Intel's monopoly brittle and cracking

A BAD DAY to be in marketing.

In this race, look who keeps falling down:

Intel, hoping to steal AMD's Opteron thunder, days before the Opteron release, produce a great new workstation chipset.

But the Processor contains a flaw...

This is typical of Intel when faced with competition. They push to get products out early and fall down every time.

AMD had a 233mmx processor, Intel had a 200mmx processor. Intel's push to get the PII released on it's proprietary slot prevented them from finding the floating point bug.

AMD had the Athlon, 50mhz faster than the PIII, at a better price. Intel needed a fast, low priced version of the i820 chipset that used SDRAM instead of RDRAM. The Memory Translator Hub had a flaw and 3,000,000 motherboards were recalled.

AMD was pushing 1.2 GHZ, Intel over clocked the 1 Ghz PIII to 1.13 Ghz but had to recall them a month later. This was a beautiful example of a paper launch, because the recall affected less than 200 customers.

With the failure of the 1.13 Ghz PIII, The Pentium 4 was pushed to early release. The processor was available for 6 weeks before any motherboards were released. Although no buggy chipsets made it to market, the delay was widely reported to be due to a flaw in the chipset.

Competition with Nvidia's dual channel nForce2 for AMD forced Intel to produce a dual channel chipset of their own, Granite bay. Granite bay was released for the holiday rush as an interim solution while waiting for Canterwood. Granite bay has a flawed AGP implementation, but no recall was offered. If you want Dual Channel with AGP 8x, you buy an Nforce2 or wait until Canterwood.

Well, Canterwood is here as a high end workstation chipset along with the 3.0 Ghz 800mhz fsb Pentium 4, and it arrived in typical Intel style, flawed. Interestingly, despite Intel halting shipments to the channel, the channel is full of 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4s. What happens to the customers that jump on it now? Do they get a replacement or is this another case of Granite bay style buyer beware? It is interesting that Canterwood is positioned as a workstation chipset. A typical product release would cover the complete market range from budget to high end solutions. Especially considering that Springdale is the same chip sans memory bypass. In retrospect, June would have been a better launch date for both chipsets from a technical standpoint since it is certainly not ready now. Perhaps Serverworks' workstation chipset for Opteron got Intel a little spooked. Marketing calling the shots instead of the engineers?

But Intel machines are much more stable than AMD machines right? Obviously not. The only good Intel chipset in recent memory is the E7501, which apparently only served to upset their previously exclusive partner, Serverworks.

But they run cooler right?

68w maximum for a Barton cored Athlon. 74w average for the 3.06 Pentium 4

But Intel is compatible with more software, right?

Yeah, sure, just take a look at Intel's list of games incompatible with another one of Intel's buggy chipsets, The 845GL. Extreme Graphics. Yeah, extremely bad graphics!

But Intel has Hyperthreading!

1 x 3.06 Pentium 4 costs $468 2 x AthlonMP 2600s cost $426

Why buy one processor that is pretending to be two processors when you can get two actual processors for less money?

But Intel has SSE2. That exclusive advantage will be gone on the 22 of April.

But, but, but. No, No, No.

Intel's monopoly has proven to be quite brittle, cracking under the slightest competitive pressure. I do not trust their technical prowess when they are under pressure because it has become so obvious that their marketing department is making technical decisions. Processors and chipsets are not like software that can be released as a working beta and patched later. Systems established in the gaming world, where the publishers call the shots and the developers jump, do not work in chip fabrication. It has to be released when it's done, not when the marketing department decides they need to sting the competition.

All this is made worse by what Intel does to the market as a whole, when they are not doing well. Intel's missteps have had a tremendous impact on the industry, destroying consumer and investor confidence. At the end of 2000, Craig Barret warned "This was a year of record annual revenue and earnings yet, slowing economic conditions impacted fourth quarter growth and are causing near-term uncertainty." He was faced with AMD going from 10% market share to 34% market share in a year. Wall street took Barret's word, as gospel, that the entire market was in decline and not just Intel's market share. Intel is a market bellwether so the market did drop, just so Intel would not have to admit that their missteps and AMD's superb execution allowed AMD to grab market share. Nasty business. Intel has a sub-standard product and they are reckless with their power.

