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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (123410)	12/20/2000 8:26:31 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: This sounds very counter intuitive to me... Intel with all there R&D dollars allowed their engineers to develop a next generation chip that is actually inferior to a previous generation chip. We've seen an explanation of what happened. The chip, as designed, was too big to economically manufacture. They had to remove several functional units which hurt performance. CPUs are hard, and there is clearly some art to them, as well as science. Intel's "constructive confrontation" corporate culture may not be conducive to good CPU design (something seems to be holding them back - there is no question that they have great engineers and unlimited resources). Intel has a history of getting very enthusiastic about trendy CPU design concepts, and then riding those concepts long after they were proven inappropriate for what Intel was trying to do. Their approach to design appears (from the hints given to the outside) to be more rigid and top down than one would expect for such technically creative work. Review the history of Intel's first moves (attempts) away from a straight X86 architecture (iapx432) its next attempt i860 (that was supposed to be workstation CPU, not a disk/network controller). Look at how hard it has been for them to get merced/Itanium out the door. You might be a little less surprised that it isn't a cake walk for them. Dan