Intel Corp (INTC)

[alan81]

Thoughts on your points...
Regarding performance, what Intel really needs to accomplish is to be at hammer level performance when AMD gets hammer in volume. AMD is still shipping over 75% of their volume as Athlon XP, which Intel has been competitive with for a long time. Over the past six months, Intel has pushed their performance envelop well above XP levels, but not quite to hammer levels yet. The new prescott with 1066FSB, 2M l2, and steady frequency increases will surely do that, and appear to be in time for volume hammer production.

I think a key issue with DDR2 is that they have lowered the DRAM operating voltage. Since the existing DRAM process technologies were optimized for the higher DDR voltage, the DRAM is essentially "under clocked", which explains the latency issues. If/when the DRAM makers develop a process optimized for the new voltage (and not able to work with the higher voltage DDR) we should see significant improvements in latency. I see DDR2 as enabling right now, but no current benefit.

PCI-express graphics are a big disappointment. Based on earlier presentations by the video manufacturers I was expecting improved performance, but what we got was a slight drop in performance. I hope this is due to software and driver issues and that performance will improve as the vendors optimize for PCI-express. I have always said there is no hope, but we will see.

The HUGE jump in socket 775 power consumption is very interesting, and very surprising. There is a pin on socket 775 that tells the CPU it is in socket 775 rather than socket 478. I assume this turns on some of the new functionality, which is probably increasing the power draw. The fact that Intel did not announce (or perhaps really enable) this circuitry yet it is there drawing power is puzzling.

As a final note, Intel really needs to get their act together before the new big 300mm AMD factory comes on line, or they are going to lose a significant amount of market share. They do have some time, but they also need to make faster progress.
--Alan