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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (24987)	12/12/1997 10:41:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 176387

Thanks Mohan. The article rehash's several theories about the demise of the PC industry. It certainly highlights the component makers pain. I for one have little doubt that today's basic PC functionality will continually see lower price points. However, there is an even bigger competetive arena where power will always be needed. The question is, will there be enough compelling applications available for the 10X leap in computing power we'll experience in the next 3-4 years? Especially on the consumer side or in businesses like State Farm Insurance where server needs are great but the desktop requirements can be fulfilled with the likes of the NetPC. We're in a period of elasticity at the low end. A period where hardware has gotten ahead of software advancements. The mistake analysts are making is in believing that we pretty much have all the software we really need which is what they've been saying for years and have always been wrong. There's a few million programmers out there doing some pretty neat things. Today, I witnessed a sample of a future PC gaming application. Two beta versions, both coded by ATI graphics which we're using to run AGP in 2X mode. No applications like this exist outside of the lab environment for the public to see yet but should be showing up shortly. Anyway, they're designed to run in AGP 2X mode and I have to tell you these games are UNBELIEVEABLE! I was absolutely blown away by the stunning graphics and realism. 30 frames per second full 3D rendering at 1024x768! Geeeeeeeeez! You've never seen anything like it. Within a year, there will be a number of these games on the market and you won't be able to run them on todays low end machines that don't have AGP. Point being, applications are being deveoped to push the computing power envelope that have nothing to do with MS office productivity packs or Web browsers and folks just don't have a clue as to what they are gonna "must have" 3-4 years down the road. On the engineering side, forget it man! We'll be replacing our Wintel workstations every two years until forever. There aren't enough MIPS on the planet to satisfy our computing needs. From the guys who design Reeboks and Nikes to stealth bombers and the space shuttle... we need realism and speed. To wit, I spent all day setting up a simulation to run over the weekend. It requires the use of two Sun UltraSparc dual processor workstations (we paid 25k ea. 18mos ago and are in the process of replacing them with Dell 400's for 8k ea.), 120,000 simulation runs and will take 3 days to complete. I pray I didn't make a mistake or I'll have to run this set of permutations over. I have 3 more permutations like this to run... 2weeks of full time CPU intensive floating point thrashing. This is where all the anti-technologists jump in a tell me that "everything that can be invented has been invented" and "640k oughta be enough for anyone" and that I'm a techno- geek who's out of touch with reality. Don't ever underestimate the advancements that lie ahead. MEATHEAD

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (24987)	12/12/1997 11:37:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Thread, great article courtesy of Mohan (sort of) on Andy Grove's strategy for Intel's positioning in the new marketplace. businessweek.com This is a lenghty article. I suggest everyone read it carefully. From this you can glean why Dell's strategy is to avoid the low end consumer segment with all it's increasing fragmentation and razor thin profits. Dell is making a good business decision to agressively persue servers, workstations and desktop power users. Did I mention notebooks? Mohan, you need to share good stuff like this with the Dell thread as well<ggg>. MEATHEAD