Tenchusatsu,
But even AMD can't hope for more than 20% total market share, and that share is destined to decrease as Intel continues building more manufacturing capacity.
That sounds like a Kumar analysis. Anyway, Intel currently has capacity to supply > 300% of the market, if Intel decided to build 486 chips instead of P3 / P4. But Intel has less than 1% capacity to supply market with 1 GHz CPU, if all people were willing to buy is 1 GHz chips.
As to what the market share (of AMD vs. Intel) will be in the future, we will see. If all you are stuck with is the slowest chips, you may have trouble gaining market share. If that's what will happen to AMD eventually, you may be right. But if AMD can produce mainstream to high end chips, there is nothing Intel can do to stop AMD from supplying them to the market short of suicidal pricing, where Intel has a lot more to lose than AMD.
Then if AMD were even able to transition 100% of their manufacturing to Sledgehammers, x86-64 will only penetrate 20% of new PCs. And the vast majority of existing PCs out there won't ever be capable of x86-64 execution.
Let's see: 20% of 160 million market is 32 million chips. 30% (wich is AMD's goal) is 48 million chips. How many Itaniums pilots are out there? 5,000? How many do you think will be sold at $2,000 to $4,000?
And the market x86-64 is initially targeting, high-end database server applications which need 64-bit addressing, will already be taken over by Itanium and IA-64. (Or if not Itanium, Sun UltraSparc III.)
High end database market has been here for decades. I am not sure what you anticipate will happen within next year that will so drastically change the landscape that it will be impossible for any new entrant to the market. Merced based Itanium? <yawn>
How is it that Intel will be able to enter the market with a chip that is totally incompatible with anything else, but AMD will not be able to do the same with a chip that is compatible with installed base.
Think Sledgehammer will have better performance than Northwood or Gallatin (Pentium 4 and Pentium 4 Xeon, respectively)?
It is possible. It seems that you are assigning probability of zero for this to happen. Good. The more people who think this way at Intel, the more likely it is that Intel will become the next IBM or GM.
Anyway, Intel's roadmap is not specific in this area, but if all Intel has is a single core CPU with traditional architecture vs. dual core Sledgehammer with onboard Northbridge, do you think it is 100% certain that Sledgehammer will lose?
Remember that Sledgehammer will need specific compiler optimizations for best performance, just like Pentium 4 and P4 Xeon.
And all of the processors would perform much better if the programs were hand coded in assembler. How many of the commercial apps out there are hand - assembly coded?
Sledgehammer (being an evolution of Athlon core) will do just find on unoptimized code (unlike it's competition).
Joe |
