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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (138197)	6/26/2001 4:51:51 PM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

<< Saturn - Re: "! IBM continues to ride two horses, the PowerPC and the Itanium. I doubt that we can expect IBM to exit the CPU business for several years. " I didn't include IBM because, as you noted, it is already in the Intel camp - ITanium and Pentium/Xeon. As for their own proprietary processors - I expect they will always have a need for them - as they perpetuate their legacy systems into the future. >> Furthermore, they already have substantial wafer fab and chip development capabilities...unlike Compaq and Sun, which were/are facing the issue of developing state-of-the-art large chips to be fabbed in someone else's fab. H-P had fab capabilities, but not comparable to Intel's, of course. They chose to partner with Intel. IBM has the resources to go it alone, even though they are not (in that PPC is only _part_ of their strategy, just as Paul notes). And ceding the entire future of processors to Intel is not necessarily a good thing. Something will come after the IA-64, using whatever new architectural tricks are trendy at the time. Even now, IBM continues to do a lot of processor research. "Blue Gene," for example, uses a lot of the processor-in-memory work sponsored some years ago by the NSA. The "Blue Gene" machines will do in a few minutes what the largest supercomputers today take a day or more to do. Delivery is not too many years off, using today's technology (no pie-in-the-sky devices). If PIM and massive parallelism become commercially important, IBM will be happy it didn't simply concede the processor market to Intel. And most obviously, processor design is a skill useful for embedding intelligence in lots of areas. Just as Intel has several families of architectures (like x86, IA-64, StrongArm/Xscale, etc.), IBM needs to have several groups doing processor design. --Tim May