Paul; The technical merits of slot one can be surpassed readily. What is needed is a standard among the others instead of three(or more) new horses in that race. This standard will constitute a viable alternative to the Intel slot 1 artifact. It is a marketing solution since slot 1 is a marketing artifact(devoid of unique technical merits. Cyrix, AMD and C6+ are doing this now.
With .25 and lower foundries it will be possible to put all the needed cache and CPU on a single chip carrier
Customers brand loyalty is fading rapidly, and will fade away over time to some low level(but will never vanish, there are still fools who ask for Esso gas only, and I used to work in a refinery that shipped5-6 brand names from the same distillation chain), once cpu's are $30 who cares. Intel is desperately trying to engender brand loyalty by false differentiation, like MMX tried, and slot 1 will try. We get few people specifically asking who made this and that part, especially as the CPU get lower in cost than other parts.
As to quality, CPUs fail rarely, however I have encountered a lower % failure in AMD CPUs than in Intel, why is that? I first saw this trend in the 386 CPUs, when AMD essentially kicked Intel off the top of that heap. Yes we all know Intel went for higher end stuff, but the truth is they had foundry space to make more 386 but the OEMs bought those of AMD an others over theirs, so the canned the line.
As you say PC buyers could care less, the few whiners who want the Intel brand name are getting fewer every day that the offensive Intel ads continue.
Market supply is the only part of your comments that is correct. Intel has the volume capability. AMD would have made major inroads with K6 if they could make more parts, soon they will make more parts.
Bill |
