Replies to post #52153 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

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Re: Intel relabels Itanic as "RISC"! LOL! The end is near

Wrong, Doug. IPF has always been labeled "RISC". The difference now is that Intel is labeling Xeon as "Enterprise" and "64-bit", something they had hesitated to do when they thought it would marginalize IPF. The positioning has to be this way, because when Xeon was being sold short, it opened the door for AMD to market Opteron in between Xeon and IPF (and rather than explaining the significance and brilliance of this strategy, I'll leave it to you to ponder).

Intel's ideal response is to defend their x86 market with Xeon and focus more on IPF as a RISC replacement. The way to do this is simple. If the end-user is already using x86, Intel will encourage them to buy the next version of Xeon. If they are using Power, SPARC, Precision, Alpha, or MIPS, then Intel will encourage IPF. It's a lot more clear than calling IPF "high end" and Xeon "mainstream", which makes a lot of end-users wonder what they should do if their performance requirements are greater than "mainstream", but their cost or software requirements make IPF prohibitive. (And yes, I realize that you would just buy Opteron, but I'm illustrating a point with respect to Intel's marketing response, not a blanket statement on the state of the market).