Milo - RE: "Ted some more follow up on a post you did this a.m.
JC's post"
That was an AWESOME post by JC jc-news.com ! It shoots down practically all the crap the author of the that article spewed.
Thanks for posting the link, Milo. I wouldn't have gone back to that site otherwise...
The rest of this post if for people who think AMD is dead past 2000. (You know who you are.)
While people are mainly focusing on Athlon vs. Willy MHz this year, they should also focus on Spitfire. The low-end volumes are still great, Intel will have nothing to compete performance-wise (unless they sacrafice revenue-producing Cumine), and it should be cheap to produce. Once the infrastructure gets in place (socket A boards with on-chipset video card) AMD will have a VERY competitive platform.
Some people are already discounting AMD past 2000 solely because of Willy, but they should remember -
* flash should be strong through 2001 and beyond and revenues will continue to rise as Fab 25 begins producing flash memory. I was reading some stuff about future cellular technologies and how they will be able to transmit data much faster in a couple of years and handset use will continue to rise. Well, each cell phone needs flash memory and AMD supplies it to some makers. From an analyst conference slide last year, AMD says set-top boxes will need high density flash, and AMD supplies that also. And we know Microsoft and the cable TV providers want every home to have a next generation set-top box on top of their TV. And don't forget the big deals with Cisco and Alcatel. The Cisco deal lasts three years and the Alcatel deal lasts two years.
* Spitfire will be a VERY competitive product. Heck, if Willy turns out to be a really great product and makes whatever competing Athlon look like crap, AMD can flip the switch and turn the MHz on for Spitfire. What would happen to the competitive landscape next year if AMD sold 1.3GHz Spitfires made on a .15 micron process really cheap? Of course, this is possibly the WORST case scenario. Everyone, DON'T FORGET - Spitfire is an Athlon core and IT CAN SCALE IN MHz. K6 couldn't much, so AMD had losses.
* AMD isn't sitting on their butts watching Athlons come out the fab. Sledgehammer comes out next year. Seeing that the Athlon's designers had the foresight to design a processor with a so called well-balanced, long pipeline in 1997/98, I am going to assume they are still eating their Wheaties and will continue to evolve their processors to scale well in MHz AND increase performance. If it ever works out, Sledgehammer's 64 bit is the icing on the cake.
* don't discount the Mustang yet. Mobile Athlons will come out this year and so will large on-chip cache versions. BOTH are new markets for AMD. And AMD also has the Lightning Data Transport (LDT) for multi-processor systems. Tench works for Intel in chipset design and HE says LDT is a good idea. Get the drift?
* according to reports, the semiconductor cycle is on an upswing right now
It's different this time.
Usual disclaimer - AMD has to execute on all this. A lot of these things depend on Dresden which hasn't produced revenue yet, but who's reports have been good. Sledgehammer is still vaporware as far as we know. |
