Introduction

Blue guys are using a vacuum cleaner and a golf club to remove light bulbs from an orange wall. What does that have to do with computer hardware? Well, I don't really know, but I do know that this funky commercial is supposed to make us buy Intel's Pentium 4 processors. If you look at the sales of this Intel's flagship processor since its inception in November 2000 however, it seems rather obvious that the blue guys in front of the orange wall can suck as many light bulbs as they want. Motherboard makers can tell you that 5-10% of their motherboard sales are actual Pentium 4 platforms. The majority is still for Pentium III (i815, i810) and the rest of the boards hosts AMD processors.

I wonder if Intel's wacky P4 television commercial is symbolizing what goes on in the brains of Intel's decision makers. In medical school I learned about the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens, and the blue, white and orange stuff that Intel's puts on our television screen seems to be rather close to the visual experiences you have after heavy consumption of the just mentioned drugs. Let's be honest, what else could possibly explain Intel's recent decision to launch a 'value' Pentium 4 chipset that chains its 'netbursting' super processor to the good old PC133 SDRAM memory? Crack pipe or what?