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Crossroads for Intel
pillageplunder writes "Businessweek offers a pretty balanced read on what challenges Intel faces in the upcoming year. Rivals Samsung and AMD are making inroads on Intels core businesses, an expected cyclical industry downturn looms next year, and with several critical delays in new (for Intel) markets puts its strategy at risk. A neat read."
because it paints a major decline in the Intel empire, or because it actually has insightful commentary and information?
And yes, I didn't RTFA.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
problems at Intel, problems at Microsoft. Could it be that some companies just get too big for their own good?
Happened to other comanies, just look at US Steel, in 1918 they represented 3% of the GDP of the US, but they got too big, and eventually competetitors, both at home and abroad ate up most of that.
Monstar L
As long as Dell is almost exclusively Intel, then they ought to be just fine. It is Intel's exclusivity agreements that will sustain them in times like these, I'd wager. (Yes, I know Intel's problems aren't just in the desktop market, but I like to over-generalize).
I would like them to only release chips within a regularly defined cycle of say 500Mhz speed increases rather than release every improvement they can squeeze out of the chip. I think people would find it easier to plan and commit to a purchase this way. I think processors are fast enough now to handle the needs of the vast majority and theres not a great deal to be gained by flooding the market with differerent processor speeds and people _always_ waiting to maybe purchase the next small incremental release.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Intel has made some pretty big mistakes over the recent years, in some cases going against common sense:
...
RDRAM, Itanium, 64-bit extensions for x86, frequency as sole measure of performance,
It should be no surprise that now Intel's future is clouded. They have no one to blame but themselves.
I would like them to only release chips within a regularly defined cycle of say 500Mhz speed increases rather than release every improvement they can squeeze out of the chip. I think people would find it easier to plan and commit to a purchase this way. I think processors are fast enough now to handle the needs of the vast majority and theres not a great deal to be gained by flooding the market with differerent processor speeds and people _always_ waiting to maybe purchase the next small incremental release.
Umm, no. That wouldn't be a very good idea. The reason, in short, is price discrimination. By having a wide variety of products, they can better milk the customers. And the customers win too, since they can choose which product best matches their requirement. It's a win-win situation, so to speak.
...from customers when they are new computer shopping? Are they adding primarily new boxes to what they are already running, or are they upgrading what they have? If it's upgrading, why are they upgrading?
I'm asking the latter because it seems like computers got "good enough" for most business purposes already. But I don't *know* that, it just seems so. Is it really just because of the way business taxes are structured?
Actually, the x86 CPU architecture is still alive thanks to a company called AMD. :-)
AMD's groundbreaking Athlon CPU core is far superior to what Intel has, and the Athlon XP showed that you don't need ridiculous clock speeds to get superior overall CPU performance, thanks to the the combination of the very efficient Athlon CPU core and generous on-die L1/L2 CPU memory caches. AMD's decision to put the memory controller onto the CPU die with the Opteron/Athlon 64 CPU's also demonstrates how to get superior CPU performance without running high CPU clock speeds like Intel needs to do with the Pentium 4 CPU's.
Remember when Intel followed AMD's 5 - 10 year chip naming using a number to identify the chip rather than using the raw MHZ speed? Yes, that was this year. Yes, that was Intel realizing that it ain't about how big it is, it's how you use it.
And AMD has been my choice, as well as my companies choice, since 95. For almost 10 years AMD has been the cheaper, faster alternative, duplicating everything the Pentium has done and recently defeating it in most speed tests, forcing Intel to panic by releasing "Super Extreme Hyper-Upper-Cut" editions of thier Pentium four just to MEET the already released AMD 64 bit chips running on 32 bit technology.
Thusly, it isn't that AMD (and Samsung??) is making inroads - they're in the lead, and Intel has been panicking for years.