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

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (147462)	11/11/2001 10:57:56 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: You do have a problem, though, with Itanium, Pentium 4, and Rambus. Understandably, the first generation of Itanium ended up being much more of a niche product than anyone imagined. Renewed competition from IBM and others, may make Itanium a hard item to sell. On the other hand, McKinley is right around the corner.... Could be, but "is right around the corner" has been the line from Intel for two years now. First it was coppermine, then it was the first big one, five years in the making: Willamette (P4), then it was the other big one, eight years in the making, merced (Itanium), now you say it's McKinley. But the expectations for McKinley are looking pretty modest, at this point. A 70% increase in integer performance won't catch it up to Athlon (or P4), and the goofy thing costs a fortune because of its gigantic die, and has (so far) been devilishly difficult to write compilers for. Actually, I think it's Northwood that's "right around the corner", at this point. The thing is, that through all these corners we've "just arounded" during the past few years, the only positive surprise was coppermine - which turned out to be quite a really strong chip. Since then, Rambus, P4, and Itanium have been weak or worse. And through all this, while spending about 1/10th what Intel spends on development, AMD continues to ship the most powerful IBM PC compatible processor (most of the time). And it's Intel that's been forced to follow AMD's lead to DDR, not AMD following Intel to RDRAM. During the period, Intel's market dominance let it take in a fortune in revenues (though it lost quite a bit of market share in the period). But it's blown what it took in, and then some, on an attempt to turn itself into a sort of high-tech conglomerate, and my interpretation is that the failure of that diversification attempt has yet to be fully recognized in Intel's accounting statements - that they're continuing to carry as assets quite a bit of value that should have already been taken as expenses. What I was trying to show in the revenue and earnings breakdown was that Intel was actually less diversified than most people think, actually less diversified even than AMD. AMD is about 2/3s CPUs and about 1/3 flash, while Intel is 4/5ths CPUs and 1/5 everything else.