Blast from the Past - July 2002

From a 2002 column I wrote -

The Judge has just declared that the Hewlett Packard/Compaq merger may proceed. It’s difficult not to think about NEC and Packard Bell at a time like this. Some of you, of course, are thinking, “Packard Bell who? Or, “When did NEC sell computers?” That’s the point. The best laid plans of mice and men –and even Carleton Forina—can sometimes go awry. It’s going to be an interesting next 12 months.

AMD’s Athlon XP 2200+ Lite (0.13micron die) has arrived. Can Intel’s 3+GHz Pentium 4 be far behind? And when will Intel release the Pentium 4 Xeon and its Hyperthreading technology to the consumer market? That’s not far-fetched. The Pentium Pro became the Pentium II so migrating a server processor to the consumer market isn’t unknown.

Found in an April 30th ZDNet news story, “Concurrently, Intel benefited from sales of chips for the Xbox, a contract both companies sought. Without Xbox, Intel's market share in terms of shipments dropped 0.8 percent to 79.8 percent while AMD's market share rose 0.7 percent to 19.2 percent, according to Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron.”

From the same news story: “"The Intel Itanium will be a failure because it doesn't obey the immutable laws of our industry," AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders said. "There are only two outcomes: 1) Dell will adopt Hammer, or 2) Intel will come out with an x86-64 (processor)." (There’s been bad blod between AMD and Dell for since forever.)

And one more from the same story (it was a good one): “In any event, Sanders said that at least Intel will not be able to tout larger megahertz numbers. With Hammer (AMD’s 32-bit/64-bit CPU) debuting at speeds of at least 2GHz, the chip will run faster than McKinley (Intel’s second generation 64-bit Itanium processor). Intel will thus be stuck trying to argue that megahertz is important in the desktop space, where it will likely be ahead, and that megahertz is not important in the server space, where it won't be.”