George said:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Robert Myers wrote:
As to analysts, the sales forecasts having been so useless in the
past, why would anyone take to believing them now?
Comedic relief?
[dropped comp.sys.intel so I don't get pulled over by the OT police]
I think analyst's estimates are a form of intellectual reinsurance
("Well, of course it's BS, but what else do you want me to rely on--my
own BS? My dart board?").
Who is that talking in quotes though?
... the corporate system buyer?...
the stock speculator?... the system mfr? Intel has certainly gotten a lot
of mileage, PR-wise out of the wild forecasts by analysts... and there's
never a day of final reckoning where facts have to be faced down and denied
or accepted. Nobody ever says: "**** IDC - they're useless... ignore
them". Conspiracy?... err, I hope not!
I don't think you need a conspiracy. Why would an analyst with no
working engineers or scientists want to try to outguess Intel? And
there is the fact that, aside from being an investment vehicle itself,
Intel is an investor, and, like all investors, likes to be told what it
wants to hear.
As to who would buy analyst projections, I'd think that just about
anybody who needed to plug a related number into a spreadsheet and had
to be able to defend it would be a potential customer. Everybody in the
business has to be (or should be) wondering where the center of gravity
of the industry is headed. If the analysts really did know, their
predictions would be extremely valuable, I would think. They don't
really know, but a guess based on accepted methodology is much better,
or at least safer, than nothing. I thought you were in OR. Your stuff
works better? ;-).
Without inside knowledge it's hard to be sure but IBM has tremendous depth
and scope for using their designs across a range of internal developments
as well as selling merchant chips in several derivative forms...
sustainable?... I dunno...
IBM sold its Power 440 IP and I gather its commitment to being a
supplier to Apple is less than certain. IBM did form the Systems and
Technology Group, apparently giving up on the idea that Microelectronics
could stand on its own profitability. That signals a commitment to
Power and allows them to hide just how much Power is really costing
them. The subtext, though, is that Power, on its own, is never going to
be a money-maker. How long will IBM be willing or able to tough it out?
Right now, the evidence is that IBM has made the right choice and HPaq
the wrong choice. Over the long run? I still think a proprietary chip
is running against the tide. Only time will tell.
... but I think I have at least as good an idea as
any err, analyst. When something like Alpha can turn rotten, anything can
happen.
I'm amazed at the bandwidth that has been consumed on Alpha without much
of anybody facing up to what happened there: the chip was too expensive
to be a merchant chip and the software base never fully materialized.
Where is Windows on Power, anyway?
So will we end up with just x86-64 and ARM as *the* computer
architectures to choose from?
Aside from the embedded market, maybe.
The problem (as always, from my limited perspective) is that none of the
revolutions in microprocessor design have really been revolutions in the
sense that they answered questions there was a big payoff for anwering.
Intel thought IA64 was a revolution that answered an important
question (how to get significant parallelism without recoding
everything), but other architectures have been just about as successful
(or unsuccessful) in achieving the same goal.
It's not as if there were no important questions worth asking--latency
tolerance, moving data around as the virtual real estate gets larger,
and, of course, power consumption--come to mind, but the demand drivers
just aren't big enough to drive a real revolution. Maybe if (say)
google succeeds in its plans for world domination and needs a real low
power revolution the way HPC needs a low power revolution.
What will the Chinese do?... do they
matter?<shrug>
Of course they matter, but not soon enough for any but the most foolish
to speculate how.
RM
