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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tomcat who wrote (26813)	5/30/1998 6:40:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Tomcat - Nice thought but I don't see it happening. Nobody has ever been able to get the majority of software developers to target anything but the volume Intel platform. Even Merced bows to that by executing X86 in silicon. Look at what happened to PowerPC and MIPS - no volume, no apps. MSFT is not doing ANY new Win98 (or WinXX) development, so a port of Win98 would seem very unlikely. Alpha will be an NT / Unix system. But the fact that Alpha can directly execute any x86 code at pretty good speed using FX!32 means that users can choose Alpha if they want, as long as their desired app runs on NT. There are already $2000 Alpha workstations, and that price could easily drop based on the hardware costs. The cost of the CPU is only one factor in the decision to develop a volume product line. Anywhere where the OS is not visible to the user, Alpha could play. That would include any kind of dedicated server in addition to the high end servers where it is most visible today. But CPQ also needs to keep up their volume with Intel (they are Intel's largest customer), and there are lots of highly integrated products in the AMD and Cyrix pipeline for the consumer space, so I would expect CPQ to be pretty careful where they put Alpha.