Kash, re:<750MHz Athlons>
Can you, Chuck, Petz, and other posters here can provide your thoughts on the main question from the marketing perspective - Does AMD need to release Athlon 750Mhz parts this quarter? What does AMD going to gain/loose with/without 750s. In my opinion, only thing that AMD would loose by not releasing Athlon 750 on Monday, is the "fastest X86 CPU" crown for a few months.
IMHO, AMD would have far more impact by having a simultaneous release of a couple of higher speed grades (ex:750, 800) and a better chipset (Irongate - AMD761 with DDR, DVD, AGP 4X, ...) in Q1. If AMD or its partners can manage to release a server chipset at the same, it would just elevate perception of AMD into a different level from the technology point of view. This is a very plausible scenario in Q1.
After reading several posts on different message boards, now I'm comfortable with the idea that AMD doesn't need to release a 750 part this quarter just to continue to hold on to the X86 speed crown - for the following reasons:
o There are indications that Coppermines above 600Mhz won't be in any siginificant volume - so there won't be any considerable pricing pressure on Athlon 650 and 700s.
o With no i820 chip in Q4, there are not going to be any superior platform solutions for Coppermine this quarter. I840 solution would be too expensive and would be a moot issue in the consumer market.
o There aren't any indications that Coppermine is going to trounce Athlon clock per clock - especially in gaming. We'd have a clear picture on the benchmarks on Monday - when the NDA expires and most of the PC hardware sites report the benchmark comparisons.
o It's prudent to wait for motherboard situations to get even better and for more mobo manufacturers to enter into the Athlon market. It seems, November is going to be the month of Athlon mother board releases from many manufacturers - Soyo, Tyan, Aopen, Asus, Shuttle, TMC, and more [credit to: slota.com ].
o Lower mobo prices by the end of Q4 which would allow AMD to have higher pricing on future Athlon speed grades.
o As you indicated in your post, it's better to wait till 100% Athlons are from 180nm process. Lower power consumption of these chips would allow the use of older mother boards with higher MHz Athlons.
o OEMs may not like this past phase of releasing newer speed grades which forces them to have a frequent pricing adjustments on their older models.
Regards,
Goutama
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