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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (47466)	6/13/1998 2:47:00 PM
From: John Koligman	Respond to of 176387

Celeron is a PII without cache, so it is slower than 'full blown' PII processors but in tests I have read it is somewhat faster on average than Pentium MMX processors. From what I know, the Celeron comes in the Slot 1 package as does the PII. Later this year Intel is releasing a followon to the Celeron code named 'Mendocino' which will have 128k of 'full speed' cache (current PII chips run half speed cache, but have 512k of it). John Lots of good info about all this stuff on the Intel thread. They have endless debates over the various Intel chips and how they compare to AMD and Cyrix, in addition to a long running personal feud between the two Pauls.....

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (47466)	6/13/1998 4:14:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

chuz - celeron is a pentium II with no cache. mendicino is a pentium II with some cache - next generation celeron. These are slot 1 devices and thus compatible with pentium II chipsets and boards.

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (47466)	6/13/1998 6:55:00 PM
From: jbn3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

re DELL's R&D Chuzzlewit, from the 1997 annual statement, page 27: Research, Development, and Engineering costs for fiscal year ending Jan 29, 1995 ==> $65MM Jan 29, 1996 ==> $95MM Feb 2, 1997 ==> $126MM Regards, 3

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (47466)	6/13/1998 9:09:00 PM
From: Techie	Respond to of 176387

This was meant for you, but you got me all excited and I messed up. exchange2000.com Meredith can take it to 4 hours if he likes, then what? He'll shut down a fab because the trucker had a flat? But you are right about Dell not having R&D. You don't need R&D to fill up a box. Let me put it this way, most of these OEMs that have no technology of their own are nothing more than S&M organizations. They don't even do customer service. If it weren't for brand name, which more & more nobody cares about as long as it's Intel inside, they have nothing. Hence Tom's push for more branding and the $70M expense. He is wasting money. People care about the branding of components but not the box. The fastest growing sector is the white box.

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (47466)	6/14/1998 12:38:00 AM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

CTC Re: Dell does very little R&D, relying mainly on the work of its value chain partners such as Intel. Releative to Intel/MSFT, Dell could be viewed as a very low R&D company. Actually they sit somewhere between the extremes of CPQ and GTW. Most of my friends work in various R&D capacities at Dell so I have a good sense of what they do and what their challenges are. PG (The Product Group) employs several hundred people at a cost of >$120MM a year. I'd bet there are many hi-tech companies which people consider "R&D intensive" that don't even generate 120MM in revenue. The misconception by many about Dell being just a "box maker" really discounts the true effort required to design and test these systems. Yes, Dell leverages heavily off of Intel and they don't design the silicon. Dell buys parts and integrates them into custom solutions. There are a tremendous number of decisions that must be made in order to design a system with wide market acceptance at a profitable cost structure. This can make or break you as these permutations can be overwhelming. You are at a distinct disadvantage if you try and buy a "solution compromise" from someone else and slap your name on it. A good analogy would be home builders and architects. They don't design the components that make up a house (lumber, cement, carpet, fixtures etc.) they select from available materials and make the creative and business decisions required to assemble the final product. Why does Dell design most of their own systems? Because they can't buy them from anybody else. Custom designs can be highly leveragable, scalable and re-useable. You don't get that with Intel or Tiawanese motherboards... not only that, you are limited to ATX form factors and the like. Take the Optiplex Gn for instance. One motherboard, three chassis. A low profile desktop, midsize desktop and Mini-Tower. This is accomplished by having all PCI/ISA expansion slots on a separate riser card. The Video, NIC and sound are all on-board population options. Replace the 300Mhz PentiumII with a Celeron and you have a product matrix that can scale price points from sub-$1000 to >$3000 without additional R&D effort. The list is much bigger but you get the idea. I am purposely staying away from the electrical engineering work, the stuff that's more closely associated with "true" R&D because of the broad audience here. But I can assure you it's not just a connect the dots effort. Ever designed an source synchronous interconnect interface that can only tolerate 100 pico-seconds of skew between any two signals?? It can cause more than a few sleepless nights<gggg> MEATHEAD