Tony,<<<How important is Itanium to Intel?
Incredibly important. It is our desire to move it into the very highest ends of enterprise computing. You've seen essentially every major computer company in the world, except one, firmly committed to it. As you get that kind of commonality, the software environment tends to follow very rapidly.
In this space, it's not just about the microprocessor; it's about the capability of the platform. That is jelling now. I think it gets more interesting next year, when you see second-generation (McKinley) systems, especially coupled with technologies such as Infiniband. It becomes very interesting in terms of the ability to run every aspect of computing in this architecture.
How did you arrive at the recent deal with Compaq, which plans to phase out its Alpha chip in favor of Itanium?
Suffice it to say that doing proprietary microprocessors is a bloody expensive business. Doing any microprocessor is a bloody expensive business. If you're amortizing that cost over a few units, it's even more prohibitive.
Differentiation is not in the processor. Compaq came to the same conclusion that HP did--which is that I can use my engineers to do other stuff because Intel can do (the chips) better and cheaper>>>
There must be some mistake. We have been told by experts that the value of processors in this market is between .2 and 2% of the server market. If Intel were to capture 100% of this $60B market, there is only between $120M and $1.2B in revenues for the entire sector including PIII, P4, Athlon, Unix, AS400 and S390 servers.
Intel must be crazy to spend $billions to capture this market. Besides, you can just cluster a bunch of 2Way Athlon MPs and achieve the same results.
Mary |
