Terje and Andrew,
>All PC related prices have
> gone down way too much. Pentium Pro is not
> selling in the volumes that the Pentium was
> when the 486 was dumped by Intel, and Intel
> has started to dump the Pentiums already.
Excuse me, but I don't think that Intel's lowering prices, what is it, about once a quarter, AS PLANNED AND ANNOUNCED WELL IN ADVANCE can be called dumping. As the higher clock frequency ones "mature", i.e. get to expected higher yields, they lower the prices of the older, slower ones. This has been their M.O. for at least the Pentium Pro, Pentium and the 486.
Another thing you seem to have missed is that the Pentium Pro, as implied in the name (Pro, as in professional) is intended for corporate and Internet use in workstations and servers. It was not really intended for home use. It is optimized for 32 bit operating systems and applications and is really waiting for NT 4.0 release to completely take off. You can MP it up to 4 way on one motherboard to make a node and then cluster together as many nodes as you want. This can get you processing power that overlaps workstations and servers. These are absolutely, positively a threat to Sun Microsystems and HP. e.g., although HP and Intel have a joint development going on the P7. The cost per MIP for the Intel based machines will be much cheaper than Sun solutions.
The replacement chip for the Pentium for home use looks to be the P55C, not the Pentium Pro.
To summarize, the way I see it is that Intel has two CPU chip families running in parallel (sort of), the Pentium, to be replaced by the P55C (home PCs), and the Pentium Pro for business and Internet use.
Tony |
