Mary,
1. On RDRAM, the hype was unrealistic and the execution is poor. But, I haven't heard the fat lady sing yet.
RDRAM was supposed to be cheap (remember Timna?), and it was supposed to blow SDRAM away. It failed at both.
2. Your Merced is not what I mean by Merced. When I say merced, I mean IA64 - Merced/KcKinley/TBA. IMO, there is very little doubt, IA64 will be the future of Information technology. Nothing is going to stop it now. Not even Intel's very arrogant and obtuse management.
Merced is Merced. It is a failure. IA64 has no impact at the present time, and I see no evidence that future IA64 implementations have any better chance of success than any other new architecture which has come along in the last 10 years. x86 is Intel's bread and butter, and they have largely turned their x86 legacy over to AMD.
3. PIII has served its purpose. It was a cash cow, still is, but Intel is moving on - will squeeze some more out of it if only because it wears an Intel label. Life may not be fair, but that is the way the ball bounces.
PIII is about to die a very rapid death. In a few months, 1.0 GHz will be entry level.
4. I think I know where you are coming from wrt the P4. If they gave you 1/10th the P4 resources to develop a chip from scratch, you could have come up with a real elegant design and had a chip that would really smoke.
I'm not sure how sincere your remark was, but I won't argue. ;^)
P4 was a classic example of engineers run amok. They tried out all kinds of cool things, but failed to meet most of the corporate business objectives. Intel needs a small, high clock rate chip- that runs the existing software base faster than AMD. They don't have it, and all of their marketing effort is not going to change the obvious.
Scumbria |
