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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A. A. LaFountain III who wrote (63580)	6/28/1999 1:52:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571405

Thanks, Tad. How do you think AMD and Athlon will fare in a PC market that is fast approaching maturity? Tenchusatsu

To: A. A. LaFountain III who wrote (63580)	6/28/1999 2:02:00 PM
From: Burt Masnick	Respond to of 1571405

Re:I don't believe that Dell's success at playing shifts within the market should be confused with the overall nature of the market IMHO, you underestimate Dell and their business model. Dell and Gateway at least appear to be awake in the management offices. Compaq and others less so.

To: A. A. LaFountain III who wrote (63580)	6/28/1999 3:15:00 PM
From: fyo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571405

Tad - Re: Or it may be that the other thing that is not equal is the extent to which software has fallen behind the curve, which is allowing the low-end PC to become a very viable substitute for the price points that have normally constituted the sweet spot of the market. I like the concept of software 'falling behind the curve'. As I see it, Microsoft has been doing everything it could for a long, long time to make even the newest and fastest hardware seem sluggish and in dire need of upgrade. I fully expect that we will see a (moderate) boom in specific areas of the hardware market after the introduction of Win2K (especially the RAM market). In fact, the biggest threat to Intel and AMD could well be good software design. While it is true that there are applications that really do require significant amounts of computing power (such as many scientific applications), the vast majority of users' needs would be comfortably covered with even a fraction of a high-end system - providing that the software (incl. OS) was properly written. The only major exceptions I can find to this are games (mainly 3D games). It seems to me that more than ever, games are what is driving much of the mainstream market. Specialized 3D accelerators are, however, doing a lot to reduce the dependence on CPU performance in this area. This trend will only increase, in the short-term at least, as companies like S3, 3dfx and NVIDIA add more and more capabilities to their chips. The complexity of these graphics chips is rapidly catching up with the MPUs. --fyodor