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To: rich evans who wrote (191)	10/27/1998 1:08:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10711

Rich, I read the link you provided. This is the best news I've read for the future of 3Dfx. Why do you see it as a sign of trouble? As far as I'm concerned, anything that encourages development and awareness of 3D is good for TDFX. Increased market size means a bigger piece of pie for everyone, even if TDFX's share of the increase is not as big as others. Now let me address the Intel issue because I've heard it before from many people. Intel is not interested in the graphics market, Internet market, memory market, telecom market, or any other market than its core CPU market. This is just my opinion, but I have many anecdotal evidence for it. From Intel's perspective, these are all the spices that help Intel sell more exotic food. In other words, most people are already doing their spreadsheets as fast as they need and beyond a certain point, they don't care about the CPU for surfing the net because they are limited by the modem speed and their games will play just the same, because they are bound by the memory bandwidth and graphics limitations. So for Intel to continue to grow (or even just maintain its current position) there has to be new applications that just don't work on the current set up. Enter cable modem, RDRAM, speech processing, and virtual reality to the rescue. If Intel can make these happen, then it can sell better and more expensive processors. And this is the gist of Intel's strategy. Just how much money can Intel make selling i740 at $7 or even selling 3Dfx class processors at $30, when as was pointed out in your link they can sell CPUs for $700? The current Voodoo chips from 3Dfx are CPU bound. So a case can be made that unless Intel comes up with superior processors, the consumer incentive to upgrade their Voodoo2 chips is limited. Now some people seem to think that Intel is going to integrate all the multimedia functionality into its CPUs and kill everyone. I can tell you this is not going to happen. As Peter Lynch advises, invest in what you understand. Well, my background is in VLSI design (CPUs and processors in particular). I don't claim to understand the "business" of semiconductors, but I do know that integrating the equivalent of a Voodoo chip in a CPU is a very dumb decision and Intel is not that dumb. Thanks for the link. I think I will call 3Dfx and ask them how the Katmai will affect them. Sun Tzu

To: rich evans who wrote (191)	10/27/1998 1:22:00 PM
From: MartinF	Respond to of 10711

Unless the new Katmai chip has the ability to render a game with cinematographic precision (like the holodeck in Star trek) to create absolute virtual reality, games developpers will always push the limit of 3D for entertainment purposes. I am no engineer, but until that goal is reached, I think we'll always need a video card. Contrary to sound cards, where I can see a point where we will reach a performance capable of simulating all of the human auditive reality pretty soon.