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

To: kash johal who wrote (55747)	9/18/2001 4:32:10 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

"re: military biz for intel "Do you have any idea of the size of Intels mil spec biz. "And what do u see as its potential over next 5 years." Intel has had an active military business for two decades. Craig Barrett's first group for which he had P&L responsibility was a manager of "TAMO," Telecom, Automotive, and Military Operations. This was circa 1980-83. I had some involvement with Intel's liasons with DoD for satellite and space weapons systems (through my work on alpha particle- and cosmic ray-induced soft errors). (I left Intel in 1986, and my last involvement in this was doing a bit of consulting on the 8085 processors intended to go to Jupiter on the Galileo mission. The concern was the effects of the energetic particles in Jovian orbit. Ironically for this thread, AMD was also very strong in this market with the 2900 bit-slice processors.) Intel is now very well-established/entrenched in the Mil-Spec market, of course. BTW, pure "mil-spec" is not necessarily the largest market: command and control, avionics, and overall computing support is huge. Integrating a P3 or P4 into some extreme mil-spec piece of gear is not where the profits lie. (The mil-spec market is always trailing the leading edge of commercial processors by about 5-10 years, though this is shrinking a bit in recent years. Remember this when you hear someone say that the P3 and P4 aren't optimized for "mil-spec temperatures.") A blood relative of mine is involved in government purchases of computer systems. I don't want to say too much, in case someone scans these posts for mentions. But he visits vendors like H-P (a big supplier), Sun, IBM, Compaq, and Dell. Four of these five are primarily Intel-based, of course. This is the real market for Intel's products: enterprise computing, fault tolerant, distributed, etc. Intel is very well-positioned to continue to dominate, even to increase its lead. (The market for these government and C3 systems is obviously a lot like the commercial market for similar systems...same OS, same apps in many cases (Oracle, Office, etc). A difference is that the government markets will be less likely to switch to a supplier like AMD to save a few pennies. And the fact that most AMD processors come out of one plant in Germany is another issue...) Intel's sales to government departments and the military is largely hidden by this role of IBM, Compaq, H-P, Dell, and others in supplying systems. The P&L numbers in the 10K for military sales must be scrutinized with this in mind. --Tim May