Replies to post #5524 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

I understand your position, but I disagree in several respects. First, the market for RISC processors
has grown over the past few years.

This is wrong. The market for RISC based systems was ~$40B in 1997. Last year it was about $20B.
It has been more or less monotonicaly shrinking over these 5 years. Part of this is the effect of the
recession but most of it is due to the competitive effects of Xeon moving into the workstation and low
to mid range server market.

The reality, however, is that there is a multi-billion dollar market for high end solutions.

Yes. HPC alone is ~$5B.

The difference between Itanium and RISC is that Itanium is not proprietary,

Not true - try licensing IPF from Intel to build compatible processors. OTOH, the MIPS, SPARC,
ARM, and PowerPC ISAs have all been licensed to third party processor houses.

I think what you mean to say is that IPF is the first high end processor to target the server
and workstation market with a entirely merchant chip sales business mode - just like x86.
In contrast the high end RISCs are basically the house processors of their respective owners
and thus employ a vertically integrated platform business model.

The development of Itanium infrastructure extends across the industry, making it by the
very definition an "industry standard". Itanium has already demonstrated performance and
price/performance advantages over all other RISC products.

The common platform across multiple vendors factor is highly important. This allows
potential economy of scale and customer choice of vendors that the RISC world, with its
tower of Babel approach, never could achieve.

Power4 still gives Itanium 2 a run for its money, but that will once again change once
Madison launches.

Power4 is definitely the only competition in Madison's class. IBM has the wallet and CPU
and semi know how to keep it competitive for a long time. The problem is Power4 relies
on expensive system level packaging to be competitive. The PPC 970 demonstrates
what happens when this architecture is separated from mainframe class infrastructure.
Also, Power4 is one of the last vertically integrated platforms. Customers lock themselves
into IBM, for better or for worse. It should be good struggle over the next five years. :-)

[Dan3]

First, let's clear this up.

Clear what up? Itanium was on Pricewatch for months, from multiple vendors, and was its own listed category. Now it's gone.

I posted that I expected that when Itanium III came out to replace Itanium II, Itaniums would be back on pricewatch. Let's see who's right about this, it won't be long. I think that once Intel has a bug-free Itanium to ship, they'll be on pricewatch again - say, 30-90 days from now, depending on whether or not Intel manages decent yields of those enormous caches.

First, the market for RISC processors has grown over the past few years

What, you "decided" that this is how things are?
The total number of Intel-based servers shipped in the third quarter edged up 2% from the second quarter, and 14% from the same period a year ago.

However, sales of servers with RISC processors fell from 53,956 units in the second quarter to 46,180 in the third quarter.
http://www.cw360.com/Article117394.htm

and:

The change in fortunes for Intel servers was foreshadowed by U.S. server sales in the third quarter, when Gartner Dataquest said Intel server sales exceeded RISC sales. Buying patterns in the United States often spread later to the rest of the world.

Back to growth
For the first time since 2000, the server market will grow again, the report predicted, driven largely by increasing sales of Intel servers running Windows and Linux.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-965865.html

"Servers running Windows and Linux" - the mainstream server market, the commodity server market, this is the market that AMD is going after wtih the Opteron, while Intel tries to make Itanium into the next Alpha.

I think Intel has been scared by Opteron, and you will see Intel running at high speed away from their "enterprise only for the next 5 years" strategy for 64-bit computing. Trouble is, they've spent so much time focusing on "enterprise" platforms with "enterprise" costs intentionally restricted to running only "enterprise" software that it's going to be a struggle for them.