Replies to post #26761 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

MO Intel and HP have invested around $3B in IPF to date.

Thanks for the numbers. They are helpful. I'm really just trying to determine whether or not this ultra high end market is viable, and it appears it is assuming a company can get most of the marketshare in this niche. The gradual death of high end PA-RISC, Sparc, Alpha, and MIPs over the years have made me suspect. Most of those came at the hand of low cost Xeon and now Linux. Are we sure ia-32e or AMD64 isn't going to displace some of this IPF marketshare and make the market even smaller? You cite Sparc as a target, yet Sun now has AMD64 to move their existing customers to. IPF has to be good enough to create a large enough market to make it self sustaining. I think it is going to be a challenge.

[HailMary]

IMO Intel and HP have invested around $3B in IPF to date.

Another thought. It will be a long time before another company attempts a new architecture given the price of entry. So I think it is IPF, x86, or bust for anything but embedded. Maybe over time x86 will be able to drop most of the legacy ugliness and become more useful. It is already going in the right direction. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of the extensions and evolution.

[jhalada]

chipguy,

Replacing a good portion of PA-RISC, Alpha, and SGI MIPS will bring IPF to well over 500k units per year. SPARC is a juicy target for IPF and it runs around 1m units per year.

You are assuming that the long suffering souls in the niche markets want to jump right into another niche. My opinion is that most of them want to join the mainstream and leave the pains of niche market behind.

Joe