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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (27435)	12/27/1998 7:51:00 PM
From: David Rosenthal	Respond to of 70976

Tony, However, Intel distinguishes themselves from the rest with products those pretenders can't make, and they keep moving up. Currently, the 400 and 450 MHz Pentium II's (AMD has 400 but most likely at poor yield), and Xeon have no competition, hence, are not commodities by definition. Next year, Intel comes with Katmai in February, which has 70 new instructions and no direct competitor . . . This statement has been true in the past however AMD's K7 chip should compete very well in the high-end consumer. workstation and server market. Some of the interesting specs for the K7 are: 1. 200 MHZ point to point IO (as opposed to 100/130 bus for Intel). 2. An L2 cache with maximum IO speed of the CPU clock (PII is 1/2 the clock. XEON is at the clock but the cache is embedded making the product more expensive). 3. Improved floating point execution (AMD says faster than any other x86 CPU). We'll see. 4. A maximum of 9 parallel operations per clock (PII/XEON is 5). 5. 72 operation out of order execution window (PII/XEON is 40). 6. The 70 new Katmai instructions are somewhat parallel to the already released and supported 3DNOW instructions, which the K7 will support. Whether AMD will be able to deliver the spec at decent yields and clock speeds remains to be seen. However it looks very competitive. Dave

To: Tony Viola who wrote (27435)	12/28/1998 12:20:00 AM
From: Big Bucks	Respond to of 70976

Tony, Re:"Conclusion is that CPU chips are not a commodity, at least across their whole spectrum, and I didn't get even into Sun Sparc or Power PC or IBM RISC chips. " There will probably always be emphasis on the high end market with new products pushing the technology envelope, however, the main 80% of the consumer market for CPU's is nearly at the commodity point now. If you consider the cost/margins of CPU's over the last year or so, and the fact that the prices are continuing to decrease as the functionality/performance increases, it certainly seems that the majority of the CPU's sold are at/near the commodity level and will continue to move in that direction as competition for market share heats up. Just my opinion, BB