Re: probably what Intel is telling Dell (and it's probably true):
This is the scenario that, right or wrong, I've thought to be most likely for a long time.
Mike Magee says: Intel will, instead, introduce the first Coppermine at 700MHz in Q4.
AMD will supposedly be able to match that in roughly the same time frame. In Q1 2000 they should both be a little slower or faster than 1GHZ - and that's where the rambus latency starts to really hurt. And until recently, intel has been expecting rambus to be its only memory for high end motherboards.
If AMD stumbles, this is irrelevant, rambus is plenty good enough when you're 200 MHZ ahead of the competition. But if the Motorola/IBM process lets them keep up with intel, intel has to to go back and redesign, retest, and rebuild chipsets, motherboards, and CPU i/o. Otherwise intel performance becomes synonomous with 10% slower...
Once Cyrix got that rap, they never got more than about 50 bucks for a processor, and intel's too smart to risk getting caught in the same trap. Meanwhile, AMD has an extra 3 to 9 months to get the supporting chipsets, boards, etc in place for volume production - given their history, they'll need it, given this sceanario, they'll get it.
Dan |
