Re: Come on Process Boy...
Don't be so hard on him. He considerately reported what he personally was seeing at his one FAB.
This was a mistake from the very top. In the current (and, sadly, the last) issue of Performance Computing, Tom Yager's column Integration is titled Embracing Change. Here is an excerpt about the situation in 1999: (I could not find the column at their web site)
...AMD got chips into some low-end laptops and Best Buy PCs, but that's it. With compatibility issues (mostly motherboard and not CPU related) and abysmal floating-point performance, the K6 CPUs never made it onto the corporate "buy" list. Intel kept lowering its Celeron prices until AMD couldn't turn a profit on K6. The field was clear. PC used to mean IBM. Now PC means Intel, so Intel wrote AMD off.
Hello? Mistake? Intel should fire its radar operator. Late in 1999, AMD came out of nowhere with the K7 processor, the Athlon, which has Intel doing the headless chicken.
PB and others like him did their jobs well, and produced as many or more high speed coppermines as were forecasted to be needed. How were they to know that the vaunted Intel "paranoid" top management was too busy prancing around the "dot com for sale" mall to be bothered with the boring old CPU business.
So, right now, AMD is putting the final shine on the logo of its new Dresden FAB, that will be ramping up just as demand can justify it, and Intel is digging a hole in the ground for the new FAB that it desperately needed last quarter.
Dan |
