Intel Corp (INTC)

[wbmw]

Klaus, Re: First, it is clearly not an active move, but a response to Athlon64-FX.

If it is exactly brillant to offer the top-of-the-line Xeon as a gaming chip, is to be seen: You know, everybody can see now it takes everything Intel has to counter Athlon-64-performance at launch. In 32-bit. I could imagine selling Xeons will be not exactly easier from this point going forward.

You forget: Athlon 64-FX was already a response from AMD to counter Intel's higher performance P4C processors, which already have the lead against the standard A64s. AMD used their top-of-the-line Opteron as a gaming chip, since it was everything they had to counter 3.2GHz Pentium 4 performance at launch. By your logic, selling Opterons will not exactly be easier from this point going forward, but in truth, AMD choses to relinquish any premiums in the server space by selling Opteron 1xx at the same price as Athlon 64-FX. Go figure. Meanwhile, Intel still differentiates via the socket and multiprocessing capability. Clearly, benchmarks show that some apps favor dual processing far more than all the things in the P4EE. So I think the risk to Intel's server chips exists, but it's small. I also don't believe Intel will have enough P4EE volumes to satisfy the entire low end server market, so I don't think you'll be seeing OEMs creating server product lines based on them.