The Computer Buzz

May 7th, 2009

Nome and Paul Van Middlesworth - owners - The Computer Factory
 

Intel Dropped the Ball Again?

Since the last of the founding fathers left Intel ten years ago, the company has ricocheted from one costly blunder to another. Yet like a great drunken oaf, Intel continues to dominate the semiconductor industry.

Started in 1968, founders Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove lead Intel through three decades creating a stunning array of high tech products based on integrated circuit technology. This Silicon Valley based company also pioneered many enlightened management concepts and was highly acclaimed was having one of the best work environments in the world.

Intel CPUs became the standard when IBM introduced the PC in 1982. Intel sales hit one billion dollars in 1983 and continued to climb steadily through the 80s and 90s as Intel CPU designs dominated. By 1998 Intel revenues had climbed to $30 billion and Intel held a daunting 80% of the worldwide PC CPU market. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel's closest competitor trailed far behind with only a 10% market share.

Bob Noyce died in 1990, both Andy Grove and Gordon Moore retired in 1997. It began to look as if Intel had lost not only its heart and soul but perhaps its mind. Intel began to show signs of bureaucratic complacency. A series of costly mistakes ensued.

First Intel introduced the slot one Pentium II CPU in 1998. This design was a mistake and was quickly abandoned. Also in 1998, Intel rival AMD matched, then exceeded, Intel's flagship Pentium III in performance. In 2000 AMD beat Intel in creating the first 1.0 Gigaherz CPU.

In late 2000 Intel introduced the RAMBUS RAM based Pentium IV. It bombed and Intel was forced to redesign the PIV to accommodate the far less expensive standard SDRAM.

The redesigned Pentium IV was slow and plagued with heat problems. By the end of 2005, AMD had surpassed Intel in world CPU market share.

Intel regained the lead in market share with the well-designed Core 2 Duo but they failed to make their most popular motherboard chipset "Vista Compatible." This blunder stunted Intel's sales in the months prior to the release of Vista and resulted in the ongoing litigation over Intel's labeling of these PC as "Vista Capable."

Intel's latest boner may also turn out to be costly. Microsoft announced what promises to be a popular feature, Windows XP emulation, in its soon to be released operating system "Windows 7." While all of AMD's CPUs are capable of running this emulation, many of Intel's current models are not.

The bottom line here is that while AMD's "Vista Compatible" PCs will be able to run all three OS (Windows 7, Windows XP and Vista,) many of Intel's latest CPU's cannot handle XP emulation.

About 80% of the PCs we build here at the Computer Factory utilize the AMD CPUs. At any given performance level the AMD's beat Intel in price. They also seem to get things right most of the time. We love em.