DELL overestimated INTEL

DELL execs explain why they took so long to go AMD64.

Jeff Clarke, senior vice president (SVP) in Dell's product group said,
"We overestimated Intel's ability to deliver and catch up."

I remember one DELL VP said Intel could do 64 bits in a nanosecond...

At the same time, Dell "underestimated" AMD, admitted Brad Anderson, another Dell SVP in the products group. "We believed that AMD's ability to sustain its performance advantage was not going to continue," he said. "We missed that."

I hope these DELL execs read my blog and understand AMD has all the grand masters in computer architecture: Opteron, Alpha, Power, UltraSparc, MIPS, Itanium and PA-RISC. Intel simply lacks the brain power to compete against these grand masters.

I imaged a meeting among AMD and Intel designers. The Intel team won't even be able to understand what AMD folks are talking about.

All of Intel's stuff seem so primitive -- Pentium Pro technology is all they got.

Woodcrest is ultra low end 2P stuff.

The Register has an interesting article and stock price chart for AMD, HP, SUN, IBM, INTC, DELL and SGI. The more AMD a company had, the better its stock performed. The more Intel a company had, the worse it performed. Arguably, SGI had more Intel than Intel itself. Intel has diversified itself. SGI is pure Itanium, and SGI BKed. Intel had more AMD than DELL, because Intel borrowed AMD64 instruction set and became an AMD64 clone maker.

Michael Dell and his people loved Intel, they still do, they may even hate AMD for whipping Intel. But they love themselves more. When AMD is growing, and Intel shrinking, Dell's fragile financials will not be able to sustain its valuation. The Enron scenario and the thoughts of Feds knocking their doors forced them go AMD. That's the only way DELL can find growth and save themselves from the Enron day, if all possible.

I saw this last year, and I told AMD and Dell folks about this last year. It's called inevitablity.