The market is now better, all things considered, having for the most part recovered from Craig's fraudulent statement. Everyone but AMD is posting profits again, that due mostly to Intel spending down their 10 Billion dollar cash reserve they acquired by lying to their customers and producing junk silicon. 10 Billion dollars buys plenty of predatory pricing. AMD will be fine. The industry has rallied, like it never has before, around Opteron. The future is bright with crazy fast, low priced computers, but only as long as we have two robust competitors in the processor segment. As much as I want Opteron and Athlon 64 to succeed, I would not want x86-64 to be a knockout punch for Intel's glass jaw. AMD might play nice for a while but it would not be long before the prices on their top processors climb into the thousand dollar plus range like Intel's were at the height of their monopoly. It is good to know that Intel has yamhill or *asdf waiting in the wings to insure that when x86-64 is in it's prime, Intel might have a more competent response than they have historically shown.

Jason Pippin

So Intel screwed up on the 800MHz P4? Big deal. They've screwed up before and they'll do it again. What really pisses me off is the sheer bloody arrogance of a PR department that lies to the Press. Denying that there were any issues with the new chip is either down to someone in the UK press office making it up as they go along - and getting it badly wrong - in which case they should be fired, or down to some PR droid in the US issuing a positioning statement for him/her to read - in which case they should be fired.

I have only one thing to say to a company that claims to be open and honest in its dealings with customers and journos - FDIV.

Name and email address supplied

Re Canterwood Paper launch....

I can't say I disagree with you, its a shame Intel have felt the need to mimic Cheapzilla in the paper lauch stakes, but lets wait and see if its as Bad as you make out... For heavens sake the idiots at AMD have been paper lauching every processor for the last 8 Months, some not even making it to market, while all the others limp out months and months after the " official" paper launch.

I am still yet to see an actual Barton in the flesh, and any inquiry on ETA is met with a scoff from the major retailers, and as for the Hacks falling over themselves to review the chips, what else did you expect them to do. I suppose after making idiots of themselves for so long with the AMD charade, they had to show the same curtesy to Chipzilla. And in regards to Opteron reviews on 22nd of April, Now come on Mike, I bet they are already in the Can !!!

The age of vapourware is unfortunately upon us again. :-(

Cheers
Vin Curigliano

Re: Senate moves to squash spam

This isn't a bill designed to stop or even slow spam. It's designed to legitimize spam.

Spammers are still allowed to spam - they just have to remove you from their list when you ask. So they do. Then they sell/trade your address (now verified as being used) to other spammers, and they create a new list, and you get more spam. You'll never be able to opt out of every list, so you won't be a bit better off.

To make it worse, even if they blatantly ignore the law, only AG's can do anything - and I'm sure they don't have enough to do, and need to spend their time worrying about spam.

This bill is pro-spam all the way. It will do nothing to limit the amount of spam that we receive, but simply legitimatizes spam under the BS cover of being an "anti-spam bill".

That's why the DMA is in favor of it.

Email address supplied

Re: Sun x86-64 plans a real mess

My ¨internal source¨ at Sun has indicated that he is spending more and more time in meetings, trying to bring some changes to Sun´s ¨official¨ stand on various strategic marketing issues... without success. :-( Needless to say his stock options are worth nil these days, so he´s not too happy about the situation.

Frankly, having read the other article from The Inq which compared the performance of the latest Canterwood + P4 to a dual CPU Sun Sparc box (costing six times as much, but I suspect that´s excluding the software licenses, disk expansion, extra RAM, etc...), I can understand what is happening at Sun: they are seeing their small server market disappearing like a mirage in the desert, and they just can´t believe their eyes.

In the meantime, I expect IBM will OEM dual Opteron servers from Newisys and sell them with Linux and a truckload of services with long-term contracts. If they don´t, somebody else will, but it won´t be Sun.

