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To: Richard Habib who wrote (18572)	9/27/1998 11:25:00 PM
From: HerbVic	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213184

True, but National Semiconductor is an Intel lackey. (ref: C/Net - IBM forced out of Intel chip market, "National has one of the oldest and most extensive cross-license agreements with Intel in the industry.") >>In short their is absolutely no evidence that IBM >>intends to sacrifice any of it's Wintel product line >>from PCs up to servers and add PPC Mac based products. OK. You don't expect IBM to pull out of the low end consumer PC market. I think that the change in the Cyrix deal changes the cost structure on low end PCs for IBM and will probably result in consolidation of their consumer product line. There should be a number of companies dropping consumer PCs over the next six months, and it's reasonable that IBM would, given that the low end PC market is not going their way anyhow. The other item I mentioned, the concept of IBM offering a Power PC product that was OS independent, was not intended to be viewed as causally related to the Cyrix deal, but was mere speculation in light of the broader industry picture. I don't necessarily think that IBM is making a Power PC chip that will emulate a Pentium II as a mode switchable added feature set. But, it is within reason that they could. If IBM was working on something like that, it would be top secret until it was ready for release. Should such a chip be designed and brought to market, IBM would be in the "cat-bird-seat" position of having a processor line that they could use to continue their Windows based consumer products in competition with Intel without depending on Intel. It would also run the standard Mac OS and future Mac OS's, so that IBM could broaden production in order to sell the processor to Apple. Since it would run any OS that would run on Power PC or Pentium, it would solve MIS's [hardware to OS tie] purchasing problem. I say all this because, although I don't know what IBM is really up to, I suspect that 1999 is going to bring something from the company that is going to sweep the industry off its "great expectations." Something that will eclipse even the copper/SOI development. Something that Apple is already privy to. HerbVic _____________ Herb, Cyrix is not being absorbed by Intel but by National Semiconductor. Cyrix is a competitor to Intel - but not a very successful one as of yet.