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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (155950)	1/17/2002 10:13:23 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

IBM to win "processor wars? Conservative, pin-striped IBM may well emerge with the CPU of choice. According to Garvin, "We think IBM is positioned to be the leading supplier of high performance UNIX-based servers with AIX and the intro of the Regatta systems. They are head and shoulders above anything HP and Sun can offer today." Regatta (Power4) is, in fact, the key to IBM's future plans. Its design began in 1996 as a countermeasure to Sun's future plans for Sparc. Along the way to release, according to IBM Fellow, Ravi Arimilli, the team evolved more than a few features that couldn't be implemented within the time-to-market deadline. There are design enhancements waiting in the wings that will substantially increase the Power chip's desirability, and much of the basic development has already been done. There are also some consequential benefits. Again, according to Arimilli, thanks to its highly integrated and innovative design, the current Power4 can be shaped into an 8-way system with the performance capability of its competitors' 16-way architecture. Your first reaction might be, "Smaller size, less power, that's typical baseline TCO stuff." Think beyond the box. With so many software developers charging per CPU for their licensing fees, cutting the CPU count in half saves on software charges as well. Quicker to market and with a lower cost--if somehow that doesn't seem like the IBM of old, you're correct, it's not. It's the result of traditional IBM mainframe philosophy being put into the hands of a new generation of young turks. One of the nice things about being young is that it should be a while before you see a pin-striped suit in the group. AMD dismissed as: Preferred CPU of teenage overclockers." If AMD can shed that honor and place its low-powered CPUs in portables and blades while infiltrating servers with Hammer, things could change rapidly. That's a big "if," and AMD may indeed prefer to wrap itself around the consumer market while Intel branches out. Intel dismissed as: IA-64 (or IPF, for Itanium Processor Family if you ascribe to Intel's attempts to de-emphasize the CPU's nearly exclusive 64-bit nature) may turn out to be a bit too radical for most IT departments for the next two or three years. According to Skip Garvin, "[Itanium] will survive long term, but it will be several more years before Itanium chips can offer the functionality that VMS can offer on Alpha chips today." And Intel's market has never really been the high-count SMP crowd. techupdate.zdnet.com