Intel Email Support

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

On Thu, 18 May 2000, Randall Hofland wrote:

> Let me rephrase my request: does anyone have an email address for
> someone at Intel where I can send a complaint about their paltry supply
> of Celerons (and discontinuation of SMP support in the newest lots) so
> they will know why I intend to look to AMD or elsewhere for future
> hardware options? I don't want them coming back later and asking why I
> didn't let them know about my dissatisfaction with their service and
> products!

Intel's pricing of CPUs has always been about maximizing their profits, so
what they're doing is really no surprise. Since they're currently
production-limited (i.e., they can sell all the processors they can make),
it's understandable that they devote their resources to making PIII chips
rather than Celerons. Increasing capacity would be a solution, but that
takes time and the investment of huge sums of money.

As for taking SMP support out of the Celeron, they didn't like the
prospect of people building high-end systems by using a couple of $100
Celeron chips on a dual-processor motherboard rather than a $1000 PIII/1G.
Annoying, but understandable.

The arms race with AMD has probably made things a bit worse, too. Intel
has been forced to push the PIII speed envelope faster than they really
wanted to, and they seem to be having trouble producing the highest-speed
chips. (Just try to buy a PIII/1G.) Some of their resources are devoted to
keeping up with the Joneses, rather than solving their volume problems.
And they can't just fall behind in the speed race, either; that would risk
being marginalized in exactly the way that AMD used to be, limited to the
low-price part of the market.

Intel may regain the upper hand in speed when Willamette comes out; that
new processor design is intended to be scalable to higher speeds. But AMD
is also working on a second-generation Athlon, which is also supposed to
be more scalable, so we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out.


-- 
Mark J. Dulcey               mark at buttery.org
Visit my house's home page:  http://www.buttery.org/
Visit my home page:          http://www.buttery.org/markpoly/

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