Re: Portents of Itanium death

From: JF Mezei (jfmezei_at_istop.com)
Date: 06/10/03 

Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 17:17:35 -0400

Fred Kleinsorge wrote:
> Well, it's possible. We will see won't we. I'm waiting for a true top tier
> company to announce a major comittment to it.

Are there top tiers who have made public announcements that they are buying
chips from AMD ? Does Dell make any wintels based on AMD chips or is it an
all-intel shop ?

Will AMD make a huge splash and significantly erode Intel's dominance
overnight ? Perhaps not. But if AMD's wintel products are competitive with
those of Intel for the wintel market, then it doesn't matter if the chip is 64
bit or 32 bits, at least initally.

If the new breed of AMD chips have significant performance (and cost)
advantage over Intel's wintel products, some of the top tier makers will start
to make some of their machines with it. If AMD maintains a consistent
performance and price advantage over Intel and manages to get good press about
the quality/performance of its chips, then wintel makers won't feel compelled
to build with the "intel inside" sticker on their PCs, something they do
because of Intel advertising giving the general public the impression that
Intel is better.

AMD doesn't need to make major breakthrough in the enterprise server market
for its chip to be succesful. Once it has proven itself in the wintel market,
especially with regards to compatibility, perhaps it can then grow into
enterprise segment.

I think that AMD is more likely to displace wintel server sales compared to
IA64 server sales initially. IA64 servers are proprietary/specialised and
won't be very popular in the "industry standard" segment where AMD can play
much of its game.

The danger is that if AMD slowly builds its image, by the time Intel wakes up,
it may have already given AMD a lot of ground. And that would be a good thing
because monopolies are rarely good things.

> Win64 isn't needed for Word, or Excel. I don't think a faster CPU will
> speed Solitaire. You need a killer app that will make it interesting.

In case you haven't noticed, today's "solitaire" games are 3D rendered
sophisticated gamesthat eat up a lot of CPU and will take any internet
bandwidth they are given. They are quite likely to be the first consumer grade
to adopt 64 bit.

On the more serious side, it will be interesting to see whether movie studios
and special effects firms adopt the AMD chip. I know that Intel has
succesfully bribed one outfit to try IA64 (and thsi was done before a
palatable IA64 was available, so it was clearly a PR ploy). But it remains to
be seen if they stick with that IA64 thing or if they switch to a cheaper AMD
that has equal or better performance.

> Opteron reminds me of the DEC/Alpha mentality - if we build it they will
> come. It's nice technology - but is it fast enough and cheap enough that
> people will abandon IA32 for it? Or abandon Sun/HP/IBM for it?

1- AMD's chip doesn't require people abandon the 8086 because it is the same
architecture and can be used in place of an intel 8086 in 32 bit mode. The
only question is whether AMD will be priced competively or not.

2-AMD won't cripple its chip, or charge premium for it etc to prevent it from
competing against the 8086, as was the case for Alpha. Since it is an 8086
competing head to head against Intel's 32 bit 8086, and trying to compete
against the IA64, AMD has every reason to market the chip, price it to compete
head to head and grow its sales as much as it can.

Whether it will success or not is another question.

> IPF is way early in it's lifetime to either judge it's success or failure.

Considering that it is almost 10 years old, the "early in its lifetime" is an
interesting point of view. How old will the chip have to be before you start
saying "OK, we've waited long enough, promises that the next iteration will be
very impressive are no longer credible" ?????

We keep being told how great IA64 *will* be. But that usually means that
today, the chip is crap and not a success. The day they announced the murder
of Alpha, it was TODAY that counted, not some time in the future.

Had they waited for IA64 to prove its worth before shooting Alpha in the head,
then we could have judged IA64 more objectively because we could compare
apples to apples. But you want us to compare existing technology (Alpha) with
some future iteration of IA64. Sorry, but that doesn't work anymore, not when
one has no confidence in a vendor such as Compaq/HP who screwed its VMS
customers already.

> 64-bit manufacturers obviously want it to fail. But it is plugging ahead,
> getting faster, and picking up support from a lot of players.

Is Dell "supportinG" IA64, or was it just coerced into building at least one
IA64 based box ? How will it compete ion a price basis with 8086 based servers
sold by Dell ? Will there be a price premium for it ? If so, then it just
won't sell much.

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