Monica, Gateway was ready to use the Athlon, very happy with the performance,it won on their internal benchmarks, until Intel made them an offer they could not refuse, worth over $20 million. As one of the weaker top tier OEMs I suspect they looked at the decline in margins coming and grabbed what they could, and turned their back on AMD(forever, if Jerry{All bow to his Bozoness} has any say in it)
As to HP, due to their closeness to Intel I suspect they did not get advance parts to test for fear they would fly over the wall to Intel with them, as their are joint development teams here and there in HP.
I discount the benchmarks produced by AMD as possibly biased and the same for Intel, and rely on the various hardware shops, like Anandtech and Tom's hardware and about 20 more who will tell it how it is. They are happy to kick AMD or Intel equally and that is the correct path for a benchmarker to take. 95% of the benchmarkerss did indeed show the Athlon to be a bit better on all tests. The 5% showed Intel parts ahead in a few special areas, with SSI etc, but behind in the rest.
It is quite certain that the Athlon has passed the P-III in performance. When the P-III runs at .18 it might be faster??for the same CPU speed, but I think not as it has an inferior architecture. The new P-III at .18 may be able to clock a bit faster, possibly 733/766/800, but will be slower than same speed Athlons which are also ready for those speeds. New Intel parts, which may rectify this are scheduled for release later this month or in October....but do not bet on it.
At this time Intel is leading in all respects, volume, profits, revenue, except one....the fastest x86 CPU in volume(albeit small...but there are enough for IBM and Dell to buy them, so it counts).
Denying this does not serve you well, it is not realistic.
Even with all AMD can make they can serve a mere 5% or so of the market compared with Intel and so this will not impact Intel greatly, unless Intel cuts the high end ASP to ribbons to get that 5% as that 5% may grow to 10% and to 20% and to 40% and then 80%......but not that far surely?...maybe not, but there is real fear at Intel and they might just do that and with lower ASP where do profits go?, and where do share prices go?
I leave that to you to figure out.
Bill |