Email address supplied

Faster, cheaper, and smaller computer chips is what drives tech land. If shut down your 2 billion dollar lab your dumb. If you stop improving the chips your even dumber. If you take charge of a company and keep the chips at 3.2 then competition will eventually catch up to you, pass you, and make better chips, taking market share away from you. Bill Gates once said 20 years ago "1 mb of memory is all we should ever need" Much like what you are saying is the same thing. How far have we come since Bill Gates said that? We are in another universe. You cant make new and better software to match the new computer speeds until you have the new computer chips. So the computer chips are what drive everything. I am sure there is a big time difference if you are ripping mp3s from a 1ghz computer to a 3 ghz computer. There will also be a huge difference between a 3 ghz computer and a 10 ghz computer. Back in the day it would take a long time just to save a document. Now, its saved by the time you blink. The future is lots of realtime video but we must have the hardware/software to handle it. Chips performance leads the way.

My 1ghz computer gets tied up a lot when I run kazaa, burn cds, watch tv, and type all at the same time.3

Glad your not running a chip company. Keep your day job!

Email address supplied

Subject: Apple introducing online music

Do you know how many articles I have seen online lately about online music piracy and how the music industry just doesn't understand the internet? After about the 3rd article I read that basically said the same thing as all the others, I had formulated a PERFECT idea of how to make money distributing music online, and I had a name for this business - Emuz, (Its logo could be a crazy-looking emu with earphones on.) I even wrote out a business plan on a page of notebook paper, that involves a joyful union between peer-to-peer networks and a ponzi scheme, which would work on the premise that artists should get half of all music sales, and that the distributor should get the other half, no matter who that distributor is. I dreamed up a new classification of intellectual property that would make this work. (Hey, if Linus Torvalds can do it, so can I)

Apple is getting close to the right idea, but they don't quite have it, so if they do it wrong it will fizzle and die. I've got the best idea, but I don't have enough programming know-how. It is soooooo agonizing to have THE holy grail business plan of internet music business all in your head and have no money to implement it, or hire someone to help you write the code to implement it! ARGGG! (insert passionate tantrum of genius here)

I hope you post this; maybe some bored programmers would help me build the software. If Kazaa, and Napster and others can scare the big five with illegal file trading, I think I could scare them even more with Emuz.

Michaela Stephens

In response to: Microsoft cuts out more competitors

I read this article and the following response but am still flabbergasted by your response. Maybe it's true as one reader suggested that you are simply biased against Microsoft, but I cannot fathom how you can claim Microsoft changing code to only support its own products as monopoly abuse. Once a company buys something it is theirs to do with as they please, be it give it away free or make it only available on their own systems. This is partially what I never understood about the MS antitrust case in the first place, why should they be required to include others in their O/S and software if they don't want to? The Sherman Anti-trust laws were originally written during a time when business practice included physical abuse and terrorist tactics in order to spread business. Microsoft simply uses lots of cash and shrewd positioning to spread its empire. It is my opinion that enough abuse of self-serving behavior will simply force a market change over time. If people can no longer download this program from the article to their Palms, then another company will offer a similar program for Palm soon enough. Please explain my ignorance to me in these matters so I can understand where you are coming from.

Matthew J. Doll

Arron replies

OK, leaving out the fact that producing a mapping and route finding system is complex and expensive, suppose another company comes along with one that can save its output to a Palm. What's to stop Microsoft buying that one too? If you don't understand what the antitrust case was about in the first place, you're quite simply choosing to ignore the number of companies that went bust and the number of employees out of a job because of underhand Microsoft business practices. Remember, MS was found guilty. There are such things as unfair business practices.

While what's happening now might not seem too nasty to you, ask yourself this: if this is what Microsoft is willing to do publicly so soon after the trial, what are they doing behind the scenes?

As for us being anti-MS, that seems unlikely. The INQUIRER runs on .Net technology.

