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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (148259)	11/15/2001 8:32:36 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 186894

Mary, I have owned a company where we had a close relationship with a major supplier(Intel). At one time we made over 1000 systems per month. This dated from the 8088 days and we contracted for the main sets of parts from Intel. We often took a look at other people products that could fit the same niche. This was done to protect ourselves from new products from our competitors that might be able to steal share from us by the use of that second source part. Most often it was price, but it could be performance. From time to time would find a better product in terms of price or performance. We would advise the buyers and they would use this in their price talks with our major supplier. From time to time we did in fact give some share to the other supplier(S). This was most often done with commodity parts like power supplies and line filters and glue. At one time we totally switched to AMD 386 CPUs because the AMD part was a lot faster than the Intel part. Many of the support parts came from AMD as well. Of course we now have a higher degree of proprietary socketing and we can no longer buy the modern equivalent of the AM386 and Intel 386 and drop them in the same sockets. Around this time it became non-economic to make our own mobos, mainly due to the advent of surface mount parts and advanced chip sets and we switched to ECS, TYAN, DFI etc for mobos. We would then buy AMD/Intel/IBM/Cyrix CPUs for these mobos, as the clients ordered. Small as we were we still bought and tried other peoples mobos and power supplies, even though we had preferred suppliers. That is why I feel that Sun and Dell and Compaq make it their business to try and test all Intel and AMD parts, even if never bought in volume. They cannot afford a situation where AMD comes out with a better part and other people start to eat their share due to their dependence on Intel. They ned to know ASAP. Even Intel gets hold of AMD parts ASAP, they cannot afford to have a repeat of the Athlon situation where a superior AMD part threatened(and still threatens) their share. Bill