Lindy, AMD competed with Intel, as well as they do now, in the latter part of the 486 days. AMD went on to shoot themselves in the foot with the early Pentium equivalent (K5). They have a history of screwing up badly just when they seem to have a toehold. Intel, OTOH, executes as near to perfection as any tech company I know. OK, still, say AMD makes it big in the low end, which is just one third of the MPU market, they still are nowhere in the corporations, where they are not trusted for availability of product and reliability reasons. Reliability? AMD has a history of poor to mediocre yields. That turns into poor to mediocre reliability. Known fact in the semiconductor industry and at least somewhat to sys-admin people, who have a big say in what is bought in corporations. It appears that reliability is not important with a lot of home buyers. Corporations therefore won't take a chance on AMD, IMO. Intel's yields are the best in the business, along with IBM.
If that isn't enough to keep Intel as a gorilla, Intel's revenues for 64 bit chips called Merced and McKinley are being called to equal current 32 bit chips by 2002. Intel has absolutely no competition for these. Any monkey business (reading the book) by AMD would take years to produce competing chips.
This is a rough patch for Intel right now, but I think that, in the long run, Intel will have an easier time with their competition than Cisco will, for example. AMD is just not that good of a company. Lucent probably is. If we were talking about Motorola or TI or one of the big Asian companies as threat to Intel right now, I would be worried. Note that I own Intel and Cisco stocks, although I understand computers and micros 10X better than I do networks, at least.
Tony |
