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

To: Francis Chow who wrote (55131)	5/5/1998 11:01:00 AM
From: Burt Masnick	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Francis - You post negatively nearly continuously about Intel and Celeron. Repetition doesn't make a point more true. If Celeron is a success it will be a success with or without your comments. If it's a failure, likewise. You haven't just made your point, you've hammered it home with Nuclear weapons. Why the overkill? Some might regard it as a waste of valuable bandwidth and diskspace. By the way, in a "flat" year, INTC makes about $6,000,000,000 after tax profit. Best regards and good investing, Burt

To: Francis Chow who wrote (55131)	5/5/1998 1:00:00 PM
From: Xpiderman	Respond to of 186894

Xeon's not-so-noble quest: To slay Alpha By John Taschek 05.04.98 zdnet.com It sounds like a cross between an elemental gas and the Amazon warrior on TV's WB network. But naming aside, Intel's new Xeon processor is a noble effort that's going to be a lot more successful than the company's new albatross -- Digital's Alpha. Intel's new Xeon chip is basically a Pentium II with a bigger, faster L2 cache. It also runs in Slot 2, which means there's going to be yet another motherboard design, albeit one with a 100MHz bus. The good thing about Xeon, though, is that when it ships in June, it will be especially prepped for multiprocessor configurations. This means it's going to be a screamer, and it will put a huge damper on some much pricier midrange systems. I'm saying this without really knowing how much Xeon will cost, but you can bet that Intel is going to make it a compelling upgrade for the aging Pentium Pro-based systems. The company has to, since this technology is inferior to the chip it will eventually kill: Digital's Alpha. Alpha had every opportunity to succeed. There is a tremendous need for high-end processors running readily available operating systems. even Microsoft seemed to be bending over backward getting Windows NT to run on Alpha. And the SQL Server group was one of Alpha's biggest advocates. But the dearth of other applications and Digital's stoic "keep it quiet and they will come" attitude killed Alpha. So now who's keeping Alpha alive? The government. Pardon me, but what does the Federal Trade Commission know about processors, and how will artificially keeping the chip alive foster competition? Alpha is becoming less relevant every day. But the FTC will only approve Intel's purchase of Digital's chip manufacturing plant if Intel makes an effort to keep the chip alive (see "FTC gives OK to Digital/Intel chip deal"). This means that Digital gets to license the technology to Advanced Micro Devices, Samsung Electronics and possibly IBM. Digital also can license the Alpha technology to other companies. For $700 million, Intel gets only the manufacturing plant, which is a lot cheaper than defending itself against Digital, which accused it of stealing Alpha secrets. It doesn't matter that Alpha will reach 1GHz speeds before Intel's Merced or IBM's unnamed processor. It doesn't matter that Alpha is a superior processor to anything that Intel has available now or will have in the next two years. Sales matter. Generating interest from application developers matters. Marketing matters. The Alpha 21264, for example, is 64-bit now -- years ahead of Merced. Yet what does Digital tout for Alpha's benefits? That it was used in the special effects for "Titanic." Alpha needs more than special-purpose applications to make the billions invested in it worthwhile. It needs real applications. But when I go up on the TPC site to see how Alpha's doing, the top-rated Alpha box is still the 3-year-old, 30,000-plus-transaction-per-minute score running Oracle 7.3. Sure, the Alpha tpm score is a good number, but other non-Alpha systems have surpassed it. IBM has nearly doubled the score with a PowerPC-based RS/6000. Even the old Pentium Pro-based Tandem ServerNet Cluster has edged up on that Alpha score. A similarly equipped Xeon will obliterate these numbers. But that's the score on Alpha. It's technology that's five years too early and a marketing effort that's five years late. How many Alphas are there in your company? John Taschek can be reached at john_taschek@zd.com.