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

To: Harry Landsiedel who wrote (54443)	4/24/1998 8:30:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Harry, Re: "But aren't they falling behind on the high end? (Xeon)" I'll put my 2 cents in from a system point of view, and I'm sure Paul can do the same and add in his chip expertise. It's one thing to design a very fast CPU, say 400 MHz Pentium II class. It's quite another to make it appealing to server makers. For example, Intel has about 2 1/2 years experience with the SMP (symmetric multiprocessor processor) architecture and implementation. AMD has none. This allows up to four CPU's to essentially act as one, giving tremendous processing power. Later this year, Intel will have eight way available. No medium to high end server company will consider a CPU without SMP capability. Intel does another thing which the server manufacturers love, and that's system integration. They'll build up motherboards, complete with their CPU's, memory, PCI slots, storage and I/O interfaces, etc. This obviously helps their customers get to market faster, as they don't have to worry about designing around the new CPU, etc. Intel goes further in that they design, build and sell what they call nodes. These consist of the motherboard as above, disk drives, tape drives, power supplies, all assembled into a chassis. A customer of this level of integration gets an even bigger jump start to market than the guy starting at the MB level. BTW, features like hot pluggable drives and redundant power supplies are standard, these for reliability. Medium and high end servers aren't just all about very fast and powerful hardware and software. Reliability, availability and serviceability are almost as important. Intel has developed Landesk, which allows networked servers to: Get software distributed from a remote, probably headquarters site...guarantees all get the same SW. Get diagnosed from anywhere on the connected net. Troubleshooting can be done by going into single instruction step and other modes. Shoot problems from a central site and just mail the local FE what to replace! Report problems,back to headquarters, leading to diagnosis. Be inventoried. etc. More, but this is enough for now. Intel has been addressing the systems market like this for some years, AMD not at all. So, it takes a lot more than just a chip. Tony

To: Harry Landsiedel who wrote (54443)	4/25/1998 1:17:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Harry - Re: "Will they be able to get the capital to go to the .18 micron process around when Intel does?" Sure - just look at their stock - selling for $29+ and they have lost money in 7 of the past 9 quarters. DLJ - Jerry's Hip Pocket Board Member - is lining up suckers right now to buy $1 Billion in stocks and debt instruments . So, they will borrow and dilute shareholder's equity - but they will get it. And then they can always turn to IBM to act as a 0.18 micron foundry when AMD's new Billion Dollars is spent and gone and the "yields are somewhat low". Paul