Paul E. Geeze, you should have been a salesman. Even Fiondella would buy a car from you. ;-)
But seriously, I think the issue is how successful is Celeron/Mendocino/Whatever.
I think the ASP to makers on those products will eventually be below $150, even if you drop out the cacheless Celeron. (Based on someone's prices of $150/ $190 for Mendocino 300/333).
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if they capture a good chunk of market share, (and let's face it, the general market doesn't require the ever increasing performance of the high end products for the internet, Word or Excel), it may have a major impact. If they were to gain, say, 25% share, that's about 20 million CPU's for Intel that in the past would have been much higher ASP product. That's only about 1.7 Million units a month, and if I remember correctly, they are ramping to that rate. Yes, segmentation is a great policy, but I wonder if it's one they really wanted.
And even the high end of desktop CPU pricing is coming down fast. I think I read somewhere that PII/350 and PII/400 will be at a 1000 piece price of $210 and $375 in October.
No doubt Intel dominates CPU technology, and they continue to introduce products that would have been mind-boggling even a year ago. And many of these will probably eventually dominate markets in servers and high end work stations, etc., in addition to the PC.
But hey, I think it's the 100 million unit and growing PC market that will have the most impact on the bottom line. |
