Enjoy your little cheerleader sessions, kids. And have fun calling me names so you can hide from what I've said.
The fact remains, from May of 1999 to March of 2002, a period of almost 3 years, Intel's large cache server chips have gone from 700mhz to 900mhz.
During the same period, their cheap, small cache server chips went from 700mhz to 1.4GHZ in the PIII family and 2.2GHZ in the P4 lineup.
If you want to keep telling each other that there was no impact on the sales of expensive server chips as a result, go ahead - and that same attitude is probably present inside of Intel, too.
It's the same wonderful approach to business that kept Intel happily trotting down the wrong path with Rambus years after the rest of the industry realized that Rambus was an idiotic mistake, and will keep the ever oblivious Intel moving just as steadily, in just as wrong a direction with IA-64 for just as many years.
But by the time that Intel wakes up from this latest daydream, they could find themselves relegated to the number two position in the CPU industry. How likely is that? We'll know better when we've seen if hammer's any good - but Intel has walked away from "IBM PC compatibility", the single factor that made it what it is today, in order to achieve a Microsoft-like monopoly. It's possible that the end result of this all-or-nothing strategy will be the delivery of their franchise to AMD. |
