Jim,>>>As you can see, This is why I see trouble on INTC's horizon.
Every one of you on this thread know that for a basic office PC a
P-166 or P-200 is plenty. For the home with out a gamer it is plenty for now.<<<
What you are referring to are people who have been using a computer acquired since 1995 (Up until late 1994 Bill Gates had never been on the Internet). While most computer programs and applications you are referring to were written with the pentium processor in mind - you are right that anything greater than a 166mhz Pentium is more than adequate for many of the current must have applications.
However, what you see here is only the tip of the Iceberg. The computer industry did not begin in 1995. Alan Greenspan in his testimony to congress today referred to some of the programs that he wrote many years ago and to his surprise are still in use today. He further stated that those programs that he had written back then were poorly documented and that if he had to go back and fix some of those programs himself, he would have a difficult time trying to figure them out. His point was that if these old programs had to be fixed for the year 2000 there would be a serious impact on the economy as time needed to fix these programs were not productively used to create something new but only spent to fix something old.
This may perhaps give you some sense as to the enormous amount of computer programs that are in use today that do not have the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pull down menus) paradigm.
Many of these old programs are CPU intensive applications and require response time measured in nanoseconds. A response time measured in seconds would be a disaster. If you entered an account number, order number, part number to retrieve information - the end user cannot wait seconds for the program to paint the screen with different colors and filled with retrieved data and then have the end user wait seconds to respond. Many businesses have requirement for several hundred transactions per hour. A delay of seconds would be extremely expensive.
Therefore many of these programs have not been converted to the new WIMP paradigm because the computers are not fast enough. This is the market that the Merced will begin to address. Even the early iterations of the Merced will not be powerful enough to address all those applications.
The question now becomes how big is the market that the Merced is targeted for as compared to the market for home computers?
To give you some sense of this number, the situation that Alan Greenspan addressed today in his testimony to Congress has an estimated price tag of $600 Billion dollars. This is the estimated cost to fix software that does calculations using a two digit number to represent the year rather than using a four digit number.
If it will cost an estimated $600 Billion dollars to fix some obsolete software used to perform date calculations, can you imagine what it will take in terms of hardware and software to replace all those applications?
I just don't think that most people can comprehend the size of the computer industry whose only exposure is to computers in people's homes and what see their children do with them.
A long winded investor in Intel,
Mary Cluney
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