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Technology Stocks : IDTI - an IC Play on Growth Markets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: musea who wrote (10194)	4/13/1999 11:10:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 11555

Investment in QED is considered insignificant so it doesn't matter what happens to it. ClearLogic could eventually become significant when and if they broaden their product lines sufficiently. Centaur? I quit guessing about that one until they come through with something competitive. As I understand Centaurs "roadmap", AMD and Intel have already exceeded Centaur's plans to introduce a part that is scalable to higher clock rates. They were supposed to have something out last quarter (where have investors heard that before?) and now maybe sometime in the near future, whatever. I wouldn't hold my breath for Centaur to deliver something competitive or for IDTI to manufacture it in quantity. What pretty much destroys Centaur's plans is the fact that INtel has decided to protect their market share by greatly reducing the cost of their revamped Celeron chips. Despite what I consider a lousy choice for a name (maybe Intel purposely named it Celeron [wilted celery] because they didn't want to attract corporate America away from the Pentium name brand that sells for a much higher price. But the joke about the Celeron's performance are a thing of the past. In fact, now that Intel has incorporated the on-chip 128k cache and tweaked core, the Celeron has been rated at performance levels only 5% under those of similar clock Pentium IIs and maybe 10% under the PIII. Intel has mounted the PIII ad campaign in hopes of persuading the market that it makes sense to pay 3x as much for parts that somehow increase internet performance. Mostly that increase is just a myth because few programs are optimized to run the new PIII instructions. Intel has tried to aim the Celeron toward the consumer where AMD has taken market share while holding onto the corporate market with the gold plated Pentiums. That strategy hasn't worked as well as they would like as many corporations have evaluated the new Celeron systems and figure that they perform just fine for mainstream desktop demands. Intel's prices on the Pentium and Celeron lines, including the once unchallenged portable uPs, were dropped again this past Monday to pricing levels that is giving AMD a big headache. Another factor that existed during IDT's brief window of opportunity for successful entry is that Intel has come out with the new socket 72(?) uP socket in addition to the slot 1 architecture. The big deal about that is that motherboards are available for plastic package Celerons that cost as low as $50. That wipes out the aprox. $100 differential between a slot 1 mb and a super socket 7 mb, putting the Celeron at a price parity or even slight advantage to AMDs similar clock rate parts. What this means for Centaur is that unless they somehow can pull a rabbit out their hat that they might as well forget about mainstream markets and should stop wasting money trying to go after them. National has reportedly run into more problems than they figured in doing a SOC uP and who knows when they will have something viable. Regardless of what National comes out with, the dynamics of the marketplace have changed such that whatever it is it is unlikely to be very much of a cost savings compared to solutions already out there. I haven't stayed close to either Centaur or National's efforts.