Intel Corp (INTC)

[Nitt]

re:"Interesting Hammer Article. Good Reading."

From the article "I'm sure that you shouldn't expect much from the Hammer architecture on the desktop market - the best performance gain will be reached on the market of SMP systems. In case of desktops the advantages are the support of the x86-64, SSE2, and more efficient models. But this is enough to attract potential customers."

This quote, if it turns out to be true, should make it very scary for AMD investors. AMD cannot build a big profitable business around CPUs for the share of the server market they will take from Sun, IBM, HP, and Intel solutions. They need significant desktop volume also to help pay for the development. In addition they are at least first ship date plus a year... probably two years before IT managers and data centers would consider doing more then evaluating the AMD. In the meantime, Intel will have two more spins of Itanium and Xeon... and Sun is not planning to go away either.

64 bitness alone will not save AMD, they need applications and solutions that will sell systems.