Re: Something smells bad about the infrastructure...
I don't think that's what happened. I watch changes on the site www.thechipmerchant.com because they tend to be a good indicator of what's around on any given day. Thunderbirds and later Durons showed up some time ago, and classic Athlons began disappearing.
Then we heard stories of a million stranded Slot A boards out there, and AMD said (without affirming such claims) that there would be some changes to their production schedules to accommodate the requests of their customers (the OEMs).
Now there are lots of classics again, joined by Durons, but very few Thunderbirds.
I think that what happened was that classic Athlon systems were established, selling well, more than competitive with anything Intel had, and the OEMs just wanted more of them. AMD was already committed to 3 million plus K6's and now the OEMs wanted more, not fewer, Classics than the 1.8 million that sold in Q2. That meant 2 to 2.5 million Athlon Classics which doesn't leave much room for Thunderbird and Duron wafer starts. The OEMs are now ramping up Thunderbirds, and will be ready for Durons in 4 to 6 weeks. Socket A motherboards have been all over pricewatch for some time, and since the 750 chipset works fine with Socket A, chipsets were certainly not a problem for low end systems.
I think what we're seeing is partly a matter of AMD bending over backwards to keep its OEM customers happy, and the fact that only so many wafers can be started each week.
This isn't a year ago when AMD had been reduced to supplying a small number of low performing systems at cost. AMD is now the dominant supplier of high end retail CPUs and has a large number of customers that depend on it. AMD rapidly and successfully modified its planned product mix to keep its customers happy.
Compare this performance with Intel's for the past year.
That's my take.
Regards,
Dan |
