stak,
<Who or what do you see as Intel's competition?>
Well....AMD is definitely competition on the low end (how competent is debatable <ggg>)....and I would feel much less comfortable if they ever booted Jerry and his boys in exchange for a more business savvy management team. AMD is also a big competitor in the flash memory arena. Cyrix/NSM is another low end CPU competitor. IDT also entered the x86 space more recently.
At the high end and the very high end, where I believe Intel will have to execute to achieve significant future growth, competition comes from names such as CPQ/DEC, Sun Microsystems, HP, and IBM. In addition to competing with various RISC based CPU's, I think Intel's future chips will have the potential to replace mid range computers (e.g. IBM's AS/400), and even penetrate mainframe territory.
So there is competition at both ends and Intel does face many challenges. I think the ultimate goal is to become as dominant at the high end as they have been on the desktop for so many years while at the same time continuing to get more than their fair share of profits at the lower segments.
When you look at the complete package and Intel's segmentation strategy, it's hard to find a single competitor...but each of their businesses has their own competitors, including cpu's, networking products, graphics products, flash products, motherboards, etc.
Good luck,
FF |
