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

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (37748)	10/27/1997 1:57:00 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 186894

The Alpha chip is dead, long live the Merced chip. Markets go up and markets go down. That is the nature of markets. When the turmoil and the carnage is over, what will the world look like. For a hint, there is an article in the current issue of Fortune Magazine about the Intel/HP Killer Chip, Merced: pathfinder.com@@s9x*NQUAbSrRBjii/fortune/1997/971110/int.html Here are some highlights: o When one of Intel's $5 billion semiconductor fabs starts pumping out Merced chips in 1999, they will embody a significant shift in micro processor design. Just as important, if the Merced measures up to expectations, it could all but eliminate what serious competition Intel still faces in the lucrative general-purpose microprocessor business. o EPIC, short for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. The design will let a single Merced act like a whole squadron of processors handling perhaps more than a dozen computational operations simultaneously, vs. four parallel operations in today's hottest chips. The chip will also be able to run today's Windows software, as well as programs written for HP's version of Unix, all without any modification. o Says Intel CEO Andy Grove: "The whole point of Merced is to bring the microprocessor revolution to the big iron of enterprise computing. It is the one remaining segment that hasn't felt the full benefits of microcomputing." In other words, watch out, mainframes. o AMD's Dham is only half-joking when he says: "Merced will ensure Intel's dominance of the microprocessor business for the next 50 years." o Intel is already sitting pretty, holding an 80%-plus share of the market for microprocessors that go into PCs. That dominance has made Intel one of the most profitable companies on earth: For the nine months ended in September, it made $5 billion on sales of $18 billion, and appears to be on track to rack up more than $25 billion in annual sales. But margins have shrunk slightly in recent quarters because of competition from Pentium clones; a new high-end processor would give Intel a boost by broadening its markets. Mary Cluney