<I am nervous about INTC's aging p6 core.>
I wouldn't necessarily call the P6 core "aging," because if you really take a good look at the K7 design, it's not much more than a "P6-plus."
Now before I get flamed by AMD advocates, let me say that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The K7 features more of what makes the P6 so great, i.e. more execution units, more L1 cache, more buffers, more pipeline stages. However, there isn't anything in the K7 that's radically different from the P6. (In comparison, the leap from Pentium to P6 saw completely new features like out-of-order execution, back-side L2 cache, deep superpipelined architecture, etc.)
<When WMT goes into volume production, K7 will be on 0.18cu running at 1.4G at half the WMT's die size.>
AMD's stated goal was 1 GHz by the end of 2000. AMD is not known for sandbagging, so it's very unlikely that they'll be able to hit their target any earlier. As for Willamette, well, we'll just have to wait and see.
<Having said that, I am long on INTC because I think the Internet is creating an explosion in demand for servers for the next 2-4 years. They have the capacity to satisfy that demand. The SMP Xeon platform will probably see little or no competition from K7 for about a year.>
Don't forget about IA-64 in the long term. Intel has big plans for IA-64 to take over the high-end market and dwarf the RISC competition for good. This effort will start with Merced, get a big boost from McKinley, then continue with Madison and Deerfield. Not only that, but starting with Deerfield, Intel also plans to push IA-64 down to the desktop level.
By the way, it's interesting that you mention the Internet as the main driving force behind increased server sales. Keep in mind that there are many, many different types of servers out there. Some only need to host a privately-owned web site which receives only a moderate amount of hits. Some have to handle millions of transactions a day. Some are even powerful enough to become replacements for corporate mainframes. In any case, I don't know any other company that has the volume and the leverage to cover the entire spectrum of servers than Intel.
Tenchusatsu |
