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#1
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Intel: The chipset is the product
Robert Myers wrote:
The _other_ company sells performance. We sell dreams. :-). My, oh my. Are we in a trolling mood or what! :-) |
#2
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Grumble wrote:
Robert Myers wrote: The _other_ company sells performance. We sell dreams. :-). My, oh my. Are we in a trolling mood or what! :-) The implication being that selling dreams over performance is a bad thing? I don't happen to think it is. Intel's Chief Architect of the P4 era says that he warned Intel management that the NetBurst architecture had bought them some breathing room--a few years at most. The players in the Intel architecture mini-drama seem to an outsider as if they might be stubbornly goal-oriented, but they don't, any of them, seem inept. Intel sometimes seems to act as if it could rearrange virtually anything, including physics, to suit its market objectives. Anybody knows that, in a showdown between physics and marketing, physics wins. Except if you're Intel, apparently. :-). Over the long haul, if people really need performance, and Intel can't deliver it, Intel is in trouble. On the short haul, it would be difficult and dangerous for Intel to try to persuade people that it is silly for them to focus on performance differences they will never notice. In a year or two, Intel might be right back where it was with P4, trying to convince them that a 2.4GHz CPU was faster than a 1.7Ghz CPU in a way that justified an upgrade. Right now, though, Intel needs to get its customers to think about something other than single-threaded performance without engaging in tedious and dangerous explanations. Intel has big architectural changes in mind: offloading significant pieces of work, like network processing, from the main CPU. If Intel were giving advice in "The Graduate," it would be whispering "Multi-threading." Intel has the clout to make a major change in programming style like that stick, but even Intel can't make it happen overnight. In the short haul, Intel has to concede single-threaded performance to AMD and to get its customers to think about something else. It looks to me as if they understood exactly what they need to do, and they are doing it. Eventually, Intel will be back to selling performance, but the kind of performance it will have to sell is going to require significant customer education. The consumer CPU business may repeat the mistake of HPC and try to force a vector quantity (usable performance) into a nearly meaningless scalar (linpack, top 500, etc.), but I can hope not. With any luck, Intel will be able to move the focus off single-threaded performance and things that look like stand-ins for single-threaded performance onto more sophisticated measures of value. Sophistication in measuring value is great conversation for hardware groups on Usenet, but when you're trying to make a sale, you don't want the party reaching for his or her credit card to be thinking about complexity. In such a circumstance, dreams are the preferred commodity to be offering for sale. RM |
#3
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On Wed, 26 May 2004 00:21:32 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote: What do you do when you're having competitive problems with your main product and there is no guaranteed relief in sight? You change the subject. At least, that's what I infer Intel to be doing with Grantsdale: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...h/news/2591485 Hmm, Centrino for the desktop? All they need is a name for the "package" now. Any guesses... anybody? Where do they get this stuff: "Because the chip set incorporates features like Dolby audio and advanced 3-D video previously found only in add-on cards..."? Wot a loada BULL****! Intel plays catch-up and a buncha anal...ysts drop their drawers in public!!! How embarrassing. Rgds, George Macdonald "Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me?? |
#4
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Robert Myers wrote:
What do you do when you're having competitive problems with your main product and there is no guaranteed relief in sight? You change the subject. At least, that's what I infer Intel to be doing with Grantsdale: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...h/news/2591485 They've already had experience hyping a chipset, otherwise known as Centrino. They'll have to come up with a slick moniker for Grantsdale too. I wonder if they're going to do like in the Centrino campaign, start emphasizing the whole processor/chipset combo? They certainly can't hype the Pentium 4 Prescott as it now stands -- it's a big embarrassment for them. Perhaps with a re-emphasis on a chipset combo, rather than a processor, they can easily take people's focus off of the actual processor and slip the old processor away (Prescott), and replace it with a new processor (Dothan) without people noticing? Prestidigitation. Yousuf Khan |
#5
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George Macdonald wrote:
On Wed, 26 May 2004 00:21:32 GMT, Robert Myers wrote: What do you do when you're having competitive problems with your main product and there is no guaranteed relief in sight? You change the subject. At least, that's what I infer Intel to be doing with Grantsdale: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...h/news/2591485 Hmm, Centrino for the desktop? All they need is a name for the "package" now. Any guesses... anybody? Since picking a brand name is a big deal these days (there are IP issues with practically any name you can think of), and since there is so little time, one suspects that Intel is going to have to do without. If this weren't a hurry-up job, they'd have a brand name ready and we'd have been exposed to it dozens of times by now. Think of the marketing barrage that preceded Centrino. Where do they get this stuff: "Because the chip set incorporates features like Dolby audio and advanced 3-D video previously found only in add-on cards..."? They get it from the press release, one gathers. I haven't yet found the culpable press release on Intel's site, though. Wot a loada BULL****! Intel plays catch-up and a buncha anal...ysts drop their drawers in public!!! How embarrassing. You worry me sometimes. Can't you just relax and enjoy the show? :-). RM |
#6
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Robert Myers wrote:
The features in Grantsdale also could help persuade shoppers to seek out Intel-based computers, said Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson. That may also steer shoppers away from PCs built with chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.. Not to appear to defend a bunch of marketing BS, but some of us do shop the chipset, obviously. Intel chipsets are the reason I've always been an Intel customer. In fact, lately I've been buying Intel-branded motherboards, confident in their quality, and confident that if/when I install Linux on them, they'll be completely supported. (I'm responsible for quite a number of computers at home and work.) I just haven't seen a need to look elsewhere, recently. It's not like I'd actually notice the 10% improvement in performance that I'd get by going with AMD and a brand-X chipset (given equal dollars). Looking forward, it appears that Intel may be in trouble with the lame Prescott going against the superb Athlon 64, and I could live with an Nvidia chipset... I'll cross that bridge when I'm next in the market for a home machine. No flames, please, we're all entitled to our opinions. |