Arron

Re: AMD Opteron workstation chipset nears

Well one must admit any chipset used by "gamers" is something most "normal" people would prefer to NOT to be associated with. Have you seen how bizarre gamers act? I mean they are obsessed over frame rates and such nonsense! If a Mobo, video card, CPU, memory stick or banana peel will get them a .0000000000001 increase in frame rate, they'll spend $1,000 to get it. These folks are insane ! Why waste a great chipset on folks with their heads stuck in video games all day long??? :>))

Cheers,
Randy

Gary Myers in his recent letter says;
'why do you liberal idiots want the government to control everything?'

Moron. A 'liberal' favors lack of governmental interference in commerce and other
aspects of civil life.

The two main spheres of political thought are 'liberalism' and
'communitarianism'. The second would be the one you are thinking of Gary,
always presupposing that 'thinking' is a word that it is appropriate to use
in relation to you.

'Louie IVX (14th) for you can't read roman numerals.'

or 'XIV' for those of you that cannot write bloody roman numerals.... fool.

Chris Hanlon

obviously, Gary, you cannot read roman numerals or else you would realize that you actually incorrectly wrote Loui the 6th. oh, and fuck you too.

From someone French we assume

Re: Spam continuing to damage the Internet's health

You forgot to mention the "contribution" of all those HTML mail reader applications that allow a HTML message. A spam mail "page" can call home via an embedded URL with a serial number which flags a "live reader".

Thank you Microsoft et al, Netscape included.

We must DEMAND a switchable option for in-active content ONLY. (ie. Plain Text).

Regards,
Connor

RE: Your Article on Spam

I read with full agreement with your views. You must be darn brave to talk on this topic and publich your email!

May I be permitted to add to the list?

1. Spam is insulting Could you imagine teaching your teanage son / daughter or for some readers their girlfriends to surf and read emails. Starring at you is a list full of mails in your in-box titled "Enlarge your Penis", "Free Breast Enlargement", "You need Viagra!" "Big TITS" What will they say? Just looking at the email subject is enough to make them uneasy. Hey my boyfriend is a "gay" maybe a "bi" or possibly a "wanker" or even a sex maniac - he's probably buying these things online. What about your conservative boss who just passes and happen to glimpse at your screenfull of such email subjects?

2. Advertisers are Stupid Advertiser resorting to unsolicited spam mails are downright stupid. They may get the headers through but not the mail contents to the above average user as we filter them. Advertisers are morons who's got too much money to spend.

May I suggest that to counter spam one must reverse spam!

1. Always bounce and delete your spam. Never just delete them. Don't just filter them. By bouncing, it will create internet traffic. If everyone bounces their spams, then so much traffic will be created back at the originating ISP or even at intermediate ISPs that makes all admin takes notice - whether or not they are the spam site or an innocent spam relay. If they don't want to jam up their ISP traffic then they better do something. Even the spamers may have used false ids this still works as the ISP has to do work to double bounce back. Again this creates extra traffic.

2. Always send a copy (every copy) of the spam as a legitimate complain to your ISP, originating ISP, councillors, senators, parlimentary representatives etc, newspaper editors, local daily, etc. This effectively creates 5 or more additional spam mails in addition to the original one. Best to send the porn spam to the wives, sons and daughters of your parlimentarians. The idea is to create so much traffic on the net that eveyone suffers. Official emails will not get through and the authorities have no choice but to act responsibly.

3. Always extract sender ids from the spam and register them at hack, porn, etc sites. Example, false sender 12345@hotmail.com. We just subscribe them anyway and also bounce the spam. Hotmail will receive so much invalid userid mails that it ends up consuming 99% cpu just to bounce off such mail. But remember to autobounce all hotmail ids such as above.

4. Using dedicated software such as mailwasher, etc you can bounce spam multiple times. Sometimes I bounce each spam 10 times. All you do is not to delete the spam mail immediately. Bounce it a sufficient number of times and then delete.

*** The idea is to create hell for everyone by creating so much traffic that legitimate and official emails cannot get thorough. Until those in legal authority choose to act to remedy the situation.

