( ESNUG 323 Item 9 ) ---------------------------------------------- [7/22/99]
Subject: Thoughts On Intel 'Betting The Farm' On The IA-64 Transition
> "First CEO Speech by Paul Otellini, Exec. VP Intel. This speech was a
> not-so-vaguely disguised sales pitch for Intel IA-64 architectures and
> how it should rule the world."
From: Howard Landman <HowardL@SiTera.com>
John,
Intel has a *LOT* riding on this. It could either assure their dominance
well into the 21st century, or be the stumbling block that breaks their
hold on world PCs. Major technology transitions are tricky to pull off
smoothly. Some good examples of smoothness are Mentor (Apollo -> open
hardware), Apple (68K -> PowerPC) and Sun (68K -> Sparc). Some bad examples
are Mentor (C -> C++ "late dot oh") and Daisy (proprietary -> open hardware
killed the company -- the mutual suicide pact with Cadnetix was just icing
on the lethal cake). It'll be interesting to see how they pull it off.
The biggest risk, in my mind, is that the architecture was designed years
ago, and it's really hard to plan accurately more than a couple of years
into the future in this industry. So there may be some aspects that are a
bit "off" from the viewpoint of today's needs. For example, it may not
support the kind of intimate marriage of processor and graphics that we're
seeing in the upcoming generation of gaming platforms (like Sony's
PlayStation 2). Ask anybody making a graphics card for PCs today, and
they'll tell you their biggest problem is bandwidth to the CPU; the
overall system architecture is strangling performance, and mere CPU speed
improvement won't fix that. But Andy Grove seems aware of the system
issues, so maybe they're addressing them.
HP is also betting the farm on this one.
(Statement of possible sources of bias: I have worked for Intel and Sun,
and for Toshiba on the "Emotion Engine" of the PlayStation 2, and I own
Mentor stock.)
- Howard A. Landman
SiTera, Inc. Longmont, CO
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