Jun. 25, 1999 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- Sunnyvale, Calif. - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. headed into a third-quarter showdown with their
next-generation technologies.
AMD said that its Athlon processor-the former K7-was shipping to PC OEMs, with published prices ranging from $699 for the 600-MHz version to $479 at 550 MHz to $324 for the
500-MHz version, each in 1,000-unit quantities. AMD said it expects high-end PCs based on Athlon to reach retail stores by August.
The Athlon announcement came as AMD chief executive officer Jerry Sanders acknowledged that AMD's current MPU average selling price had dropped to about $60 and that it would
suffer an estimated $200 million loss for the quarter ending June 29. That, and a gloomy report from Micron Technology, sent tech stocks into a tailspin.
Meanwhile, Intel said it has not changed its plans for third-quarter shipments of its Camino chip sets, for its Pentium III CPU. The chip sets support the full range of 600-, 700- and
800-MHz Rambus technologies. An Intel spokesman cautioned that, "as often happens in this industry," volume shipments at the higher 800-MHz speeds would start out small and
build.
At last week's PC Expo in New York, Dell Corp. disclosed it would ship a line of workstations that would support two Rambus channels, with a theoretical peak bandwidth of
3.2-Gbytes/second. Shipments depend on delivery of chip sets, a Dell executive said. |