"Counter Spammer"

Subject: The number of times Microsoft has abused its monopoly will only
increase

The relationship dynamics between Microsoft and its customers has provided a lot on which to ruminate of late. I'm beginning to notice a cycle in it. The more Microsoft obsesses about money, the more they institute policies that nickel and dime their customers to death or restrict the freedom of their users. Each time they do this, they make more of their customers mad and drive them toward "disloyalty". Disloyal customers' only method of fighting back is to "mis-use" Microsoft's products (e.g., hacking the Xbox into a LinuXbox), pirate their software, and find ever more creative methods of getting as functionality for as little cost as possible. In other words, the more customers feel they are getting ripped off, the more they rip Microsoft off. Of course, this lowers Microsoft's revenue stream, so they are forced to find even MORE ways of gouging their customers to make up for it, which leads to more angry customers, more pirating, and more defections. Which leads to.... which leads to.... which leads to.... You get the idea.

Just as there is a critical mass of product adoption which leads to burgeoning growth in a company, there must be a critical mass of product defection which leads to large-scale decay of a company. I'm waiting and watching with interest to see where that point is with Microsoft, because a juggernaut's days are numbered.

Michaela Stephens

Subject: MicroSlut Internet Exploder

Just want to let off some steam. I inherited an old laptop that runs Win 95 and had IE 5.0 as a browser I went to update the browser for security reasons to IE 6 but IE 6 wont run on Win 95. I then tried to download the latest IE 5.X but Microslut does not support IE 5.X anymore. So I said #$%^ you Microslut and downloaded Netscape 7.0 which runs fine.

Ray Beane

Subject: Microsoft smooth talks AMD processor performance

whoever @ Microsoft texted this one is smart enough to be aware that the crowd using mediaplayer is unaware of the difference between Pentium and Celeron.
So his wording makes perfect sense.

Klaus

Well I just played each of the video's at the highest resolution and noticed my Athlon XP 1800+ cpu was more then capable of handling this "new" format. My cpu never went above 30% usage during playback. I have a Radeon 8500 Le card with 64 meg of Vmem and 512 meg ram on an ECS K7S5A. You can't get more basic then that. It looks to me like they were being quite bullish on their requirements for no reason at all. I bet a 1 ghz cpu or slower could run these video's without a hitch. Know anyone with such a system?

Gregg

Subject: X11 Alternatives

The INQ seems to be subtley pro-linux. I was wondering if anyone was aware of a project to make a GUI for linux that isn't reliant on X, and is easy to install. I look at OSX and I see the BEST *nix windows manager there is. Users don't have to recompile the kernel to use a new device. And best of all, the system looks pretty. There's a lot of people that are pro X, but I think for linux on the home desktop OS, the client/server system is confusing,complicated,insecure,and unnecissary. Not that X shouldn't exist, it makes sense in the buisness world where thin clients running X can run programs from the server, but a simple remote desktop program would make more sense on the home/prosumer machine.

Mike

Subject: BE a little more carefull with your reporting.

You may want to verify the quantity of cards being auctioned. I saw bids at 100 GBP and also at 700$ us. But they were for a boz of 100 cards packs and 1000 card packs. Verify your story next time. :) Later.

Regards Haik Yasa

More MS-DoS gadgets

The vole may introduce soon a new operating system for handcuffs, called MS-LoL (MicroShaft Liberty of Law). This operating system gives law enforcement officers remote control over jailbirds. First field tests have proven that MS-LoL is as reliable as MS-DoS (also known as MicroShaft Denial of Service).

This is a tremendous opportunity for the vole to expand its monopoly into a market where nobody fights for privacy. Privacy is just a public nuisance anyway. The DMCA and its European counterfeit will ensure a growing market.

Only 5% of the world population lives in the USA, but it is the host country of 25% of the world's imprisoned population. 75% of the criminals live "overseas", which proves that US citizens fall three times more likely victim to a crime overseas than in the US. A speaker of the vole reportedly pointed out that MS-LoL will bring a better standard of living to the people overseas.

The US version of MS-LoL comes with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) button, but law enforcement officers may only find it if they install the Internet Exploder (IExx) on their Punishment Console (PC). A service pack for IExx is already available. At present it is unclear whether this patch allows the vole to control the welfare of Linux users.

Henry

µ