There is little advantage in slot one by itself at this exact point in time. Bencharks generally show that Pentium II is faster than the K6, but this is not really a comparison of Slot 1 vs Socket 7 alone. However when 100 Mhz buses become common, and processor speed climb to 400+ MHz (so that external cache speeds are 200 MHz - 3x faster than Socket 7) Slot 1 will be the cheapest way to go - that is because the motherboard manufacturers will have had all the hard work done for them by Intel (reliability, RF limits for example). At that point Slot 1 will be a necessity. I myself am planning on buying one when a Deschutes processor is released (I am delaying an upgrade until then). The lack of AGP and limited memory bandwidth will keep AMD's K6 in the low end of the market (AMD may have an AGP Socket 7 chip set in the near future but if it is released more than 3-6 monsth from now it may miss the boat).
Intel is doing very well compared to AMD. AMD maybe is selling all the chips it can make, but it is not making many (either because of less demand than suspected or because of poor production yields - the market believes it is the latter). It will only be producing 1 million chips this quarter, being sold at a price that is roughly equal to Intel's previous generation product (Pentium MMX) and not at a price anywhere close to what Intel is getting for Pentium IIs. Because of this, margings are poor and AMD announced that they will have a small operating loss this quarter. AMDs window of opportunity with the K6 is closing fast. Estimates for INTC this quarter are to make 1.5 B$. The price cuts according to Intel are not as a result of competition but just in line with the regular price declines they have have announced in the past. I agree with you that their price declines seem to have accelerated in the Pentium MMX category, and if they knew of AMDs troubles prior to their price cut announcement they probably would not have made them as deep, but in the end their earnings during a relatively slow part of the year will still be very healthy.
My guess is that Intel will open the Slot 1 standard if it feels that market acceptance is not forthcoming, but personally I can't see how it will fail - there is no real competition at this time. If AMD and Cyrix fail to make their current generation chips profitable, they may never have the capital to mount a significant x86 threat (when one considers the amount of money needed to design, and produce a successful chip). |
