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

To: Elmer who wrote (170322)	8/29/2002 11:59:02 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Elmer, Since the Intel folks left the Moderated thread, it appears a lot of 'Droids are not happy with their thought controlled utopia. They came over here like a swarm of wasps. A 'Droid that can't attack Intel is only half a 'Droid, I guess. John

To: Elmer who wrote (170322)	8/29/2002 12:30:50 PM
From: NITT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

re: "Don't count out SUN. They are a real possibility in my mind." Agree the Sun might team up with AMD, but I doubt they would drop the needed bucks (over $1B just to get AMD out of the hole their in). It's not clear that Sun alone can drive the volume needed to keep AMD afloat. I also think it's possible that Sun would go to Itainium for their high end needs... either on platforms they design and support or possibly on 3rd party systems. Suns effort to date with Solaris on IA has been at best half hearted... and they still had some significant performance advantages over the years (not as much lately because MS has improved network performance and Linux tuning continues). If Sun would just says the king (sparc) is dead, long live the king (Itainium) they would probably continue to lead the enterprise market in perception and in profits. Spark is more of an Albatross to them at this point. They cannot get partners to invest and they cannot get the licensing stream going to help offset development cost. This may all be a moot point due to Mc Nealy's ego... we'll see. Nitt

To: Elmer who wrote (170322)	8/29/2002 1:33:02 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Will Sun acquire AMD? Elmer writes, quoting someone else: ""If the business downturn continues much longer this could be the end to AMD as a threat of any kind to Intel. I doubt there will be any deep pocketed company to come to there rescue this time around." "Don't count out SUN. They are a real possibility in my mind." An interesting scenario to consider. Consider the issues for Sun to acquire AMD: 1. They would not be buying AMD for manufacturing capacity and prowess, as Sun already has firmly gone down the path of outsourcing production (to T.I. and one or more Japanese companies). Considering that HP inked the deal on IA-64 with Intel precisely because it concluded that it could not justify building the necessary $2 billion fabs to economically produce next-generation CPUs, it would be weird for Sun to decide that now is the time to get into the fab business. (And AMD is itself outsourcing, as the UMC deal shows.) Conclusion: Sun will not be interested in AMD's one major plant and a sprinkling of minor plants. 2. Acquiring AMD's x86 line, especially Hammer and its variants. This becomes attractive if and only if (IFF) Intel falters with IA-64 and fails to produce effective 64-bit extensions to x86 and AMD's Hammer becomes the de facto standard. Of course, if this scenario begins to unfold then AMD stock is probably back above $30 and Sun likely could not afford to acquire AMD. (AMD at $30 would give a market cap of about $10 B, close to Sun's current market cap of $12 B. Doable, barely. If Sun anticipates that the scenario is likely to unfold this way, they should acquire AMD while AMD is still relatively inexpensive.) More importantly, though I'm not a processor guru, it seems that while Hammer looks to be a pretty good performer, it will run into the "wall" that caused Intel to look beyond conventional ISAs and move to the VLIW/EPIC approach. (A lesser version of this decision was the one Intel made to shift to a longer pipeline for the P4, a choice the AMD supporters laughed at, but one which turned out to be a good one...the P4 is clockspeed scaling very nicely.) If this analysis is correct, then Hammer will be a dead end, and AMD _itself_ will have to make the ISA change that Intel made with IA-64. Conclusion: For Sun to be interested in acquiring AMD, they must conclude that IA-64 will lose and Hammer will win. This does not yet appear to be the conclusion that companies like HP/Compaq, IBM, and others have reached. (In fact, if and when these companies reach this conclusion, expect a bidding war to break out to acquire AMD. This is the scenario no doubt hoped for by the AMD investors, but so far there is not the slightest hint that this is starting. Indeed, the low market value of AMD is our best indicator that this scenario of Hammer's dominance over IA-64 is not considered likely.) 3. Lastly, consolidations and acquisitions often don't work very well. The H-P/Compaq battle is an indication. This point is more vague than the other two....I just don't see Sun trying to swallow AMD. --Tim May