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

To: Amy J who wrote (180744)	4/13/2005 8:06:41 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: I did dabble in them a tad here. It'll be interesting. Could be a good idea. Besides anything Intel specific, there's a rotation going on from small caps (big the past couple of years) back to large caps, which should help Intel. But Intel's recent behavior has been disconcerting. Their rush to the press with dual core systems, including this one from Dell the night before AMD's conference call is the sort of stunt that Jerry Sanders used to get criticized for. availability for the Dell Precision 380 will be announced in the coming weeks www1.us.dell.com They got Acer to put out a similar report the day before: Acer plans to announce in May an Aspire desktop PC based on Intel's (Profile, Products, Articles) dual-core Pentium D processor, the company confirmed Tuesday. infoworld.com This sort of thing was cute coming from a scrappy underdog that arrived at the conference call in a stretch limo, but is a bit spooky coming from the industry's 80%+ monopoly leader. There are hints that AMD will be announcing specific near term or even immediate availability of multiple lines of dual core workstations and servers from each of HP, Sun, and IBM at the Opteron anniversary a week from now. It looks like Intel's response is to float previews of a couple of future gaming rigs with vague "coming soon" availability, but nothing for the corporate market - this is a 100% reversal of the way things always worked in the past. Intel (or AMD) sells the CPUs for a quad server to the OEMs for $800 to $2,500 each, making a profit of $5,000 or so on the average unit sale by the OEM. CPUs for desktops carry much lower margins, ranging from nothing (after costs) to perhaps $100. Intel (or AMD) makes as much or more money when one server is sold as it makes selling 50 or more desktops. Intel's business model has been to keep up the volume with it's desktops and make its money on servers. It seems unlikely that Intel's business model could be at risk, but they sure have been acting that way.

To: Amy J who wrote (180744)	4/13/2005 2:07:57 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Health care's the ticket, Craig Barrett says Published: April 13, 2005, 7:52 AM PDT By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com The future for the technology industry lies under your skin, according to Intel CEO Craig Barrett. Inefficiencies in the medical industry, along with advances in chip manufacturing and design, will likely provide chipmakers with one of their big opportunities for growth, Barrett said Tuesday in a brief interview. The first phase of growth will likely involve creating systems so that doctors can retrieve medical files and histories more rapidly. "Amazon knows more about me than my doctor does," Barrett said. But the larger opportunity revolves around creating sensors that can monitor a person's vital signs or ferret out problems. "Health care is still potentially one of the big sleepers. The sleeper is using the technology in the diagnostic sense--small-scale sensors the size of human proteins," he said. Some companies are already creating products for this niche. Sensant has created a tiny drum-on-a-chip for improving ultrasounds, while Pria Diagnostics is testing a chip for male fertility testing. Meanwhile, Intel, General Electric and others have developed prototype chips for testing blood samples. Devising chips for these purposes, of course, will rely on speeding up the pace of hardware advancement beyond what's described by Moore's Law, the observation that chips will increase in power and performance at a steady clip because designers will be able to continue to add a greater number of transistors to a single chip. The original version of the law turns 40 on April 19. Although manufacturers will have to develop new technologies to maintain the pace of development, Moore's Law won't die anytime soon. Intel has already produced prototype transistors based on the next five generations of manufacturing processes, which means that the chip industry can count on at least another decade of shrinking and adding transistors. Gordon Moore and his law, then and now "That kind of guarantees you another five generations," he said. "There is no fundamental limit there." Many have stated that the industry will have to make substantial changes, and perhaps even completely overhaul silicon manufacturing techniques, after the 22-nanometer manufacturing process (the fourth generation), which chipmakers should begin using in 2011 or 2012. Barrett's comments indicate that, once again, the predictions that Moore's Law is in trouble could be premature. Barrett will step down as Intel's CEO in May to become chairman. An avid traveler, he will celebrate the change by going on a fishing trip to Kamchatka, the far east peninsula in Siberia which, in the game of Risk, is frequently subject to military invasions from Alaska.