Konrad and all, (H&Q's Intel Update 2/7/97-continued)
*Intel Creats Another Barrier to Entry
...We believe Intel will experience spectacular demand for Pentium MMX technology for both the corporate and consumer desktop because it boosts performance for all applications, not just applications compiled for the MMX instruction set. Although Intel has licensed the MMX instruction set to AMD, we believe adds another element of compatibility risk because today's MMX applications are written for Intel's Pentium MMX technology processorm implementation. In addition, Intel is spending an enormous amounts of advertising dollars brandingn the new MMX processor which significantly raises the bar....
< >*Competition is Weakest in Company's History
We believe the microprocessor architecture war is over as every alternative microprocessor architecture is clearly losing ground to the Intel architecture in the client, workstation, and server markets.
In particular, the Power PC, once viewed to be the strongest threat to INTC's architecture has clearly not met market expectations. Also, HP is abandoning PA-RISC as it has joined forces with Intel to co-developed a new 64 bit architecture, and SPARC/MIPS are running out of software support or performance headroom. That only leaves DEC's Alpha which has still not managed to attract any new design win momentum.
As far as the competitors in the x86 architecture, most notably AMD and Cyrix, we believe that they have credible architectures but will continue to have difficulty attracting significant design wins as Intel continues to out-invest them in the areas of CPU and platform architecture, manufacturing process and market. As Intel accelerates the technology curve, leading PE OEMs can't afford to be left behind and use alternative CPU offerings. Therefore, we continue to believe Intel will retain its greater than 85% market share in the x86 market.
*Intel's Level of Market Influence is Enormous
Intel has substantially increased its level of influence on the market in terms of defining the PC platform coupled with enormous brand strength....After the AGP specification last year, there are AGP graphics accelerators sampling in the market today, almost 2 qtrs ahead of the availability of Intel's supporting AGP chipsetThat is what you call influence. Intel also defines the PC main memory standard for future platforms. As the leading suppliers of memory controllers, Intel has direct influence overn the $50 billion memory market. ...Consumers are willing to pay the premium because the PC is a big-ticket item. It is that simple. Intel's brand awareness is the strongest in the company's history and significantly stronger than when it rolled out the first Pentium in 1993. This brand has enormous influence over consumers buying patterns.
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A little more to follow in the next post.....
Ibexx |
