Tony, my man, thou protestith too much!
1) I agree with you, INTC is not dumping it's chips. Although it sure must look that way to CYRX, AMD, MOT, et al <G>.
2) The PPro for the corporate market? Not! Who are the hottest sellers of PPro systems today? The likes of GW2000, Quantex, etc. who are selling to individual power users. Although the corporate marketplace is starting to sit up and take notice, most corporate automatons are still content running Word on i486's. That's because the most demanding apps today are...games. Their heavy use of graphics and multimedia soak up CPU cycles like you wouldn't believe. (P.S. Terje - yes I do own a PPro at home! Runs Quake a lot better than my Pentium too!) Moreover I predict that the home sector will continue to be the biggest buyer of frontline CPU's . And the Pentium MMX is only a stopgap (kinda like i486DX4). By 3Q '97, the chip everyone will want (OK every home user with a brain, can't count on the braindead corporate market) will be a PPro MMX with AGP & USB on the MB.
Sure some CPU's will be absorbed by the server market, but today PC volume lives, breathes and dies with consumer spending. And Tony, just 'cuz I think the market will draw certain conclusions about how slowly the PPro ramp will occur, it doesn't mean that I actually think it will play out that way. It should however make for some decent add-on points latter this year. |
