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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (118585)	11/20/2000 2:52:57 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tony, Some are being objective (not to categorize this poster as an AMDroid, but most of his posts are on AMD threads). I have not seen a single person on Intel thread express an objective assessment of P4. Anyway you look at what the processor delivers today, you must conclude that it is a disappointment. I personally expected the outline of the story to be something like Pentium II, with weak initial benchmarks (the one on Tom's site was the best example), but a substantial jump in performance of the production systems. It didn't happen. The weak benchmarks that have been leaked over last few months were confirmed by the production systems. While the processor may amount to more in the future if Intel guessed correctly the direction where the software will move, I find this bet to be a long shot. How much did things change in say last 4 years, which is a typical life of 1 generation of a microprocessor? Not much. I am running pretty much the same software, maybe version 8 vs. version 3 that I did 4 years ago, but the mix didn't change much. One thing that is emerging is that Intel will have to maintain clock speed lead of 30% or more just to keep up with performance of current AMD processor, which means Intel will have to have a 2 GHz processor to beat AMD 1.5 GHz processor, a 2.6 GHz P4 to beat 2 GHz Athlon. Going forward, the roadmaps of the core changes of Intel and AMD seem to be: Intel AMD Q1 01 Mustang core tweak Q2 01 Q3 01 Q4 01 Northwood shrink Thoroughbred shrink Q1 02 New Hammer core It seems obvious that Intel again failed to "slam the door" and the race will at best be too close to call for the next year. Not much is known about AMD Hammer processor family, but there is a risk (for Intel) that AMD will leap forward, and Intel will be stuck in the same situation as we have seen throughout the last 12 months, as Intel was just barely holding on with the Coppermine vs. Athlon, facing unfavorable odds. Joe

To: Tony Viola who wrote (118585)	11/20/2000 3:16:20 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 186894

Tony, I will post my response to that one here. I used to be an Intel fan, technology wise anyway, and I still got 4 PPro processors running in the vicinity. The P5/P6 versus Piii/P4 line is a crock, I'd assume that the technical types here would agree anyway. On second thought, belay that assumption, unless Elmer wants to say something about that 1.6 ghz chip that was supposed to show up today. My response to the post you cite: As I posted previously, I disagree with that. The PPro looked great on 32 bit code at introduction. x86 32 bit mode was only 10 years old or so when the PPro was launched. It wasn't Intel's fault that the world was still running oodles of 16bit code, including big chunks of Win95. It was Intel's fault that they screwed up 16 bit mode in the PPro, though. Intel never pushed the PPro as its mainstream chip because the original packaging was expensive and required fabbing 2 processor-sized chips for each processor shipped, due to the custom cache chip. Of course, according to my limited understanding of semiconductor fabrication, producing 2 processor-sized chips ought to be cheaper than producing a single (more than) double-sized chip, as in the P4, at least in terms of silicon production costs. Packaging is probably easier, though.