<Fact is that AMD can't ship anywhere near enough K7 to do any damage to Intel in terms of market share, probably for the next nine months at least. Given that this is the case, AMD woud be stupid to charge any less for the K7 than they can realistically get for it. Starting a price war is the kind of thing you do when you want to gain market share, and AMD is in no position to take significant market share with the K7 for quite a while.>
Kevin, I completely agree with you on these points.
I'm arguing, however, that AMD is indeed charging less for the Athlon than they can realistically get for it. Either that, or like Ali Chen said, the Tier 1 customers are forcing AMD to sell the Athlon at lower prices, perhaps in an attempt to get Intel to discount the Pentium III. Either way, a price war will be initiated. However, in the latter case, it won't be AMD who starts the price war, but rather the Tier 1 guys like IBM and Compaq who would benefit greatly from Intel and AMD slugging it out. And that would be costly both for AMD and INTC investors.
Now that I think about it, the latter case sounds much more probable than the notion that AMD wants to start a price war again. Maybe I ought to think about this a little.
Any comments from the peanut gallery?
Tenchusatsu |
