Re: any feel for respective production rates for Athlon vs. P3/733?
Hi John,
I dunno, I'm happy to offer up my WAG interpretation of how things stand, though - but take it with many grains of salt.
The only information I've seen that may be any kind of a reliable indicator is Gateway's move to embrace Athlon - which seems to indicate limited availability of PC/733 and good supplies of the Athlon/750. I'm not a process guy by any means, but the Athlon appears to have the same manufacturability advantage over Coppermine that the Pentium II/III had over the K6-2/3.
The somewhat strident protests that always come from the Intel fans are justified in that much of Intel's inability to supply vendors with enough high end chips is due to the relatively limited demand for middle and high end CPUs from AMD compared to Intel.
On the other hand, I've read lecture after lecture on SI threads about how Intel's dozen plus FABs and perfected "copy exactly" production systems are infinitely superior to AMDs approach. So the current situation is making AMD look pretty good.
Intel also appears to be in great shape, since Coppermine has on chip L2 that is cheaper and easier to produce than the Athlon's catridge. So Intel margins should be good even if Coppermine yields aren't so good for awhile, but AMD, by all appearances, is having one of the smoothest new CPU ramps in recent memory.
As companies, both should do well and make lots of money, as stocks, Intel is currently priced in the expectation of excellent performance and AMD is priced in the expectation of a disaster. Since Intel looks to have excellent prospects since general demand is very strong and Coppermine is definitely competitive, it's stock price is probably about right. Since AMD appears to have zoomed by opportunity after opportunity for disaster without having any happen, AMD's stock price appears to be quite low.
So, by the end of Q1 we may see Intel's stock price pushing 90 or 100, and AMD not too much below that.
By the way, this supply and performance tie may make it very hard to justify the Rambus cost delta. An Athlon 750 with 128 meg of PC133 SDRAM will cost an OEM less than a Coppermine 733 with 128 meg of Rambus (KX133 based Athlon motherboards have starting showing up). Performance will be a toss up, and the 750 will have MHZ bragging rights. They'll be sitting next to each other on store shelves (pretty soon) we'll see how they sell. If AMD can ship 800s when Intel is shipping 800s (and, if anything, right now it looks like 867MHZ Athlons when Coppermine is at 800) Rambus is in very big trouble as a PC memory for 2000.
So my take on production rates of Athlon vs. P3/133 is that absolute numerical production rates of the P3 may be higher but in terms of the effects on market penetration for PIII/Athlon/Rambus and earnings of same, Athlon production rates are doing considerably better.
Regards,
Dan |
