1. The Computing Landscape Has Changed.
- Author
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Nicholls, Bill
- Subjects
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COMPUTER industry , *NEW product development , *INTEGRATED circuits , *ECONOMIC competition - Abstract
This article offers a look at changes in the computer industry in 2004. Intel was set to bring its new 90 nanometer Prescott chips into the market and had updated Itanium chips in the queue. Opteron chips of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) were then becoming a major challenge for Intel, as they were both powerful and offered 64-bit extensions while still running 32-bit code very well. On the Itanium side, IBM is taking its Power processor architecture to levels that are very competitive with Intel's Itanium. Intel's plan to dominate the high end processor market with its proprietary Itanium design now faces challenges from AMD below and IBM above. Sun Microsystems is another company in the throes of change. It has just cancelled its next planned processor, the UltraSparc V, in order to go with new multicore designs named Niagara and Rock. It has also extended its systems line to embrace Opteron of AMD and Linux while continuing to enhance the Solaris operating system. In one stroke, AMD turned an obsolete design into one that will live at least another twenty years. Intel has seriously stumbled in the processor market in three areas. These technical problems will be compounded by a marketing problem as Intel is now changing from a frequency based advertising to a confusing number based system that has no clear relationship between processor number and performance, especially between different x86 implementations.
- Published
- 2005