dumbmoney, RE: Frankly, I don't think anyone outside of Intel cares much about Itanium.
Uh, no. There are plenty outside of Intel that care.
Listen to the market.
INTC really didn't react much yesterday to this news. That's because the future for Intel and its stock really doesn't depend a whole heck of a lot on how far they can push an old processor. In the long run, whether P3 can scale reliably to 1.13 GHz or 900 MHz is pretty irrelevant, because the number isn't going anywhere after that.
Look at how strong SUNW was yesterday, in the face of some bad news.
Look at who has performed well in this industry, and who hasn't. This year, SUNW, EMC, and INTC have all done very well. MSFT, DELL, and AMD have recently underperformed those stocks. In addition, CPQ has started to outperform DELL.
The market is telling us that the opportunity is in the high end, the Unix workstation. This is where the growth is happening. MSFST tried to enter this world with Win2000, and has failed to even put a dent in Unix. They're still basically a PC company, and revenues there are starting to slow considerably. And for Intel, a high end PC chip doesn't matter nearly as much as the chip that will eventually give Intel a shot at the high end Unix workstation, namely the Itanium and its progeny. The market is looking at this chip and sees the kind of growth that can support INTC's historically high PE.
If the same thing happened to the P4, INTC would tank sharply. That is because P4 is the key to growth over the next half decade. The market is smarter than you think. |
