What does a bargain-basement fab that produces competitive 64-bit CPUs cost 
anyway?

On Tuesday 05 March 2002 00:04, you wrote:
> TI is going to be producing the Sparc Ultra III for Sun.  Alpha is Dead or
> dying.  AMD is about to (or has) release the Sledgehammer, their competitor
> for the 64-bit world.  Wouldn't surprise me if Motorola got out of the
> Desktop world, but probably not while Apple is selling the systems.  It's
> gonna be fun to watch AMD and Intel going head-to-head in the 64-bit world.
>  As long as AMD stays in the market, Intel has nothing to fear from Big Bad
> Uncle Sam coming after it for being a Monopoly, but of course Intel hasn't
> done the things that Microsoft did to get their monopoly (or am I wrong?).
>
> > I'm not certain the "only runs on Intel" is much of a distinction.  As
> > far as I know Itanium will be the only chip in its league.
> >
> > Cost of development and building a fab is getting just to high for there
> > to be more than one producer.  IBM, HP, and Compaq are getting out of the
> > CPU biz.  Motorolla probably will too.  Don't know about SUN.
> >
> > As for having to upgrade every three years, aren't you the one who says
> > the cost of hardware and the OS is "irrelevant"?
> >
>