INTC, despite its vast resources has become a wannabe AMD, operating about 2 years behind on the AMD curve ;-)
So let's look at a little recent history in attempt to substantiate the above statement:
1. Pre-Opteron, INTC vociferously maintained that x86 had exhausted all potential efficiency gains, and x86 64 computing would never see the light of day and therefore must be jettisonned and replaced by Itanium...(which, incidently would render all x86 software useless, not to mention obsolete x86 over a fairly short term, and not incidentally, leave INTC with a stranglehold on its monopoly.)
2. AMD claimed,contrary to INTC, that not only is there much headroom left with x86, but also existing software and hardware can evolve into more efficient x86 product offerings. To prove same, AMD introduced its backward compatible 64-bit Opteron.
3. INTC's Itanium ruse, having been exposed for what it was (i.e. attempted exploitation of the enterprise), caused INTC to tear up its roadmap and madly initiate an Opteron cloning exercise, (despite its insistence prior to Opteron that x86 had hit the wall).
4. INTC's P4, was a pitiful first architectural effort, designed only to win the MHz battle, forsaking any heat/performance delimiters. In fact, INTC promised a 10GHz P4.
5. AMD's Opteron began gaining major momentum achieving a phenomenal 8 point gain in Revshare in the past year climbing to its current 17.3% Revshare.
6. INTC backed up once again and dusted off its dusty P3 (you remember the 1.13 GHz "botched" gate fiasco) in effort to come up with something a little more competitive than P4 in attempt to stem the accelerating customer erosion. Basically, the plan for success was based upon producing ever larger caches, which unfortunately for INTC creates some serious production efficiency headaches, thus explaining the 25% Q4 ramp in Q4 (despite the huge lead in 65nm teething it has enjoyed) and the rush to 45nm.
7. Just as it seems that INTC has finally designed a competitive product, albeit virtually paperware at the moment with, I'm guessing some very serious production hurdles ahead of it, AMD has moved to its next phase in x86 innovation with its co-processor initiative recently announced.
8. As huge a competitive boost as Opteron has provided AMD over the past 3 years, (i.e. exemplified by the current 20% servershare and AMD managements recent assertion that servershare would be 30% by year's end), this Opteron boost we have withnessed is likely to be dwarfed over the next 3 years by the revshare impact associated with AMD's new co-processor initiative which, rumour has it, will provide 10 to 100 times existing performance at 2 to 3 times the power (sure like to see an SAP coprocessor).
9. Unfortunately for INTC, if AMD's co-processor innovation works out nearly as well as current expectations, INTC is, once again, going to be left eating AMD's dust just about the time they figure out how to produce Conroe in meaninful volumes.
10. About 2 to 3 years out, we can probably anticipate INTC, once again, in panic mode, as it attempts to clone AMD's co-processor innovation.
11. Oh, by the way, has anyone noticed INTC's AMD-wannabe move by selling off all of its non-CPU assets so it can more resemble AMD?
12. As the foregoing brief history overview demonstrates, INTC, despite its vast resources has become a wannabe AMD, operating about 2 years behind on the AMD curve ;-) |
