Waiting for the chips to fall

The moral for today concerns expectations. Intel isn’t going to live up to the ones it has set, whereas Microsoft has managed to just slightly exceed mine. Sunday was a chaotic day, at once filled with voting trepidation, hordes of children dressed as bleeding Britneys begging for sweets, and, of course, the heartrending end of the Holy Northeast Winning Streak.

In the midst of all this activity, Intel decided to quietly introduce its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU. Coincidence? I think not. Aside from its support for a 1,066MHz front side bus, the chip shows lackluster performance in both static benchmarks and application-level testing. And let’s not forget about the $999 price tag — this in a world of $999 PCs. No wonder the company tried to slip something so lame past us while our attention was diverted elsewhere.

Although the new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition doesn’t do much to blow your skirts up, the trend it embodies should. Let’s face it: Intel is finally feeling the effects of its technology race with AMD. InfoWorld‘s own testing has shown that AMD can more than hold its own in corporate computing environments. It’s time for a more radical shift in CPU performance design, and it’s clear that Intel’s heart is with Netburst, its upcoming dual-core technology due out in late 2005 or early 2006.

Until then, it will keep churning out the last of its Pentium 4-based, single-core CPUs but will concentrate on improving performance by means other than straight clock-speed enhancements. The 1,066MHz bus is a good example: Look for this to be supported across more Pentium 4 CPUs as new CPU chip set architectures are released during the next year, which should keep some of the Doom 3 and Far Cry analysts happy.

Unfortunately for Intel, when I put on my Conservative Corporate Buyer’s Hat, I couldn’t care less about Doom 3. I care only about value-add purchasing that gives my users added performance they can see, feel, and touch so I don’t get staked out over an ant hill during budget meetings. As such, I feel much better about making do with the Pentium 4s we already own and keeping my wallet in my pocket until the dual-core CPUs show up at the end of next year.

Fortunately, this seems to jive just fine with Microsoft, and for a change, Redmond is doing the right thing by customers in this CPU donnybrook. While some folks floated rumors that Microsoft would revamp its software licensing for dual-core CPUs, in effect charging customers for multiple licenses if they used multicore silicon, Microsoft formally silenced those pundits a couple of weeks ago. The company stated flat out that future licensing programs would view dual-core or even multicore CPUs as single-CPU licenses only. Score one for Microsoft customers, especially those who might wind up running multi-CPU servers with each CPU carrying more than one core. That multiplication probably made more than one Redmond MBA drool, but trying to push that cost down customers’ throats would have steered more of them toward the penguin.

But if we all wait for dual-core Intel, what happens to Microsoft’s ambitious software release plans? Not much. True, operating system upgrades and new system purchases generally go hand in hand in corporate America. And if many of us wind up waiting for Netburst before making really large workstation upgrade purchases, then we’re looking at a slight purchasing slowdown until late next year. But that shouldn’t bother Microsoft too much. The company already dropped the Longhorn-in-2006-or-2007 bomb, so that OS should be arriving just about the time Intel works the kinks out of Netburst. No harm, no foul in Redmond.

Meanwhile, we customers get a bit of a purchasing break. All we buyers need to worry about is Microsoft application and server releases, which should run fine on the Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server hardware we have. I’m happy to have one less thing to concentrate on in 2005. Pentium 4 Extreme Edition may not make enthusiasts happy, but it bodes only good news for corporate customers.