News
Cahners: Intel Will Wait for the Enterprise
Analyst firm CahnersIn-Stat/MDR predicts Intel Corp. will need a few more yearsto catch up to the capabilities of enterprise server processors produced by IBMand Sun.
The market research house also predicts that Intel willkeep some of its non-Xeon 32-bit server processors alive for awhile.
"Intel Corp. has made significant inroads into theserver market with its new Xeon (the server version of Pentium 4) line ofprocessors and is on its way to shaking up the market over the next severalyears," the analyst firm says.
But senior analyst Kevin Krewell says muscling into IBMand Sun 64-bit territory will take considerable ingenuity.
"Intel may be up to the task. Intel plans toupgrade areas with succeeding products to pull ahead of its rivals' benchmarks,but that evolution will take several years," Krewell says.
Meanwhile, In-Stat expects several non-Xeon 32-bitserver processors to remain in production through 2003. The Pentium III-S andBanias servers have a future in dense servers, In-Stat finds.
Other conclusions of In-Stat's latest report,"Intel Server and Workstation Processors," are that Intel must focuson the server market to help offset decreasing prices for PC processors.In-Stat predicts that the intense price cutting that has driven down desktopprocessor prices by up to 51 percent will not extend to server or workstationprices in the near term. – Scott Bekker