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

To: that_crazy_doug who wrote (45382)	6/27/2001 10:11:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Doug, The new SMP parts from AMD will allow a huge sea of players to enter the bottom and middle tiers of the server market. This will aggravate CPQ and Dell as any SD shop is now enable to make capable servers from off the shelf parts. Maybe that is what has pissed off the big Q. So let Q go away, AMD will do better with the sea of smaller players who will soon humble Q and even Dell at the lower/middle end of server space. Bill Bill

To: that_crazy_doug who wrote (45382)	6/27/2001 11:49:12 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Doug: I think AMD is going down the same path as Xeon did with the same success. First you build up market share in 32 bit servers (there are many apps that will not need 64 bit addressing for the next two or three years, if ever). That lowers your costs. Give the workstations 64 bit addressing for free (the customers still care for 32 bit speed and low cost). Then simply ramp the number of CPUs in SMP servers. You keep stripping the next higher performing server level until there are no higher levels to go. Most of the money is made at the low end of whats left after each strip. And most of that is in accessories like storage, networking, and especially services not CPUs. This worked successfully for Intel in overrunning various other architectures. It would be ironic that it would be done to them the same way. IA-64 will fall the same way as it is the apps (their numbers, breadth and depth in particular) that sell systems. Backwards compatability has always been a big plus. Compaq is going to lose that since from a customer POV, switching to something else is not much harder than switching in house unless what its going to is very compelling (Itanium is not compelling at this time or in the near future). Intel has tried to move away from x86 at least 4 times and each time it had to move back. Each of the other times, it had good compilers and now it still does not have them for IA-64. This was known to be the achilles heel of EPIC architectures (even I claimed that this problem is much harder than the hardware portion). Intel was two years late in the hardware thus, doubling the time estimated for this to be complete. The compiler side was to take 3 to 4 years and looks like it will be more like 6 to 8 years. That puts it far beyond the introduction of Hammer and x86-64. All of the partners will not wait that long. If Hammer is ready and ramping more than a year before good IA-64 compilers (yielding fast performing stable predictable error free code easily), it will simply blow up IA-64, and IA-64 will sink as another failed attempt from sight (and memory). OEMs are fickle and ask "What have you done for me lately?" Pete