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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (64724)	7/11/1999 12:14:00 AM
From: fyo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576881

Paul - Re: Merced may be a month later - but IT ISN'T GETTING ANY LATER! [snip] By the way, the original Pentium was about a year late. From its original planned release date, Merced has slipped significantly more than a year. Original specs have it being on a .25mu process, as well. However, as the Pentium example illustrates, it isn't really a question of how late you are with a product - it's how late you are compared to the competition. I take it the 'competition' in the case of Merced is Sun, Alpha, IBM and maybe SGI? How late are they? How good will their products be in a year and a half? Those are the questions. I can't remember the last time I heard of a semiconductor product that was finished early... --fyodor

To: Paul Engel who wrote (64724)	7/11/1999 4:01:00 AM
From: RDM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576881

<The story has some merit> I think the timeframe of Merced is not the biggest threat to it's success. Rather I think the bigger problems are: 1. It will be disappointing in the speed of running current X86 code. It may run at 50%-70% of the speed of the fastest available x86 processors at the time it comes out. 2. The world they really has to have true 64 computing is very small and currently is limited to large databases (such as the top 10% of Oracles customers) and esoteric applications needing more than 8 gigabytes of RAM. (Yes I said GIGABYTES). 3. The 64 bit performance will lag behind Alpha in single and multiple CPU configurations. 4. McKinley (two years after Merced) may eliminate my Alpha objection (#3 above) at that time. This would particulary be true if Compaq gives up on Alpha due to items 1 & 2 above. It is these considerations that more seriously determine the success of Merced than 1 month or 3 month delay.