From several articles linked at the bottom.
"As part of the agreement, we are going to transfer our Alpha chip technology, the tools that have allowed us to build that, and specific engineering resources to Intel"
and
"Compaq will transfer to Intel hundreds of employees and other resources related to its own chip technology, known as Alpha"
OUCH! Free tech, free talent. that hurts!
"Compaq hopes this will provide a seamless transition for its Alpha customers onto the Itanium platform."
Ack!, so a somewhat neutral, to even almost psuedo friendly to AMD (tech similarities such as EV6 etc) customer base is just wrapped up, given over, and converted into a customer base loyal to a hostile competitors product and technology.
"Compaq and Intel will also concentrate on developing 64-bit clustering technologies for Itanium servers."
Argh! the similarities between some of the Alpha tech and AMD tech was part of the reason that Compaq always seemed to be one of AMD's strongest allies (at least to me), now Compaq is cozy with Intel and is cooperating to make their relationship even more close... and AMD is left where?, in the cold? probably :(
"Intel, through the Alpha deal, will gain valuable intellectual property from Compaq for use in its chips, while gaining a major customer for its Itanium processor. As part of the deal, Compaq will eventually transition all of its server systems to use Itanium processors."
Win, win for Intel, free tech, free customer base, and a comitted new OEM for Itanium. Win for Compaq in the form of cost savings and standardization. Lose for AMD, they lose an ally, they lose out on the tech, they lose out on the customer base... :(
"Compaq will transfer the majority of its Alpha development tools and engineering resources to Intel, which also will be granted licenses to use Alpha processor technology and compilers."
add in free IP licensing for Intel which is probably implicit in "free tech" but...
Uggh! This is too depressing to go on. Sure spin it guys, spin it so that it doesn't make any difference to AMD because they don't sell large scale servers yet. Spin it so that the phasing out of Compaq's competing solution and full scale adoption and standardization on Intels 64bit ISA will have no effect whatsoever on AMD's plans for adoption and penetration of x86-64, Tell me how it doesn't matter since AMD plans to bring 64bit to the desktop where it is so very badly needed, after all it's really on the desktop where we need it, not in those silly large database servers with their large addressing needs. Spin it so that large scale cooperation between Compaq and Intel on high end server tech will have no effect on Compaq's relationship with AMD in the desktop, laptop, and business computing segments.
Maybe I am going overboard but I think this majorly sucks for AMD!!
Epinephrine
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