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

To: Dan3 who wrote (107461)	8/13/2000 5:38:56 PM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dan, there is a HUGE difference between 16->32 bit and 32->64 bit. People wanted 32 bit because of multi-tasking, RAM allocation problems and crash-stability. As long as you don't have more than 2GByte RAM, 64-bit itself will not improve your desktop. What customers really care about, is how fast your system runs with Windows (and maybe Linux). And if a 32-bit processor is faster than a 64-bit processor, people will prefer the faster 32-bit solution. Customers are not that stupid, and especially now that Windows Me gets slammed for being slower than Windows 98, customers are aware, that the latest product may not be the best product for them. People that don't do big servers don't care about the 32/64 discussions. They just want a good and cheap internet connection, lots of RAM and a very good 3D graphics adaptor. Many gaming cafes run the latest games with 266MHz procesors today, and the bottleneck is the display adaptor, and the biggest problem to comfortable playing is lack of traffic prioritizing in the ethernet LAN switch. My company uses mostly AMD processors, but this has nothing to do with technical details. It's just because the solution we chose for buying PC's happens to use AMD. It's like buying milk - I don't specify which cow the milk should come from. Intel has gotten itself some fierce competition with Athlon, and the only way to make a big difference now is to make a backwards incompatible step into 64 bit, which requires IA-64 and more Linux. Microsoft is more a help to AMD right now than to Intel, and INTC investors should really hope that Linux will take over most high-end servers. I use a PIII-400MHz right now with 256MB RAM, and for the first time in my life, I'm not interested in upgrading my processor even though a 2,5 times faster processor is available. The processor is simply not a bottleneck anymore.