#7
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chrisv wrote:
Robert Myers wrote: The features in Grantsdale also could help persuade shoppers to seek out Intel-based computers, said Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson. That may also steer shoppers away from PCs built with chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.. Not to appear to defend a bunch of marketing BS, but some of us do shop the chipset, obviously. Intel chipsets are the reason I've always been an Intel customer. In fact, lately I've been buying Intel-branded motherboards, confident in their quality, and confident that if/when I install Linux on them, they'll be completely supported. (I'm responsible for quite a number of computers at home and work.) I just haven't seen a need to look elsewhere, recently. It's not like I'd actually notice the 10% improvement in performance that I'd get by going with AMD and a brand-X chipset (given equal dollars). Looking forward, it appears that Intel may be in trouble with the lame Prescott going against the superb Athlon 64, and I could live with an Nvidia chipset... I'll cross that bridge when I'm next in the market for a home machine. No flames, please, we're all entitled to our opinions. Why flame everyday good sense? Who could argue that Prescott is not a disappointment or that the chipset is not an important part of a purchase decision for a knowledgeable buyer? If you look at what Intel is doing as purely a marketing ploy, it's fairly transparent and easy to make fun of. If the market for PC-type processors were mature (and some people do think it is), we should be preparing for a future of Coke vs. Pepsi and Hertz vs. Avis marketing campaigns. As I read the signs and portents coming from both Intel and IBM, though, the technology should not be taken to be mature and the market could be headed for chaos. In particular, the von Neumann architecture is a technological dead end as far as increasing the power of microprocessors is concerned. It's a dead end because, while there may be a few more doublings left in Moore's law, the von Neumann architecture is already having trouble making good use of the available transistors for a number of reasons: heat, leakage, and the inevitable triumph of wire delay come to mind first. If Intel wants buyers to think about upgrading for more power, it is going to have to get buyers to think about something more complex than a more powerful single-threaded x86 processor. It's not a problem Intel is facing by itself. IBM, on whom AMD is reliant at the moment for process technology, is having problems with scaling, too. It is hard to imagine that AMD is not going to run into the same brick wall as Intel, albeit more slowly because AMD did not make the self-destructive choice that Intel did: to get to a faster clock at all costs. If the von Neumann architecture is running out of steam, and if entertainment is the future, then the future of x86 for "personal" computing has to be threatened, too. In a universe of wild imagining, maybe Sony/Toshiba/IBM, not AMD, is the real threat to Intel's dominance. Not likely, but Intel would have its work cut out for it in the "personal" computing business even without AMD: either people are going to lose interest, the business will become a true commodity dominated by the likes of VIA and Red Dragon, or Intel has to come up with something to match the hype of a Cell because that's how much razzle dazzle it will require to keep Intel in the style to which it has become accustomed. No two ways about it, the disappointing performance of Prescott matched against the technological success of AMD/IBM have forced Intel to scramble, but it's a reasonable guess that Intel has actually known for a while in what direction it was going to scramble when forced. The fact that Intel didn't take the future they've been hinting about seriously enough to come up with a more mature marketing campaign does suggest a certain level of denial at the highest levels of Intel management, though. ;-). RM |
#8
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On Thu, 27 May 2004 04:57:21 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote: They've already had experience hyping a chipset, otherwise known as Centrino. They'll have to come up with a slick moniker for Grantsdale too. I wonder if they're going to do like in the Centrino campaign, start emphasizing the whole processor/chipset combo? There's been a tendency to capitalize on existing successful branding campaigns - look at the life of the Pentium name, which was originally just a replacement for '586. That would argue for the possibility of names such as Centrino-D (for desktop), Centrino II, and such. One thing the marketeers are aware of is the risk of confusing your non-technical customers with too many name brands. You want them to go "Oh, sure. Centrino. That's good, right? And Centrino II must be better!" Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer |
#9
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chrisv wrote:
I just haven't seen a need to look elsewhere, recently. It's not like I'd actually notice the 10% improvement in performance that I'd get by going with AMD and a brand-X chipset (given equal dollars). Looking forward, it appears that Intel may be in trouble with the lame Prescott going against the superb Athlon 64, and I could live with an Nvidia chipset... I'll cross that bridge when I'm next in the market for a home machine. As they say, if you don't try any other products other than the ones you're comfortable with, then how are you ever going to know the quality of the competing products? Yousuf Khan |
#10
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Robert Myers wrote:
As I read the signs and portents coming from both Intel and IBM, though, the technology should not be taken to be mature and the market could be headed for chaos. Why because they're having trouble getting good power consumption out of their 90nm processes? What relevance has that got with whether the technology is mature or not? The technology itself is mature because it's been around forever. Nobody cares how it's made though. In particular, the von Neumann architecture is a technological dead end Wow, I'm not even touching that. Where'd that come from? No two ways about it, the disappointing performance of Prescott matched against the technological success of AMD/IBM have forced Intel to scramble, but it's a reasonable guess that Intel has actually known for a while in what direction it was going to scramble when forced. The fact that Intel didn't take the future they've been hinting about seriously enough to come up with a more mature marketing campaign does suggest a certain level of denial at the highest levels of Intel management, though. ;-). I'm sure the scenarios have been played out within Intel for some time. Knowing about all of the possible scenarios is one thing, but knowing exactly which scenario is going to play out is to become god. Yousuf Khan |
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