Paul, I'm certainly not a market timer, but my guess is that INTC the stock will be pretty quiet for the next few months. The upcoming law suit (and the negative publicity that will accompany it) along with the arrival of the slow season, the Asian debacle and some scattered wins for Cyrix or AMD will all suppress any upwards price movement.
Intel the company is a different story. Obvious mastery of the .25 micron process and .18 in the wings. Mendocino round the corner as the baseline entry level product (at speeds that are a headache for AMD to match). The 100 MHz BX and 200 MHZ bus interface. Katmai and KNI in the wings. Merced. A bazillion investments in promising companies. And who knows, maybe even something positive out of the DEC purchase like a StrongArm position in the controller market. The bottom line is that I see Intel at double it's price today in 3 to 4 years.
I am assuming that the FTC charges will either be settled with minor consequences for Intel or that it goes to trial and maybe even Intel prevails.
By the way, shocking lack of enthusiasm for AMD latest offering. Given Sander's SELL SELL SELL personality, the holes in AMD's strategy are beginning to be clear. I've taken a hard look at the benchmarks. The big ticket processors (high numeric performance through tons of floating point calculations like workstations and such) won't be in AMD products, I guess because industrial strenght floating point stuff chews up prodigious real estate, which is not in the cards when you have serious yield problems). So they are limited to a Packard-Bell kind of customer (end users who go for price alone - in automobile terms, the YUGO market) and a subset of the hyper-gamers, who may or may not get the software to match up with the product. Business plan from hell. Abrose Bierce had a sardonic definition of love - "a form of temporary insanity curable by marriage". The AMDophiles seem to fall in love with AMD and then, after bitter disappointments, become more ardent about the "potential" for the future. As George Santayana said a century ago, "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it".
Best regards,
Burt
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