Ann, (Probably too much ON TOPIC, but you asked for it). Here's post #2 about the stockholders' meeting this Wednesday.
Andy kicked off the meeting by introducing Craig Barrett as the new CEO, and he, Andy, will remain Chairman of the Board (we knew this was happening). I'm sure y'all have seen Andy on TV, but I, personally, had never seen Craig. He's tall (6 feet two), athletic looking, and I've heard he really is athletic.
Andy talked first about the current business climate. He told it like we've all heard: slow right now, Asia and Japan suck, price wars are happening because of the slowing biz, too much inventory, 20% of PC sales are sub $1,000. However, and I didn't know this, historically, 20% is about the percentage for < $1,000 PC's. That's it for the negative stuff. From here on out, it's all positive (looking forward).
Intel's response to the slowdown is to accelerate change, i.e., introduce a fleet of new products. Showing a graph of Pentium MMX vs. P6 (PPro, PII, Celeron) microarchitecture, the two curves have crossed, with P6 microarch.. now >50%.
With Craig talking now, we heard that Intel, instead of traditionally having one basic CPU chip at several different clock speeds to cover as much market as possible, is segmenting their products. The market segments, with different chip families for several of them are, with the most power at the top and working down:
Servers
Workstations
"Performance" desktops (like your PII 266 MHz, Ann).
"Lean" desktops
Mobile (e.g., laptops).
Consumer
Craig talked about the two new families, Celeron (low end) and Xeon (high end but still 32 bit, i.e. not Merced). PII of course is king now. He emphasized the Intel brand (intel inside) as continuing to be a big deal and will be advertised a lot. Just when the doors opened to the auditorium, there was the familiar "boing intel inside" little jingle over the speakers.
He said that screen to screen business over the Internet was now 79 of business, vs. 64% just a year earlier. This sells computers and network stuff.
There was then a nice tribute to Barrett via a collection of photos projected onto two large screens in the front...pix of him on a horse in deep snow, cooking on a small hibachi while camping in the woods, pre-teen pictures, Craig with his wife and I guess daughter, Andy in the bunny suit with Craig behind him and with the two fingers of one hand in the V pattern over Andy's head, and many more. A very nice collage. Also a film in which a colleague at Intel said that no matter what he did, whether 2 man basketball, or tennis, golf or work, whatever, he was a fierce competitor, had to win. Yet, he's almost soft-spoken. Don't be fooled, however, he's brilliant and answered every question after the meeting perfectly.
Craig said that when all the new products (PII, here now; Celeron, one here now, more to come; and Xeon, starting June-July) Intel will be more competitive than at any time in its history. Almost hard to believe, remember just two years ago when AMD had only the K5 dog and Cyrix had zip?
When there are one billion connected PC's (Andy), there will be tens of millions of servers with intel inside.
As far as technology goes, in 1Q98, 0.25 micron line width product was 18%. By the end of 1998, it will be 100%. My comment..this is awesome, considering how many fabs Intel has world-wide. Well, all the CPU chips will be on 0.25. There will still be older tech fabs for chipsets, etc.
New packaging term: SEPP, meaning single edge processor package. It's the Celeron (celery to Intel haters) package.
Xeon...Craig said essentially all workstation/server manufacturers are signing up to use it (me too!).
Katmai is coming, I think next year. It's PII based with 70 or so new instructions. It will be a killer chip for highly graphical applications, like CAD, even games!
He talked about other Intel products...Intel still #1 in flash memory;
camera products; video conferencing products, others.
Some of the interesting questions and answers:
From the Intel thread:
Message 4552391
"When will Rambus memory technology start I think he said shipping along with Intel CPU chips in PC's." Answer: late 1999
From the audience: "congrats on the purchase of Digital Equipment." I almost had a heart attack. It was just the DEC fab in Massachusetts. Whew! Completed Sunday.
An aside learned at the lunch with Paul Engel and others...Paul worked for Craig Barrett for about three years. Paul says he's super.
I have some more notes but they are less interesting and I'm sure this is enough. NOW SOMEBODY OWES ME A JOKE!
Everyone have a great three day weekend!
Tony |
