Re: back to your looney ravings....
Hmmm... Were you at all surprised by the information that has been released in the Microsoft case? It may have an indirect bearing on just how far Intel can force the rest of the industry to shun AMD.
Not sure what you could have taken such violent exception to in that last message. My comment that it could be that Intel is having some problems right now?
Coppermine is being lauded as a 106mm die that is coming out with high binsplits - yields are not being bragged about. We've been told that 4 FABs are have been dedicated to producing Coppermines, though we don't know for how long. We have heard enthusiastic rumors about the binsplits for quite a while. Something close to 250 106mm2 die should fit on a 200mm diameter (8") wafer. If Intel's big FABs are the same size as AMDs, and they aren't sitting mostly idle, that means there are 4 x 5,000 = 20,000 wafers starts per week from the 4 Coppermine FABS. 20,000 x 250 = 5 million die/week.
Even 1 week's production at a 30% yield should have been able to supply as many chips as all of the channels, including the guys who advertise on pricewatch, with as many parts as they would want in a week.
So what's up? If these FABs just switched over to coppermine, and the parts coming out are still from Celeron and Katami wafer starts, why is Intel canceling planned Celereon price cuts - which seems to indicate a lack of supply. Is there just an extended period during which the lines are being converted and there aren't any wafer starts? Are the yields really low?
Maybe the demand from the tier 1 vendors for direct sales parts is higher than expected and that's where all of the Celerons and .25 Pentium IIIs have been going. But if that were that case, shouldn't we be seeing news that, in the last two months, Compaq, IBM, Dell, etc. are seeing unexpected large sales increases? (maybe there has been such news, and I've missed it)
I don't have a direct count, but in the last 6 weeks or so, it seems that more of the retail machines are K6's and Athlons, at least in the ads, and fewer are Celerons and Pentiums. Ads are something of a proxy for sales, due to the fact that co-op dollars are usually used to pay for ads - but there are exceptions to this rule.
Maybe we'll see a flood of 650 through 733MHZ Intel parts in 10 days that have been wending their way through the production process for the last couple of months.
Still, especially given the sudden shrillness of Intel's legal attacks, something seems off.
Regards,
Dan |
