Any One Buying?

[cute fuzzy bunny]

To put pressure on INTC?

Ding ding ding!

Its SOP every year. Do note that many former intel managers now hold one-up positions at Dell. They're pretty chummy, which doesnt keep them from playing the game.

Jim- only problem with renting out fab space is that AMD isnt making a profit in the first place...and now they have to pay someone for manufacturing their products too?

We lose money on every sale, but make it up in the volume?

Plus AMD's track record on getting fabs built quickly and having them turn out quality product at high enough yields in their first years run is awful. Look at the Dresden miasma.

This is Intels forte. Manufacturing and reliability. Nobody can come within a country mile of them when it comes to banging together a fab and knocking out quality product from day one at the lowest cost.

Sure, the technology isnt as good right now and they're into way too many distracting things. Thats what I suspect Otellini will fix. These "problems" started 5 years ago on Barretts watch.

 

[Danny]

What about an AMD INTC merger?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

 

[Spanky]

What about an AMD INTC merger?

You will be paying more for your processor!

 

[Danny]

You will be paying more for your processor!

Yes...and INTC would love that!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Yeah, I was just about to say "and the problem with that is...".


Before you jump the gun and laugh, consider this. While you're getting far faster and far cheaper products more quickly, a long, long time ago (about 10 years and before) and in a galaxy far, far away (somewhere in the san francisco south bay), processors came with highly optimized development tools, software makers turned out reasonably well optimized code, and a lot of the hardware niceties of the processor were actually well used by the software makers.

Now, the software folks just throw a gob of code, knowing that next years processors will run it almost half as fast as the old cpu ran the last version of the OS. The special features of the processors like multimedia instructions, faster math options and so forth are very poorly used due to their multiplicity, compatibility issues and so forth.

The processor makers simply arent making enough money and dont have enough product life cycle time to have the software really ready and able to take advantage of the hardware before the product is already "old news".

So in many ways, you can blame your crappy bloatware operating systems, office suites and the like on your cheap processor.

Note that the apple folks that toot their horns over the perceived superior stability and performance of their platforms enjoyed a slow and steady release of processor platforms, speeds and capabilities with very little cpu architectural change, aside from that little 68k to powerpc fiasco.

This, like a lot of other things, bears a lot of thought...its not as simple as it looks on the surface.