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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (30)	3/14/2001 12:43:36 AM
From: minnow68	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 47

Tony, You wrote "Also, the Intel or AMD processor to replace, one for one, an IBM TCMP processor, is going to sell for a hell of a lot more than a PIII or Athlon" Why? Mainframes processors suck compared to current Athlons or PIIIs. The reason that mainframes cost so much is not the fancy processors. They cost so much because of the incredible reliability, massive I/O capability, and most of all, the backward compatibility. Where I work, we have a 16 CPU Sun box that runs circles around our mainframe. Most of the work still gets done on the mainframe. The processors have very little to do with it. We can't run 390 assembler programs on a Sun box. I'll bet they won't run on IA-64 either<G>. You wrote "So, if what you say is true, why is Intel developing McKinley, Mendenhall, Madison... (OK, also Sun high end server business)." Let's see, current x-86 chips can address "only" 2 gig of memory easily. That's about $640 worth of memory at current prices. So McKinley is needed if you want to use a thousand bucks worth of memory in your machine. By the time it actually ships, it might be needed to address $300 worth of memory. Sounds like it might not be in time for the high end PC enthusiant market. Look at this another way. I just went to Dell's site and took their top of the line server and added everything to it. On most metrics, it _already_ beats the vast majority of installed S/390 systems. Fully configured, it cost about $210,000. It's CPU's as a group are faster than the mainframe I work with, it has four times the memory of the mainframe I work with, and it costs about 1/30th of the mainframe I work with. So where IBM got about $5,000,000, Intel gets a whopping $20,000 for the CPUs. And if my company were able to port all our software to x-86 (not bloodly likely!!!), we would not need as many of these machines as we need mainframes. We also spend a ton of money on software from IBM, tape storage libraries, EMC arrays, etc.. And Intel would get $20,000 from this sea of money. So let's assume Intel completely kills off the mainframe. Great, IMHO, Intel _might_ gross a penny for every dollar of gross that IBM lost. Mike