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

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (154369)	1/8/2002 8:03:57 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 186894

Jim, Re: "If you were Intel and you're best chip ran 500 Mhz less than a AMD just how would you market that?" Intel is fortunate, because they have the kind of brute force marketing to re-educate the world about what megahertz really means. Intel would solve being behind in megahertz by changing the rules about what megahertz means. AMD, on the other hand, doesn't have much of a marketing team, so they create numbers that look like megahertz to confuse the customer. This has worked on occasion, too, as some of the press have accidently called AMD's recently released processor the Athlon XP 2000MHz, rather than the Athlon XP 2000+. Of course, a massive re-education program will mean finding a meaningful substitute for megahertz. I can see Intel including processor specifications in their processor labeling to make up for a smaller megahertz number. For example, if Intel were to market the Athlon, they may have doubled the cache early on (hey, Intel can afford a larger Athlon die), and call it the Athlon 1.67GHz/512KB. AMD probably wouldn't have installed the extra cache on Northwood (to conserve die space); thus, Intel would have had a feature to sell over the AMD equivalent. That's one idea. Front side bus speed could have been used, too (assuming that Intel had the quad pumped bus on the Athlon, while AMD had their EV6 bus with the Pentium 4). Another idea might be to include the SPECint score with the processor label. They might have called their product the Athlon 1.6GHz/677SpecInt. They could have included both Spec scores, such as Athlon 1.6GHz/677int/588fp. The possibilities are huge. But anyway, these are just rough ideas. I think customers are smart enough to shop with three different numbers. After all, most of them know how large they want their hard drive, or how much they want for memory. Come to think of it, Intel might be needing some of this kind of marketing for their new Banias mobile processor in 2003. If the Mobile Northwood is clocking at 1.6GHz-2.0GHz, will Banias get that high based on the Pentium III core? If not, Intel would be competing against themselves with a higher performance Banias processor against a higher clock frequency Northwood processor. Since Intel will no doubt want to sell their new architecture for a premium, they will obviously need to find a way to market it against the megahertz. Itanium, too, has much lower megahertz than the Pentium 4, but that may be taken care of by the nature of its market. Hope this helps. wbmw

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (154369)	1/8/2002 8:31:13 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Jim, <If you were Intel and you're best chip ran 500 Mhz less than a AMD just how would you market that?> Would you rather have a model number war? Now THAT will be plain dumb. "Intel Pentium 4 Model 12,000!!!" "AMD Athlon XP Model 13,000!!!!" "Intel Pentium V Model 20,000!!!!!" "AMD Marathon Omega Model 300,000!!!!!!" Tenchusatsu

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (154369)	1/9/2002 3:50:50 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Jim, going back to the question over "QuantiSpeed," I was shopping for a light bulb the other day. I remember a while back when the wattage of the light bulb was the only thing that mattered as a consumer. The more watts, the more light. Now thanks to the energy-saving models, light bulbs are measured both by wattage and by lumens, or light output. A 15W halogen bulb can produce the same amount of light as a 65W incandescent bulb, but with a fraction of the power. But at least the package on the halogen bulb doesn't say "Model 65" or "QuantiWatts" or "Halogen Bulb with QuantiLight (tm) architecture." This is the approach AMD has chosen, and it is plain wrong. (Not to defend Intel's marketing of clock speed, mind you, but at least it works.) Tenchusatsu