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

To: Jay who wrote (42441)	12/16/1997 11:57:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 186894

Jay, Sonki - Re: " What is your take on the Sun/Intel deal ..." This SunW endorsement of MERCED will have paramount importance to the rapid deployment and acceptance of MERCED. Merced has been designed for both internal parallelism execution and multiple CPU parallelism - with hardware support for up to 256 MERCEDS in parallel. It then becomes imperative to have an operating system capable of utilizing all these parallel processors. Today, SUN's Solaris ships on 50% of the enterprise servers in the world and can directly support 64 SPARC processors. TODAY. On the downside, Microsoft's WINDOWS NT 4.0 SERVER directly supports 4 CPUS in parallel and can only support 6, 8 or more in some cobbled up cluster configurations. IF INTEL RELIED SOLELY ON MICROSOFT, INTEL COULD RUN THE RISK OF SHOWING UP AS THE BELLE OF THE SERVER BALL WITHOUT A DATE for MERCED. This would cause a media backlash that would cloud over the significance of the MERCED architecture. Intel would have trouble ramping production of expensive CPUS for expensive SERVERS if there was no OPERATING SYSTEM SUPPORT to take advantage of these processors. Moreover, the MERCED LAUNCH would be a joke if the hardware was available and Microsoft could not provide real support for it. And relying on Microsoft would put Intel into that unenviable position! ENTER SUN! SOLARIS exists today for both SPARC and Intel-32 bit architectures, and it already supports many CPUS in parallel - up tp 64. SOLARIS is SUN's propritary version of UNIX and it has been developed and refined for over 15 years. This ROAD TESTED O/S will have enormous advantages over the relatively new Windows NT. With SUN committed to work with Intel on the SOLARIS/MERCED/IA-64 processor, Intel's customers will have OS support, application support, and a foothold INTO THE EXISTING ENTERPRISE market that SUN NOW DOMINATES via their ULTRASPARC machines. Intel and the SERVER OEM's will be able to begin selling DIRECTLY into these accounts with full blown SOLARIS software and hopefully applications that can be ported quickly from SPARC to MERCED. AND, Intel already has deals with Oracle, Computer Associates, SAP, etc, and they will now be able to provide an OS (Solaris) that these Enterprise Software companies ALREADY SUPPORT TODAY! Look for a BIG payoff in mid to late 1999 when the first Merced Super Servers begin to ship with an OS and applications. All just in time to help solve the remaining Year 200 problems for corporate America! Also, this may provide a wake up call to Microsoft regarding their strategic relationship with Intel. Microsoft will be P*SSED in the beginning (like TODAY). Now, Microsoft will know how Intel felt when Microsoft developed Windows NT to run on the MIPS chips, DEC ALPHA, PowerPC, etc., and you can throw in Windows CE which runs on a host of non-Intel CPUs as well. With Solaris, Intel/MERCED can nucleate and grow with a robust OS - Sun's Solaris - and PLENTY of ISV application support - totally decoupled from Microsoft. Intel could theoretically spawn a two, three, four or five billion dollar market segment WITH NO DEPENDENCY ON MICROSOFT! That presents an opportunity for Intel that hasn't existed since August, 1981! Bill Gates will have something in addition to the DOJ to keep him awake tonight. Paul