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

To: combjelly who wrote (152973)	12/21/2001 12:54:06 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Combjelly, Re: "x86 wasn't even on the radar screens of Power, Alpha and Sparc." I disagree. For a long time, it was speculated that x86 architecture would eventually be over-run by RISC architectures. Earlier last decade, IBM's and Motorola's PowerPC was supposed to rid the market of the old and inefficient x86 ISA. However, improvements in the x86 architecture, and the invention of OOOE allowed x86 performance to match or exceed that of RISC. When I said that RISC architectures capitalized on the shortcomings of a primitive CISC x86 architecture, I meant that the diverging performance of x86 and RISC in the 80's and early 90's allowed several designs to take root in the enterprise markets, a market that wasn't very popular for an x86 chip until the last decade. A new Alpha or Sparc style architecture these days would probably not be as successful. The market is simply too crowded, and x86 has taken root in the largest part of it. But what does this mean for Itanium? It's surely going to be difficult, but right now, there is still a lot of effort going into building the infrastructure. It's likely that x86 will still have a lot of life to it, so the performance story is going to differ, depending on who you talk to. I think that Itanium has more to it, though, than raw performance. Performance will follow with newer designs that better exploit the architecture, but I think what's bound to sell the Itanium first will be the reliability and scalability features. Merced is not a fair product by which to judge the architecture. Most of the industry realizes this, which is why it hasn't sold as much more than a development vehicle. It's the next generations that will make the difference, and even if the length of the IA-64 project has taken 7 years to build up from zero to product, it may be worth it if it can establish itself as the standard for enterprise computing. I think that Intel still has a fair chance of making that happen. wbmw