Paul and Fred, Re: Competitive pressures for INTC. Let me add a few points here.
- Firstly, obviously Intel has the consumer mindshare but if that is what they were depending on to keep them at the top, then I would be worried.
- Next, we need a competitive product from AMD (I'm not mentioning Cyrix here, since I do not believe they have the resources by themselves to compete at any level against Intel). This might happen with the K6. But AMD has enough doubters with their past history and they still have to prove themselves with an independent design before they can hope to sign enough customers to pressure Intel. Now AMD has enough experience manufacturing x86 processors but very little experience designing independently, and they got a taste of that with the K5. Hopefully they've learnt from it but they're still early in the game and the odds of encountering a hitch are higher than Intel.
- Next we'll need an appropriate marketing/sales campaign. Here AMD has no hope of catching Intel - because they are late at this game and they do not have Intel's resources.
- Manufacturing capacity is important for the especially large accounts. AMD satisfies this to some extent.
- Chipset support - here AMD has no hopes of matching Intel. Intel has managed to own a large portion of the chipset market from the Pentium generation and even today no other vendor comes close. Next year (Actually this year) Intel will have their own graphics chipset too being developed in collaboration with Lockheed and Chips. AMD realizes this and I think they've announced a program to develop their own but it won't be there for the K6.
- Mother board capacity - Intel controls a majority of this market. Note that the Klamath and the P-Pro are not Pentium socket compatible whereas the k6 depends on the Pentium socket. Guess what happens when Intel decides to switch to mainly manufacturing Pentium-Pro boards.
- Manufacturing efficiency - despite what Cyrix/AMD fans would like to believe, this is one of Intel's main strengths. I believe very few companies in the industry have their manufacturing arm as tuned as Intel's. This is an arguable point though.
Others - there are lots of other imponderable factors like influence with OSV/ISVs, OEMs. Ability to effectively support a large number of customers with all sorts of issues. These are all mostly in Intel's favor.
I think Intel realizes all of this and we've heard Andy grove say pretty much the same thing (that is they are concentrating on growing the overall market more than worrying about competitors). This explains how they could get away without the usual price cuts and why they've chosen to delay introducing Klamath despite having working Silicon for a long while now.
Not to say that AMD cannot do well. If they deliver a competitive product, the market is big enough for them to do well. But I think Intel is safe for the Pentium-Pro generation at least (in terms of continuing to remain the dominant player).
The real battle will be with the next generation when AMD will have much more experience at the game (Merced/other). Maybe by then, there will be new tricks to learn.
All in my opinion of course,
Best Wishes,
- MJ |
