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

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (141108)	8/9/2001 3:36:36 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dear Wanna_bmw: I am just stating the case that Intel would be better served, if it did not cut P4 prices, but increased P3 prices. What argument can you make that such severe cuts in P4 prices will not result in a loss either through lower revenue or higher costs for Intel over current status quo? Saying I did not give sufficient backup for those numbers is an observation of a double standard. You did not give any justification at all. Saying that Intel never makes a mistake and would never do something detrimental to its shareholders is something that was obviously wrong. The Rambus fiasco is one of the blatant errors of judgement by said management. Remember, they signed a cotract to use only RDRAM for all future chipsets and promote them heavily until 2002. They obtained some wiggle room on Clinton like definition interpretations. But, they locked themselves out of DDRDRAM for a period of 2 to 3 years and severely limited SDRAM chipsets as well. They invested billions of dollars into RDRAM production, had delays in supporting chipsets and reliability problems to boot. Many here stated that this was a bad deal for Intel and those in management who signed off on it, should hang their heads in shame. And that is exactly what happened. So, Intel management has been known to make aggregious errors in judgement before costing Intel billions in profits. Other errors can be traced to arrogance, the same example of Rambus can partially be blamed to this error as well. Still more can be traced to a tendency towards coverup, FDIV is a famous case. By ignoring that they had a problem, the costs escalated far beyond what a simple acknowlegement and a promise to fix or replace the processor when possible would have been. Yes Intel management can do dumb and stupid things. Some errors are due to trying something new and it didn't work out, like x432, i860, and i960. The jury is still out on P4 and IA-64. Time will tell. In Q1, Intel cut prices to spur P4 demand and that failed for the most part. They did the same in Q2 and that failed as well. They seem to want to try it again given their plan. Would you claim victory if GAAP and PF earnings were both positive for Q3 even if both are lower in absolute terms? If GAAP is negative but PF positive? If both are negative? Would you think it a success, if they lost market share in for each of the three cases? Would you accept severe losses in PF profits for moving half of P3s to P4s in Q3? And in Q4 to continue the move? Yes, that is a lot of cases, but with Intel being very secretive in this area even to past performance, you can define the boundaries of the problem in victory and defeat. I845 provides a possibility of more sales against a disadvantage of poorer performance. There exists a reduction in latency and definitely in cost, but a large hit in bandwidth (1/3 that of dual channel RDRAM). It will be compared to both the Coppermine (P3), Celeron and the Tualatin (P3M) using same SDRAM speed and latency. If it on average falls below one or more of them even with the highest speed P4s, wouldn't that be a severe hit to its value and sales? Now, if it fails to match against Durons, Tbirds and Palominos with same SDRAM, don't you think that P4 would again take a big hit and be even slower in sales? A nightmare scenario would result if a DDR Duron beats the top P4 on i845 on the average. Remember what happened to the L2 cacheless Celeron, another dumb move by Intel, albeit quickly recognized and fixed although causing more problems. Pete