Chipguy:
Intel has that they will only get to 3.8GHz by Q1 2005. 6 months to just a 5.5% increase. A 3.7GHz at 1066MHz QDR (14 mult) will not get the big boost over 3.8GHz at 800MHZ QDR (19 mult). If we see 5%, I will be surprised. So 10% in 6 months and 15% total in 12 months going by the schedule, is not like the Athlon Williamette era. Its more like the Athlon P3 era where P3 reached the end of its increases for a year and where the next version (Banias) was a few years off. Except now they had to cancel their Tejas follow on, so its like Athlon vs P3 without the P4 available at all.
Besides the inflection point is where Intel confirmed it must follow AMD. The first time was with DDR. Next was that it had to go dual core with Itanium (it hit the roadblock sooner with a 6.6% speed up taking 15 months). Now the third strike was with AMD64. The fourth one is that due to the roadblock encountered, everything has to go dual core. AMD still has more to go with single core speed ups (17% speed up in less than a year), but it has dual core to turbo boost its marketshare. Intel has to do it to stay in the running.
The inflection also occurs in the highest GM market, server CPUs. The GMs here are in the triple digits and produce enough profits that Intel is willing to spend billions of dollars on Itnanium to stay in the game. Of course some of that had to be put back into Xeon to attempt to stave off the Opteron stampede (Intel's own words). This is a place where market share gains or losses drop readily to the bottom line. This in conjunction with workstations is where Intel makes most of its profits.
Although it can afford to lose the entire market and still be a profitable concern, its GM, earnings, stock price and reputation depend on maintaining its monopoly here. Any movement here to AMD can cement its future. Getting 30% of this market would push its CPU GMs towards the 60% Intel used to enjoy. Getting 50% of this market would put overall GMs into this range even with substantial Spansion revenues and allow AMD to earn more than $1 billion per quarter. YOu know that would shoot the stock price into outer space.
Pete
