Re: Yawn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
An excellent characterization of Intel's strategic planning these past few years.
But they've gotten themselves into a bit of a pickle, due to AMD's incremental-step Hammer strategy.
Giving yamhill a full green light will instantly kill any hope of Itanium success - so Intel can't make that particular move lightly, though the recent news about Yamhill may indicate that Madison isn't much of an improvement on McKinley, so they may have little to lose.
Once they decide to kill off Itanium, they need a lot more than just the yamhill chip, which will take time. They also need to get chipsets designed and tested, and motherboards designed and tested. That's probably around 1H 2003 at the very soonest - when Clawhammer will be moving to .09 and 64mm2. At that size, Dresden should be good for close to 16 million Hammers per quarter, and by then AMD will have well established platforms to take those chips - including mobile platforms. If UMC is supplying 4 million Durons per quarter by that time, we could see, for H1 2003, Intel shipping 15 million Prescott P4s, 10 million Northwood Celerons, and no more than 5 million Yamhills. The platform would just be too new for much more than that.
AMD doesn't yet have enough capacity to redefine the installed base. By 2H 2003 and 2004, Intel yamhill could match, then exceed AMD's run rate for 64-bit chips, unless AMD expanded Dresden (which it was, after all, designed for). But by some time in 2005, the new joint venture FAB AMD is building with UMC is scheduled to be able to ship 50,000,000 Hammers per quarter, which could make leadership of the CPU market a real horse race by 2005.
The Itanium line, of course, would be long gone by that time.
Intel could actually lose the whole ball game, here. It's no wonder they're scrambling to replace Itanic. But, as we've seen from P4, and Itanium, it takes Intel a long, long, time to bring a new platform to market. If they couldn't get the Yamhill platform out until, say, H1 2004, it may be that we'll all be thinking of Intel as the company that makes chips for PDAs, video game consoles, and network cards - not PCs.
Maybe there shouldn't be quite so much Yawn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz from Intel. |
