Replies to post #116676 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

Intel's very lucrative Xeon business is a giant target and competitors can attack some holes in the roadmap.

And it took 18 years of considerable investment and consistent
execution and about a dozen generations of products, each building
on the lessons of the last, to achieve the position Intel has today -
taking about 2 out every 3 dollars spent on server hardware today.

Competitors can scheme and dream all they want but customers
are very conservative. It will take hundreds of millions of dollars
and multiple product generations to get even a toe hold. Intel won't
be standing still either. It appears to be setting up what some might
call a defense-in-depth with new Atom products being the first line.

Then there the benefits of incumbency - server software targets x86
first and increasingly nothing second.

[wbmw]

Samsung pretty much hired the entire AMD Bobcat team in-tact in Austin.

Is that so? Didn't realize AMD had already started harvesting vital organs. I thought Bobcat/Jaguar were a critical piece to AMD's strategy going forward. In my opinion, it was the best chance they had to develop a power efficient x86 core going forward. The Bulldozer lineage has very limited opportunity in my mind, as the entire PC business starts shifting to lower power - and if AMD bet on Bulldozer over Bobcat, then they made the wrong call.

Intel's very lucrative Xeon business is a giant target and competitors can attack some holes in the roadmap.

Sure it is, but Intel also seems to be doing a great job in keeping the beachheads firmly closed. If there was ever a micro-server play that Intel could be attacked, they've already serviced that gap with a series of server-tuned Atom processors. Good luck to Samsung, et al, who think it's actually up for grabs.