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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (102780)	4/21/2000 12:14:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 186894

Tony - I have also questioned the wisdom of these mainframe-like systems designs. My suspicion is that the big iron advocates in these companies were looking for a proving ground to see if any of that technology could give them an edge. There is a slight market window for them, since the big volume based designs appear to be targeted at McKinley, not Merced. And there is an opportunity to get the long development cycles started with the major ISPs - since the development of big software platforms can take 18 to 24 months, it is important to get real systems in the hands of those developers well ahead of volume products. I suspect that is why Compaq decided to OEM the Unisys box, rather than any significant customer demand. Intel may also be aiding and abetting that effort, for the same reason. Getting the advantages out of EPIC is no small challenge, and without big platforms, the enabling applications would be arriving in the market in 2003 rather than 2001. I would imagine that Intel would go out of its way to advance the state of the art around EPIC, even if the sales opportunities near term are marginal.

To: Tony Viola who wrote (102780)	4/22/2000 10:13:00 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: Makes you wonder why Hitachi bothers with a non-standard design... It works with their operating system. Big X86 system still lack a trusted operating system. (this is changing, but is still largely the case) The secret to SUN's (and IBM mainframe/AS400 and Compaq/Digital) success is that their customers, correctly or incorrectly, think that these systems are more reliable than any standard volume system with an X86 CPU inside. Even when there is a huge difference in hardware price/performance. A significant part of this reliability is attributed to the proprietary operating system (though the hardware is usually well regarded, too) To many enterprise customers, Intel inside means tens of millions of additional dollars will be required for support and downtime will be much greater no matter how much is spent. I'm not sure whether these customers are right or wrong, but they are certainly giving SUN, IBM, and Compaq a lot of business. Regards, Dan