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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jjayxxxx who wrote (85609)	7/23/2002 1:50:21 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

JJ, Re: "I bet you already knew this and were trying to make a point? If so, isn't it sort of a 'droid'-like point that just happens to be on the opposite side of the fence?" The article had a very obvious spin to it. I'm sure you've noticed. I've never been a fan of "highly opinionated" articles, as they fail to grasp any of the fundamentals behind their words. I'm not going to argue it point by point, since it's a debatable topic to begin with. Clearly, the future of the enterprise will go in one of two directions. Either, we will see a quick commoditization of this market, at which point cost becomes a leading feature. If this happens, the market may turn to clusters of low powered value CPUs that are tuned for uptime and low costs. Or better yet, distributed networking will take off, making uptime a non-issue, at which point the lowest cost systems will win out, and server CPU sales will be satisfied by value desktop parts. Celeron clusters, anyone? On the other hand, what I think is a more likely situation is that greed will compel businesses to continue offering proprietary solutions based on high volume parts (i.e. Itanium). I think that high performance, and RAS features will continue to demand a premium in the high end, and OEMs will require differentiating platforms to lock in their respective markets. Clusters of Celeron servers would be IBM's and HPQ's worst nightmare. Dell could get away with this model temporarily, but even they would see this as a fetal trap for the long term. It's not industry standard chips that are bad; it's commoditizing the server market that big businesses will want to avoid. Itanium is a new architecture, and it allows the designers to include many differentiating features that would be too expensive to put into a desktop line. Having those differentiating features gives Intel's customers what they want to secure their livlihood. It may be a convoluted argument, but you have to understand the basic motivation. I don't think that AMD will be ready to offer OEMs the kind of differentiating solution that Intel can. Hammer is still a processor based off of an architecture that has a habit of commoditizing markets in which it is used. 64-bit extensions does not offer anything wildly new. Moving forward, I see x86-64 hitting the wall before IA-64. Unless the market is totally interested in commodity parts, I don't see IA-64 losing the battle. wbmw