Intel Corp (INTC)

[Nitt]

re:"One new outstanding part per year seems to be Intel's cadence with Itanium. In no time at all, it should easily tower over any other competitive part"

I think this is key to Intel's strategy to win the entire segment. They made a part with the features and functions needed in the segment, they and their partners spend a bunch on building the base of solutions, and now Intel turns on the afterburners with their process technology and lets Moore's law lead to a doubling of performance every 18 mos. The "boutique" architectures like Spark and Power will be hard pressed to compete. The price tag for a competing architecture goes up every day. Intel is moving both up and down with this architecture in the future. They are going to continue to move up with the 32bit line and they will probably add 32 bit extensions at some point… unless they are able to establish IA-64 as the standard and just bring it down to the masses through silicon scaling.

Sun may choose to not give in due to ego alone, but that would lead to their end. IBM will take it and lead with it; their money is in services anyway.

I don't care what Gartner said about market share in 2007, if Intel keeps its foot on the gas, there is no choice for the system houses and the IT shops.

Nitt