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

To: Scumbria who wrote (98696)	3/16/2000 10:55:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570679

Scumbria, I'd agree that moving forward, that's probably what AMD should do. I haven't looked at it in detail, but I don't think the control logic for an alternate ISA for conceptually similar operations should be that big a burden, if there aren't legal issues. I would personally expect there to be legal issues, though. On your general pessimism on AMD vs. Intel, and the Intel/MSFT alliance on X-box, I'd offer this counterpoint. The interests of Intel and Microsoft are not the same. Microsoft benefits from cheap PCs, and Intel doesn't. To a first order approximation, the cheaper PCs are, the more money Microsoft makes. It's to Microsoft's advantage to have AMD keeping the heat on Intel, and I don't see where Intel really has anything to offer Microsoft that could compare to what Microsoft gains from having real competition in the x86 cpu market. On the specific issue of 3DNow vs. "Screaming Sindie", as the Register would say, Microsoft is going to have to support none of the above at any rate. In the near term, Intel is going to be selling plenty of processors without the Willy variant of SS over the next couple years, totally ignoring the installed base. Microsoft is either going to have to support 3-4 variants of the libraries or ignore the installed base. I'm sure Microsoft would like that particular headache to go away, but what do they gain by playing into Intel's hand here? Finally, one last point on X-box. Remember, it's a year and a half away, by the official Microsoft schedule, and Microsoft schedules tend to slip, a lot. Willy is, I think, a much bigger issue than X-box. A bit from the Register yesterday on X-box: Will X-Box win (X) Windows Everywhere for MS theregister.co.uk There are a lot of contradictions and complications in the X-box strategy. Most interesting to me, as the register piece implies, X-box is a real threat to PC OEMs, and Microsoft has an interesting dance to do there. Ideally, I'd guess they'd like Microsoft-Intel-X-box to play out like Intel-Dell, where Intel becomes, more or less, a distribution and assembly arm for Microsoft hardware, sort of like Dell is for Intel now. I don't think Intel will find that game all that amusing, but I will be amused watching it play out. Cheers, Dan.