Dan, <They actually made a bunch of Athlons, and they are available. Given that a new chipset was needed, and a new motherboard to go along with it, I don't think even AMD really expected the whole Athlon thing to work>
AMD did indeed have execution problems, particularly with motherboard availability. (It doesn't matter whether you believe Intel was behind all this or not, since either way, the execution was less than perfect.) Also, AMD's announced achievements in Q3 and targets for Q4 and beyond did not surprise me one bit. A million Athlons this quarter, Fab 30 ramping up with the money coming in Q2 2000, etc. This was exactly as I expected, except that Fab 30 is ramping up a little later than I had originally thought.
The only "upside surprise" from my point-of-view was the fact that AMD's 650 and 700 MHz speed grades came a little sooner than I thought. Given that, I thought AMD would have "phantom announced" a 750 MHz speed grade by now, but they haven't.
<As far as 750+ parts are concerned, I think AMD is just letting that big question mark hang out there to goad Intel into making hurry up and ship it mistakes - and their strategy has been working like a charm, so far.>
Yeah, right, AMD is just "teasing" Intel, huh? No one, not even AMD, is that stupid when it comes to competing with Intel. One should never purposely give Intel a chance to catch up.
Tenchusatsu |
