Robert; I think some blame falls to Apple on the forecasting level. The production volume of Apple chips is quite small, and even though the foundries are busy, they can easily produce Apples requirements, if they know what they are. The rush to fast Pentiums, and II's, made a similar rush to the fast APple chips. The fall price cuts were not foreseen, even by Intel, who was keeping to it's gradual downtrend.
And then came the AMD K6, faster than Pentium and with MMX to boot, and cheaper. Several entire tiers of prices were clooapsed by Intel as the adopted a firebreak price strategy towards AMD.
AMD only made 1,000,000 K6 CPUs in the third quarter, and will only make 2,000,000 in the fourth. Intel makes 20-40 times that volume. Let us say 30 million chips in a year. They cut over $200 from 30 million chips($6 billion in margin) to cut AMDs prices by about $100 for a loss to AMD of $300,000,000, or around 5% of Intel's losses. That is why it is called a firebreak defence, you burn your own profits in an attempt to deny share to AMD. The 2M chips can become 4M, 8M, but not if they have insufficient margin to make hay at Intels expense.
Apple had to match ther speed shift, and slow stuff died, and fast was oversubscribed. Since foundries have 6 month to 1 year lead times, Apple was caught short(again). This price drop will exacerbate the drift to WIntels(rush to Wintels??, and figures on Apple sales yet??)
It would make sense for fast chips to overheat. As they fine tune the process looking for lower heat producing chips, exponential could not make enough fast ones to make it worthwhile. The speeds of a batch will follow a bell curve versus heat out put. A few get real hot when slow, and a few do not get hot when run fast. (In general the same chip makes more heat when you run it faster, if it gets too hot the implanted ions become mobile in the silicon, and drift around, destroying the individual transistors, and then the chip stops(1 transistor failure can make a chip die out of millions)
So if you make 10,000 chips, and 200 will run at 533 Meg, and the rest are slow/scrap, you must increase the yield of fast chips. This was what Exponential could not do. They could make lab protos, but no volume(bad foundry??)
This is only part of the story.
Bill |
