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

To: TGPTNDR who wrote (152958)	12/21/2001 3:55:45 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

TGPTNDR, Re: "it's easy and cheap of me to giggle over it." But you'd also be justified to be a bit disappointed - and perhaps a bit skeptical. It's obvious that creating a new architecture is a monumental task, but if Itanium had launched a year or two sooner, this would be moot, since most of the reason why Merced seems so mediocre is because it's using technology that's three years old already. To be perfectly frank, I'm sure that in some respects it's poor management at the part of Intel that delayed Itanium. In other respects, I'm sure they just couldn't get the ISVs and OSVs to get their act together in time. For whatever reason, though, Intel will need a few generations of IA-64 to have any hope of showing revolutionary performance over other solutions. On the other hand, I don't think that the value proposition behind Itanium is all about performance. Performance is about one third of the deal. Multiprocessor scalability and RAS would be the other two thirds, IMO. Just look at Sun - they seem to have the latter two thirds, and despite performance that lags even a Pentium III, Sun still does incredibly well for themselves. I still think Itanium has too much momentum to stop in the next few years. McKinley and Madison will be deciding factors on whether OEMs and ISV/OSVs are still excited about developing for the future. If McKinley gets a 70% performance improvement over Merced like Intel is claiming, and then Madison gets 40-60% higher frequencies because of the .13u process, then I think Itanium will be back in business in 2003. I don't know what other "large scale releases" you are expecting in the next 5 years or so, but those previous two in the next 1-1.5 years should improve the architecture considerably. But I'll still retain some skepticism until I see it for real. If anyone can make Itanium work, it's Intel, but even they will need a lot of hard work, and a little luck to ensure that the ball keeps rolling for hardware and software support. wbmw