Ali, There is a chance that the attempt by Intel to make a proprietary standard that must be licensed from them, and they will restrict who gets it with their patented/copyrighted holder with memory etc, will hurt them greatly. Remember IBM and microchannel. It was a dead dog the day it was born. The licensing was so onerous that it took patent attorneys 6 -12 months to ink deals. All those who got on the microchannel bus bus died a slow death(some lived) along with IBM. Their Hubris kept it alive long after the market said 'dead dog'.
In the same way with others making CPUs that run fast, and are in stock that do not need the funny socket, there will be some who hedge their bets and make two motherboards(1 for each) and if Intel tries to make it more propreitory, then they will leave the mainstream, and others will make the chips. Remember, it is no longer an x86 standard. It is a what will run Win95/NT standard. The MMX exntensions are an attempt to make a special case, but microsoft can bypass them. And remember when IBM was king and said "we will move the market away from a standard, where we are one of many, to one where we are king". Well that king is dead, and the USA has a long hatred of kings of all kinds, so we may be seeing the start of a serious erosion of Intel by the AMDs/Cyrixes, IBMs etc. After all who cares who makes it as long as it runs Win95/NT. Intel is extended in a big way. The smaller lines and better yields of the new foundries will soon bring balance to the marketm, and even price erosion, and many will vote with their wallet and by non Intel items. Intel has seen this and tries to avoid it. but they cannot. They have reached the point of diminishing returns, and can now only do things like MMX and the socket thing to differntiate themselves from the pack. Wait until the gallium arsenide RISC processors get into the act. 1-2 gigahertz process times. On chip delays becoming paramount design problems.
(1 gigahertz = 1000 megahertz, and 1 cycle is on;y 12 inches long as light/electricity runs along the wires, so you must have fffffast memory, and close coupling and phase synchronised clocks etc) flat plane computers will be replaced by 3D array computers so all the parts and ports can be within 1-2" of the CPU, so they do not get hopelessly out of date by the time a signal gets back to them. It is doable, but computationally intense, but it will allow for RISC emulations of X86 stuff to run 5-20 times as fast as what we have today. Perhaps Intel has a skunk work doing this as we speak. They have the $$, and they have better strategists than me working there, so they must see it too.
Bill |
