you...
What makes you think Nehalem will only be out in 2009, I understand Intel will now have to main and separate design teams so there is a good chance Nehalem will be ready way before 2009, the Nehalem team will have something to prove as many where involved in netburst, the mostly Israli NGA team will be riding high for the next two years, competition even within an organization is a good thing.
Me...
Well, that's one way to look at things. From my point of view, one of the things most damning is that INTC basically had to go outside the company, to Israel, to find a solution to its' P4/netburst mess. To me this is a perfect indication of just how inbreed and stagnant the thinking at INTC has become thanks in no little part to HIH.
Long gone are the adversarial team days under Andy when new ideas flourished. Pretty much I credit that to current INTC management not having a clue as to how Andy used to pull it off, though I never like that management style.
Thought at INTC seems to have become so inbreed that I doubt there will be much original thinking in any solutions the U.S. based teams come up with. Of course the Israelis are so far removed from INTC that they haven't been contaminated by INTC speak yet, so maybe they will again save INTC's butt? Anyway, it seems like a big expense for little gain, but then that's the way things have always been done at INTC. Namely, the overridding philosophy is that all problems bend to enough money and people tossed at a solution.
Have you ever wondered how AMD is able to kick INTC's design ass with 1/5th the R&D budget? Could it be that AMD spends their limited funds more efficiently?
Which gets us to NGA. I'm extremely interested in that product, as it will shed a lot of light on how effective INTC currently is in designing new products. If it turns out that most of the advantage comes from more cache I think you can pretty much write off INTC as a threat to AMD. To me it seems that for the last 5 years or so INTC has been taking half-steps while AMD has been taking 3/4 steps. What I need to find out is whether NGA is just a temporary catch up or whether it represents something more significant. Despite all the contrived reviews so far there’s still a strong odor of dead fish
