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

To: tecate78732 who wrote (257610)	12/27/2008 6:10:27 PM
From: mas_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

My point is that Intel never had a plan to leave x86. They were hiring teams for x86 in 2001 timeframe. Yes they did but that was in 1994 at the beginning pcreview.co.uk Intel spokesman Howard High said the intent of the technology agreement is to have a single architecture that will replace all others from either company. Once they realised what a train wreck Merced/Itanium 1 was going to be by 1996-7 both x86 and PA-Risc suddenly got reprieves and fresh roadmaps. When AMD defined x86-64 Prescott was designed to include the original version of it in it but was only turned on when Opteron was a success as a 64-bit server chip.

To: tecate78732 who wrote (257610)	12/27/2008 6:29:35 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 275872

Maybe I can clarify what I am trying to say with a couple of questions: 1 - How many X86 32 bit processors does Intel currently produce? 2 - What is the unit volume of those compared to Intel's total production? 3 - What is the percentage of OEM products (notebook, desktop, etc.) shipped with 32 bit processors? These are rhetorical - the answer is that almost nothing shipping today is 32 bit. Even Atom is 64 bit. Would you claim that this was all due to the AMD X86-64? That may have accelerated the trend, because it was backward compatible, but the shift was driven as much by customer demand and memory hungry apps. I believe that if Intel had achieved better acceptance for either Merced or McKinley in the high end of the desktop and workstation market, and better server performance, they would have developed a strong position - but the four year delay in producing IA64 parts that came close to expectations gave AMD the window to bring Opteron to market. Now virtually everything uses the X86-64 architecture. Whether Intel would have maintained 32 bit processors or not is a moot point - one way or another, no one would have been buying them.