Re: I did dabble in them a tad here. It'll be interesting.
Could be a good idea. Besides anything Intel specific, there's a rotation going on from small caps (big the past couple of years) back to large caps, which should help Intel.
But Intel's recent behavior has been disconcerting. Their rush to the press with dual core systems, including this one from Dell the night before AMD's conference call is the sort of stunt that Jerry Sanders used to get criticized for.
availability for the Dell Precision 380 will be announced in the coming weeks
www1.us.dell.com
They got Acer to put out a similar report the day before: Acer plans to announce in May an Aspire desktop PC based on Intel's (Profile, Products, Articles) dual-core Pentium D processor, the company confirmed Tuesday.
infoworld.com
This sort of thing was cute coming from a scrappy underdog that arrived at the conference call in a stretch limo, but is a bit spooky coming from the industry's 80%+ monopoly leader.
There are hints that AMD will be announcing specific near term or even immediate availability of multiple lines of dual core workstations and servers from each of HP, Sun, and IBM at the Opteron anniversary a week from now.
It looks like Intel's response is to float previews of a couple of future gaming rigs with vague "coming soon" availability, but nothing for the corporate market - this is a 100% reversal of the way things always worked in the past.
Intel (or AMD) sells the CPUs for a quad server to the OEMs for $800 to $2,500 each, making a profit of $5,000 or so on the average unit sale by the OEM. CPUs for desktops carry much lower margins, ranging from nothing (after costs) to perhaps $100.
Intel (or AMD) makes as much or more money when one server is sold as it makes selling 50 or more desktops. Intel's business model has been to keep up the volume with it's desktops and make its money on servers.
It seems unlikely that Intel's business model could be at risk, but they sure have been acting that way. |
