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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (111392)	5/17/2000 9:11:00 PM
From: Buckwheat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575170

Jim and Tench, I am afraid that the "book PCs" that you recently noted will have a far more reaching effect on the computer market than just a passing novelty. A lot of the book PCs are also shipped with built in 10/100 network adapters and and CDs or DVDs. All the owner has to add is memory, hard drive, cpu, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The far reaching effect that I mentioned earlier has to do with those that are shipped with the network adapters. More and more businesses are experimenting with the old mainframe/terminal concept. The new implementation is to replace the expensive mainframes with modern terminal servers (small, med, or large x86 servers) that run NT 4.0 terminal server, Citrix, or Win 2000 terminal server. The terminals are low powered book PCs that run applications and get their user profiles, permissions, etc from the terminal server. I've seen several shops running this setup already and it runs the office suites very well. Two of the shops are using the book PCs as disposables and throwing them away when they require any repairs. The important issue or feature with this configuration is that the desktops can be standardized and better control maintained over them. This setup requires much less effort and administration as opposed to typical desktops running on the typical LAN or WAN. The largest shop I have seen using these is a 400 box shop. One medium duty server can power or serve up applications for as many as 50 of these "book PCs". As you can see this concept/configuration has the potential to turn the business PC market upside down. Another thing to keep in mind is that analysts are baffled by business PC sales that appear to continue to lag. I'm afraid what they will discover in the next few months is that the missing "business configuration" sales are being executed in the "sub $600" computer configuration market (book PCs). I suspect that business configurations in the future will encompass the very low-end and servers and not much else in between. This amplifies the need for AMD to quickly develop a multi-processor infrastructure that has good compatibility with fast data storage products. Buckwheat