[IP] On AMD, Apple, Intel, IBM and The Great Game of Chips
_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject: On AMD, Apple, Intel, IBM and The Great Game of Chips
Author: Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah <amaah@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 6th June 2005 9:34:30 am
http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-amd-apple-intel-ibm-and-great-game.html
I posted this 10 days ago in my internal IBM Blogcentral joint but thought it
might deserve a wider audience.
Robert Russell points to rumours of Apple to move from PowerPC to Intel. Indeed
like the question of who would be the new pope a few weeks ago, the entire
blogosphere is abuzz with prognostications. Everybody seems to be concentrating
on Apple's strategic outlook and admittedly they are the sexiest company in
technology. Intel would be grateful, Microsoft would be curious, IBM would be
unhappy but who cares about those companies, right? The Big Apple is where the
action is at, right?
The elephant in the room of all these discussions is AMD.
Intel has been falling behind under the repeated onslaught of AMD's Hammer
architecture, first with the Athlon which beat them in the race to 1 GHz, then
the Opteron favoured by white box manufacturers everywhere, the move to 64 bit
computing on the desktop (now that Windows XP 64 bit edition is out that
paradigm is legitimized even though Linux and BSD were there earlier) where
Athlon 64 rules and now in the dual core race in which they again don't have a
competitive or affordable offering. In all of these things, Intel has played
second fiddle to the fleeter AMD. They have made huge architectural mistakes
read the Pentium IV which is too big, runs too hot and doesn't perform, rushed
and recalled products. If you read ARS Technica, AnandTech or Toms Hardware
this
would be the story that enthusiasts would tell.
It is only a huge amount of payola (read the Intel Inside war chest) that has
kept people like Dell exclusively in the Intel camp. Indeed all the first tier
manufacturers have AMD in their product lines. Now all affiliate programs are
smart marketing and moral payola so don't read my words as pejorative.
Obviously
also Intel has the edge on process technology and scale which will mitigate the
fallout but they are have been shaken by the AMD onslaught. They like Microsoft
can turn on the dime and become hardcore, the problem in The Great Game of
Chips
is that you have those pesky fabs which take 18 months to a 2 years to turn
around, thus any mistake you make ties you up for a good 8 to 10 quarters which
is an eternity in Wall Street terms. In mitigation for Intel, AMD can't afford
any mistakes given their harrowing corporate history and the skepticism that
the
market's familiarity with Intel entail. However, with their Dresden fab humming
along, they've been able to have generate product at will and on time and more
importantly to control pricing: the best chips on the market always command
premium pricing with AMD had never been able to have. It doesn't hurt also that
they aren't trying to compete with their clients, the chipset manufacturers
like
Intel is so the ecosystem around their offerings is chugging along nicely.
The big bang of the web, of the data center came about because in the hardware
arena, AMD was pushing Moore's law at a furious pace to the delight of
Taiwanese
chipset manufacturers everywhere. Google's server farms in the past used mostly
Intel but I'd hazard that the reason those servers were so cheap and disposable
was the competition with the unsung AMD.
The replacement cycle for machines bought during the of the Y2K hype was a
little delayed by the bust of 2000-2001 and the current Iraq war uncertainty
but
in the next 18-24 months the hardware arena is going to be exciting. And AMD
has
product, Microsoft has even been complaisant with Windows XP 64 on the software
front, they too don't want a monopoly on the hardware front. While the dual
core
dream might be delayed, a nice dual-processor Opteron with 64 bit Linux
distribution would serve most small companies very well. If you won't deal with
PowerPC, IBM and others will sell you some happily.
[snip]
http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-amd-apple-intel-ibm-and-great-game.html
--
Koranteng
--
Koranteng's Toli: the blog edition
http://koranteng.blogspot.com/
"Just because a lizard nods its head doesn't mean it's happy."
- old Ghanaian proverb
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/