[IP] On AMD, Apple, Intel, IBM and The Great Game of Chips

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:	On AMD, Apple, Intel, IBM and The Great Game of Chips
Author:	Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah <amaah@comcast.net>
Date:		6th June 2005 9:34:30 am


http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-amd-apple-intel-ibm-and-great-game.html


I posted this 10 days ago in my internal IBM Blogcentral joint but thought it 
might deserve a wider audience.

Robert Russell points to rumours of Apple to move from PowerPC to Intel. Indeed 
like the question of who would be the new pope a few weeks ago, the entire 
blogosphere is abuzz with prognostications. Everybody seems to be concentrating 
on Apple's strategic outlook and admittedly they are the sexiest company in 
technology. Intel would be grateful, Microsoft would be curious, IBM would be 
unhappy but who cares about those companies, right? The Big Apple is where the 
action is at, right?

The elephant in the room of all these discussions is AMD.

Intel has been falling behind under the repeated onslaught of AMD's Hammer 
architecture, first with the Athlon which beat them in the race to 1 GHz, then 
the Opteron favoured by white box manufacturers everywhere, the move to 64 bit 
computing on the desktop (now that Windows XP 64 bit edition is out that 
paradigm is legitimized even though Linux and BSD were there earlier) where 
Athlon 64 rules and now in the dual core race in which they again don't have a 
competitive or affordable offering. In all of these things, Intel has played 
second fiddle to the fleeter AMD. They have made huge architectural mistakes 
read the Pentium IV which is too big, runs too hot and doesn't perform, rushed 
and recalled products. If you read ARS Technica, AnandTech or Toms Hardware this 
would be the story that enthusiasts would tell.

It is only a huge amount of payola (read the Intel Inside war chest) that has 
kept people like Dell exclusively in the Intel camp. Indeed all the first tier 
manufacturers have AMD in their product lines. Now all affiliate programs are 
smart marketing and moral payola so don't read my words as pejorative. Obviously 
also Intel has the edge on process technology and scale which will mitigate the 
fallout but they are have been shaken by the AMD onslaught. They like Microsoft 
can turn on the dime and become hardcore, the problem in The Great Game of Chips 
is that you have those pesky fabs which take 18 months to a 2 years to turn 
around, thus any mistake you make ties you up for a good 8 to 10 quarters which 
is an eternity in Wall Street terms. In mitigation for Intel, AMD can't afford 
any mistakes given their harrowing corporate history and the skepticism that the 
market's familiarity with Intel entail. However, with their Dresden fab humming 
along, they've been able to have generate product at will and on time and more 
importantly to control pricing: the best chips on the market always command 
premium pricing with AMD had never been able to have. It doesn't hurt also that 
they aren't trying to compete with their clients, the chipset manufacturers like 
Intel is so the ecosystem around their offerings is chugging along nicely.

The big bang of the web, of the data center came about because in the hardware 
arena, AMD was pushing Moore's law at a furious pace to the delight of Taiwanese 
chipset manufacturers everywhere. Google's server farms in the past used mostly 
Intel but I'd hazard that the reason those servers were so cheap and disposable 
was the competition with the unsung AMD.

The replacement cycle for machines bought during the of the Y2K hype was a 
little delayed by the bust of 2000-2001 and the current Iraq war uncertainty but 
in the next 18-24 months the hardware arena is going to be exciting. And AMD has 
product, Microsoft has even been complaisant with Windows XP 64 on the software 
front, they too don't want a monopoly on the hardware front. While the dual core 
dream might be delayed, a nice dual-processor Opteron with 64 bit Linux 
distribution would serve most small companies very well. If you won't deal with 
PowerPC, IBM and others will sell you some happily.

[snip]

http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-amd-apple-intel-ibm-and-great-game.html



-- 
Koranteng
--
Koranteng's Toli: the blog edition
http://koranteng.blogspot.com/

"Just because a lizard nods its head doesn't mean it's happy."
- old Ghanaian proverb

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