Pentium 4 Rev A will not support SMP
Intel's hopeful Athlon-killer will not support SMP until the middle of '01. Now, a number of you are upset about this, but let's consider just how wise of a decision this is for Intel. Where is Intel's sales hurting right now? Is it in the SMP market? Uh, well, no, they dominate it in the x86 world for obvious reasons. That's not likely to come completely undone in the next six months because that market, as AMD itself has realized, is very calm and considered--witness AMD's decision to put Mustang on hold, and focus on doing one thing right at time.
Intel is basically doing the same thing, but in a different market. AMD is making all their cashola in the home and enthusiast markets right now. Intel's single-CPU with phat GHz is going to be attractive to folks who buy OEM computers. Where competition with AMD has been tough, Intel hopes that a new CPU (along with its hype) and the allure of big numbers will be enough to reclaim some lost market share. For the immediate future, they'll focus on the single-CPU model, make sure there are damn good mobos to go with it (and let's face it, motherboard support is one of Intel's strong points), and perfect the SMP solution behind the scene, all while their PIII models continue to sell to professionals and corporations, who thus far have been slow to accept AMD. Perhaps I'm crazy, but I can appreciate Intel's motivations here.
