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To: hmaly who wrote (78454)	4/26/2002 11:01:01 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

hmaly, Re: "If Madisons performance lead over Hammer is questionable, Madison is a dead duck. Hammer or Yawmill will easily outsell it, because Hammer and Yawmill will have the software, and price." Of course, they will outsell it. And you are correct that it will be because of the software, and the price, and this is regardless of performance. IA-64 will unfortunately have a long migration towards volume markets, and I don't expect it to leave the high end market for several years. Therefore, expect volumes in the tens or hundreds of thousands per quarter, while x86 architectures and extensions continue to sell in the millions. Of course, that certainly doesn't make it a "dead duck". RISC architectures have been low volume, and have continued to thrive for nearly two decades. They are low volume, but also high margin. It's a different market, so I'm not expecting IA-64 to affect sales of x86 processors. I don't think it will be difficult for Intel to establish Itanium 2 as a RISC competitor. It will be much more difficult for x86 to vanquish the rest of the high end RISC market. There is probably a decade or more life left in high end, specialized micro-processors, designed with high end features, and scalable platforms. Itanium 2 will start out by making headway in this market. The real challenge will be when Intel is forced to migrate IA-64 into the volume server space. If there is a lack of available software, and if the architecture can't be brought down to mainstream cost levels, then it stays a high end processor, and eventually dies as commodity processors make inroads to this market. But you make it sound like this will happen overnight, and that Itanium 2 won't even have a chance at that. That's where I disagree. Itanium 2 will be the beginning of the IA-64 life cycle. It will gain market share in the high end, and several years down the road, Intel may try to bring it to higher volume markets. That's when I believe the greater challenge will lie, and the next generation of IA-64 will have to be a lot lower cost, lower power solution by then. Re: "Itanium is another Alpha" First, you might want to consider Hammer's similarity with Alpha. High cost manufacturing process, high pin count package, similar architecture, similar complex topology, and a number of the same designers, too. wbmw