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

To: Apollo who wrote (36414)	12/11/2000 2:43:31 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Apollo, Thanks for sharing Ten's respose to your PM with us. S/he made the best case, by far, of any I've seen that Intel is a King. If s/he had clarified in detail the basis of the opinion that "the x86 architecture is now an open architecture that Intel can no longer keep to itself like Microsoft can with Windows," my vote might have been swayed. That's because I assume Ten is saying that the architecture is no longer essentially proprietary. Is that because critical patents have now expired or is it because of Intel's reaction to market conditions? Regardless, if Ten is correct about that, it presumes that a Gorilla market can morph into a King market. Do we have any examples of that happening in the past? --Mike Buckley

To: Apollo who wrote (36414)	12/11/2000 3:00:30 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

For all practical purposes, the x86 architecture is now an open architecture that Intel can no longer keep to itself like Microsoft can with Windows. It seems to me that this sentence points us at a key question in this King versus Gorilla debate, i.e., what does and does not constitute an Open Proprietary Architecture in this case. One might, for example, claim that the AMD license was the very thing which makes it open rather than being the thing which makes it no longer proprietary. Or, one can take the view that the CPU is one chip in a larger system, much of which is dictated by the interface to that chip, so that it is the system which is open and the chip which is proprietary (except for the AMD issue). I also think it is important to realize that the AMD license only dealt with the architecture of the 386 and while the whole x86 and Pentium family (so far) has retained a common instruction set, what one does with that instruction set has changed enormously since the 386. Intel's changes in this regard are proprietary to Intel and AMD has had to figure out its own ways of attaining comparable (or better!) performance without violating Intel's patents on these extensions. Itanium has the potential, as a new architecture and with a new value chain, to induce a huge tornado. Remember, that Intel has recently stated that the world only has something like 1-2% of the servers it will need in the next few years; again, this need is Internet-driven. Yes, but it also has the potential to not be the product that wins the tornado. To be sure, lots of manufacturers have hedged their bets by working on IA-64 products in parallel with their RISC or x86 products, but this doesn't become the heart of a tornado until the customers start picking the IA-64 boxes over the other alternatives. This is a very different situation than the one by which Intel came to dominance of the desktop since there are lots of other very mature offerings already in this market.

To: Apollo who wrote (36414)	12/11/2000 6:00:04 PM
From: techreports	Respond to of 54805

Intel is not a gorilla in traditional sense, but they have a slight gorilla power. The ability to dictate standards, ect.. Yes, Intel can continue to introduce SSE2, but AMD also introduced 3dNOW! Intel, in my opinion, will beat AMD for a few reasons.. 1)its huge manufacturing capacity 2)brand..Intel inside 3)R&D..Over 6.5 billion dollars not to mention smarter researchers 4)lead and experience in using RDRAM and the introduction of SSE2 (these are not full gorilla tactics, but shows Intel does have a slight gorilla DNA. It's ability to change the playing field. I think we'll all agree that the introduction of RDRAM changes the playing field, but whats to stop AMD for doing the same in the future?) We must all come to realize that there are different versions of gorillas. Microsoft might be the perfect example, but i don't really see AMD taking Intel out anytime soon. Well..as long as INTC management stays focused.