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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gopher Broke who wrote (45368)	6/27/2001 7:13:56 AM
From: dale_laroy	Respond to of 275872

>x86 was certainly not an ideal server platform but it was cheaper than the alternatives and it had the biggest base of software. That is why it succeeded.< Not exactly. The reason x86 succeeded in the workstation market was that it had the largest base of software engineers familiar with its development tools. This is what acquiring the Alpha OSs and software tools is all about. IA-64 will not run Alpha's existing software base. But IA-64 will have the tools that some of the best programmers in the industry are familiar with. AMD should look upon this as an opportunity, rather than a setback. The reason that Compaq is handing their OS and compiler development over to Intel is to reduce costs, at the expense of reducing their market share. Compaq will be loosing many Alpha customers to more stable vendors, such as IBM and SUN, but most of this loss will not occur until the actual shift to Itanium is made, and Compaq can avoid most of even this loss if they continue to offer EV7, doing no more than process shrinks, for several years after Alpha software development stops. AMD could license OpenVMS and/or True64 from Compaq, together with the development tools. AMD would not have to continue to develop these tools, the way that Intel will presumably be, but rather could simply port the compilers to x86-32 and do new OS builds. Compaq should welcome this as an additional way to reduce support costs, as it would enable their x86 customers, as well as their IA-64 customers, to use the same development environment and tools. Intel can not do this, at least not with True64, because Xeon will not run 64-bit software. Such a strategy would enable Compaq to offer IA-64 at the high end and x86-64 at the low end, while having uniform technical support across both IA-64 and x86 product lines. But AMD will not do this because they would see support of OpenVMS and True64 as detrimental to attracting other support for x86-64, such as Linux and Windows. Personally, I think that AMD should bite the bullet and license OpenVMS from Compaq as an OS that could be offered on the open market directly against Windows. Provide it with a good GUI, and include the compilers and other development tools (albeit obsolete versions) as part of the distribution. If developers don't have to pay for development tools (unless they need the latest and greatest), software development should be rapid, and AMD could alter Microsoft's market approach in much the same way they have managed to alter Intel's. Indeed, this might be the single best way to get Microsoft to port Windows to x86-64, because with OpenVMS supporting x86-64 and being cheap, failing to do so would eventually lead to Windows being supplanted by OpenVMS. And if AMD adopted the pattern of providing the most recent port only to Compaq, while supplying only versions two or three generations out of date to other vendors (more or less analogous to providing Compaq with WindowsME while all other vendors are stuck with Windows 95), this could be a real winning approach for Compaq. AMD's other rational alternative would be buy SGI and higher the 21464 design team to produce a next generation Alpha processor. By producing each new generation of Alpha with state of the art processing technology, instead of letting Alpha lag behind, as Compaq did, AMD should be able to keep Alpha well ahead of Itanium. This, together with x86-64, could provide SGI with the edge that they need to make a serious comeback. And by owning the company, there would be no problem with taking the SGI OS and development tools to the open market.