Re: will CONTINUE to LOSE - money, hand over fist...
That's not the the way it's looking these days. Take a look at Message 11438617 posted by Goutama Sai Kantamaneni. There is a modest but significant increase in performance and decrease in power consumption for the Athlon 700 relative to the earlier Athlons. If it were Intel's chip, it would be trumpeted as the Pentium N+1 and hailed as a major achievement in a dozen press releases.
For AMD, this was too small an improvement to bother talking about - they're busy shipping products with big changes and major improvements. How many releases of the Pentium core have there been at 500MHZ? How many will there be at 600? Base, E, B, EB, Celeron, portable, etc? At some point you need new products or the marketplace begins to demand substantial price cuts.
There will be extensions to the k6 family, but they will be real extensions - 50 or more MHZ increases, perhaps a copper part with a 150MHZ speed increase. They won't just diddle the cache and buy a thousand pages of ads, hoping no one will notice it isn't really new. A steady stream of new products is how Intel always made its money in the past - and that's how AMD will be making its money from now on.
Intel will be back in the game soon, but the lazy days of easy profits are gone for quite awhile - while the good times are starting to roll for AMD.
Dan |
