Re: Any other inference wrt "production problems" is inaccurate...
PB, I can't help but notice that in a market where DRAM prices are falling fast, and disk drive prices are falling fast, almost certainly due to less demand than expected, Intel seems to be unable to meet that lower demand level at any level (high end, midrange, or low).
The high end lack is painfully evident and often commented upon, the midrange problems led to Gateway going back to AMD, and at the low end, Intel has had to bring back the PII - presumably manufacturable on equipment useless for anything else. Q4 year on year computer sales showed the smallest gain since 1996, and AMD has got to have sold more processors than Intel hoped (or planned for). Now, maybe the increase in AMD sales is supplanting some sales Intel expected to be made by Cyrix, but Intel still has a falling market share in a market that's growing more slowly than expected.
There have got to be some Intel production problems, somewhere. (Either that, or my fairly far out theory is correct - that capacity was planned for a coppermine w/o on chip cache, and the appearance of Athlon made such a part unsellable, led to bigger than expected die, and not enough wafer space).
Regards,
Dan |
