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To: Steve Porter who wrote (50687)	3/17/1998 12:50:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 186894

Steve, re: "I understand.. my thinking is that Intel is making a mistake in that they will make a chip that everyone will think is a PII, but the performance won't match up to what people expect." It's called a degrade, and has been done for 20 years in the larger computer industry. First you come out with the fastest product you can of a new design, to get the product out there. Then, you go in both directions, adding CPU's to get more performance for customers that crave the screaming edge, or, improving cycle time (MHz), or both; and degrade by removing cost for customers that don't need the screamer, implementing a new model number within the same product family. An advantage of the latter, again for customers that don't need top performance, is that they pay less for software licenses from, say, IBM. This doesn't apply to PC's, but, someday, who knows. In any case, a lot of customers will go for the degrade, as long as the price/performance is reasonable. Then, if they need more, they just replace the cartridge with a "regular" PII, give the Celeron to a co-worker, or younger child who doesn't need full strength PII. Beating this one death. Tony

To: Steve Porter who wrote (50687)	3/17/1998 1:16:00 PM
From: Jeff Fox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Steve, re: Celeron Adminitedly, some people perceive Cyrix or AMD to be crap and won't buy them for that reason.. Intel is risking their future on this cacheless PII idea. Now they can survive by increasing advertising but that is increasing $$$$.. I'm not sure how this will play out. Whoa - cool your jets, Steve. You are overly worried 'bout Intel... Celeron is just one of a whole family of Intel processors. Intel will continue to sell PII's in ever increasing volume. Celeron is not a product shift. Intel is not "going cacheless". Celeron is just one price/performance choice of a whole line of products. There is not any perception that Celeron is "crap" as you say. Celeron is a simply a PII that will outperform cacheless K6. It is really an old and successful Intel product strategy played out over three times now. Introduce a new architecture at the highest possible level, then backfill the lower price/performance niches. To remind you of two: Intel introduced the 386DX - 32 bit bus with a companion cache system (82396 I think it was), called "smartcache". This was the highest performing PC system at the time. - A year later the 386SX with 16 bit bus. (At the time OEM's could design with existing 16 bit wide peripheral chips much cheaper.) This was the product line backfill. Intel introduced the 486DX - with internal L1 cache and floating point units; the highest performing PC processor of its time. - A year later the 486SX without the FPU. This was the product line backfill. Both times the insiders howled "intentionally crippled" and "crap". However each of these were wildly successful in the market. In fact it was the 386SX that did the trick to end the 286 generation. (Remember the Red X campaign?). A little side note - the 386SX was so successful Intel had a problem - The brand "SX" became more well known that "386"! Your problem is that AMD/Cyrix/NSM are at a level of ability to field just one processor at time. Well, almost field a processor at a time. A new product, like the K6, or a K63D, replaces all previous products. The investors know this and are thus tuned to interpret company futures on the merits of the one offering against the whole market spectrum of PC computing. This is their problem. Please understand that this is not the case at all for Intel and Celeron. Jeff

To: Steve Porter who wrote (50687)	3/17/1998 3:44:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Steve, > they will make a chip that everyone will think is a PII... Ummm, it doesn't even have "Pentium" in the name. It will be marketed sepearately, probably in such a way that identifies it as the "inexpensive, for the home" chip that consumers have been waiting for to replace the "old style" Pentium. Other than those of us techies who actually understand the relationships between the two, there will be very few consumers who believe that Celeron = crippled version of PII. mg