Jules,
Here is another anecdotal piece of evidence. I saw a purchase order for my work PC 2 years ago. It was an "average" than, somewhat behind the top of the line. It was Compaq Pentium 100 with a 17" monitor. The total price was over $4,000.
Today, I could buy a Compaq Computer, similarly behind the state of the are (Pentium-233 or P-II 233) for less than $1,500. Of 1998 dollars, that according to goverment accountats are worth about $.95 or even less than 1996 dollars.
I would not buy lower than about a P200 personally, and if it was only $200-300 more I would get a PII. Is it?
With MediaGX 220MHz at $799 and P-MMX/K6 233 MHz at $999, there is little incentive to go to 200 MHz or below.
intel has low end servers locked up, and will move up the food chain Darwinian style soon.
Intel has a chance to make major inroads in the high end server market with Merced, but I think it will not generate significant revenue until year 2000. It may be earlier if it can run x86 software significantly faster than natice x86 processors and is cost competitive.
If Merced has to make it solely on it's ability to run it's native instruction set, we will have to wait until the software is refined, and varous evaluations run their course.
Regarding your prediction about sub $1000 notebooks this year: that
would be nice, I would buy if its a p166.
We should see some competition in the notebook market this year, which will bring the prices closer to desktop level. Prices of other components are going down as well:
Message 3080655
Joe |
