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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (29263)	8/2/2000 12:12:38 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

The possible failure of Intel's dram gambit, one that could only have been attempted by a Gorilla, does not threaten their pongid attributes. They are the Gorilla of microprocessors, not memory. INTC is the King (or Gorilla) of "processor components", not simply CPU's. INTC's attempt at Rambus RAM was to boost the overall power of its processor component architecture (which, when assembled, make a motherboard). RDRAM is/was seen as essential in relieving the processor component bottlenecks required to allow the capacity of faster CPUs to be used. Just as INTC invented and promoted the PCI bus to overcome bottlenecks to the CPU in the early nineties. So far in the DDR war, INTC's attempt to dictate the processor component architecture has been marked with design failures, compromises and capitulation rather than victories. Celeron is an example, not of Gorilla power, but of the need for a King to respond to a threat from a Prince. AMD was and still is effectively taking business away from INTC at the low end. AMD's success took INTC by surprise and it took almost two years for INTC to effectively respond. In the meantime INTC lost some important boxmaker customers. Now the Athlon is effectively taking mid-range business away from PIIIs. AMD has taken major bites from INTC's desktop market. To deny that fact is to admit that you have not been to Best Buy and taken a look at the shelves lately. And it ain't just low end. 700+Mhz is not low end. INTC's advantage these days lies primarily in its ability to manufacturer chips more efficiently than AMD--not unlike JDSU's advantage.