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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (77335)	3/27/1999 7:06:00 AM
From: Burt Masnick	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria - Every company routinely paints subjective information in a favorable light. The line stops when what they say is patently false, the financial numbers are plain wrong and misleading or material facts are blatently misrepresented. Unfortunately, other than for financial results, the standards are subjective. Intel bigots (I am one) will view the same information as AMD bigots (can we think of any?)and arrive at vastly different conclusions. IMHO, you have a teensy tendency to take virtually every announcement from Intel and rip into it as a crystal clear sign that Intel is: a) wrong b) prevaricating c) stupid d) evil e) dangerous f) remarkably incompetant That is your right. That function on the AMD thread used to be taken by Fuchi, AlbertK, Martin AB and others. You appear to be the current vigorous AMD supporter. Within a year, it will be clear whether this is a shrewd stance or not. All I can say is that in the 3 years I have been reading the threads, the AMD supporter tune has been consistent and wrong (again IMHO). Unless you were a nimble trader, an investment (buy and hold) in AMD has been a losing proposition. In the future, all they have to do, again IMHO, is perform very considerably above their track record, make no tragic mistakes and get their financial house in order before they run out of options. My personal guess is that they won't end 1998 as an independent company. But hey, that might turn out to be a windfall for AMD investors. And it might turn out to be a serious headache for Intel, depending on the buyer. In the interests of truth in advertising, I have invested in Intel (starting my purchases in 1982 or so) and it has been very rewarding for me to date. Very. Haven't sold yet. If I had listened at any point in the past three years to the AMD supporters I would have missed out on substantial gains. Although even a stopped clock is right twice a day, I believe that a substantial record of wrong advice is not necessarily an indicator that todays advice from the same source is sound, correct or well reasoned. But I will admit that AMD has potential. Good investing, Burt

To: Scumbria who wrote (77335)	3/27/1999 8:50:00 PM
From: Diamond Jim	Respond to of 186894

News March 27, 00:22 Eastern Time Mar. 26, 1999 (Electronic Buyers News - CMP via COMTEX) -- In the mid-1990s, Intel decided that since it provided the star microprocessor on the PC stage, it might as well provide the supporting cast. In a short time, the company began producing the lion's share of PC chipsets. Last year, Intel's PC chipset sales hit $1.26 billion, up slightly in a market that declined to $1.7 billion from 1997's $2.3 billion, according to Semico Research Corp., Phoenix. Intel's huge market share leaves little room for other players. Only Acer, Via, and SIS are visible as other actors on the PC chipset stage, with combined 1998 sales of about $300 million. Several major trends govern what's currently available on PC chipsets, and what can be expected in the near future, according to Semico. One is Intel's support for the Direct Rambus DRAM architecture for high-end desktops. Traditional DRAM architectures have moved data over a wide bus at a relatively slow rate, but Direct RDRAM pumps out data at an extremely high rate over a narrow bus. This reduces pin count but creates more design complexity. Another development is the integration of graphics functions onto the chipset. CAD and high-performance gaming applications require a separate 3D graphics accelerator board, but most businesses and home users don't require 3D graphics, outside of multimedia presentations. Merging what has been a separate graphics chip into the chipset efficiently reduces chip count and design complexity to meet the vast majority of PC users' needs. Similarly, audio functions will be absorbed into chipsets. Intel has already released several specifications on how digital and analog components in the audio domain will be divided within chipset circuitry. As 56-Kbit/s modems emerged, their digital functions were transferred to the host MPU, but Intel's new modem structure easily allows migration of those functions to the chipset. Keen interest in new, higher-performance bus architectures stems from concerns about the number of pins on chipsets. Integrating more functions on chipsets puts a premium on achieving an optimum pin count for the number of functions while still meeting die size, package, performance, and cost objectives. Given the number of MPUs being introduced or developed by Intel and its competitors, chipset suppliers, including Intel itself, need to weigh design options carefully, according to Sunil Kumar, chipset marketing manager at Intel's Platform Components Division, Folsom, Calif. For example, the PC market is dividing more sharply between low-cost, mainstream, and higher-performance systems, with a number of permutations within each segment. The "one-approach-fits-all" philosophy won't work any longer, because the requirements for each segment are diverging, according to Kumar. Yet there has to be enough volume emanating from each segment for a chipset supplier to consider supporting separate architectures for each, he said. Another design issue: Motherboards containing chipsets must be consistent and stable, but must simultaneously possess the "headroom" to support two to three generations of MPUs with different frequencies over a board's 12 to 18 months of life, Kumar explained. But as chipset makers move to new technologies, implementation costs go up. At the same time, platform costs are coming down, leaving chipset suppliers with the problem of deciding how to achieve a balance between cost and performance while meeting customers' applications requirements, he said