Re: Where are the AthWipey MP systems that you forecast for August? Answer the f***ing question !!
Getting rather desperate, aren't you?
I expected DDR in August and MP this quarter. Both are turning out to be about a quarter late. That's where they are. AMD is making record profits, has sold out its production capacity, and is riding the wave of the next major infrastructure change - the move to DDR DRAM. AMD can afford to bide its time and release its products only after they are thoroughly tested and only if they are up to market expectations.
Now look at Intel's position. They had to rush out (then recall) 1.13 P3. Now they are putting the P4 out when it really isn't ready yet. It uses high cost, low performance, dead end Rambus memory. The current stepping has awful IPC performance that means it is solidly beaten by an Athlon clocked 20% slower on the productivity applications used by 90% of all users 90% of the time. Intel really should hold off this release until they can fix the IPC problem but they have been pushed up against a wall by AMD.
The 20% disadvantage P4 has is about the same as the Celeron 300 had against the Celeron 300a.
axiscomputech.com
Remember what a laughingstock the Celeron was after its initial release? The chip was later fixed by giving it on die full speed cache, but it took about a year to repair its reputation. A Celeron 300 wasn't a "real" 300, it was "more like a 250 or something", nobody trusted or wanted them. And they were cheap, low end chips in cheap, low end systems being purchased by naive buyers.
How do you expect the P4 to fare when marketed to sophisticated, high end buyers in systems that cost substantially more than anything else on the market?
Maybe their eyes will glaze over and, unlike the buyers of entry level Celeron systems, they'll ignore everything but the MHZ number.
You'd best hope so - if the markets barf the P4 back at Intel, Intel will be in a world of hurt.
AMD's DDR story has been a huge success. Micron sold out nearly an entire quarter's production in a weekend. Wafer starts and system starts are being ramped as quickly as possible for this smash success. Q1 will see a flood of Athlon/DDR systems that will face overpriced P4s that aren't "real" 1.5 systems - "they are like a 1.2 or 1.1 or something, it's hard to say". Will anyone want or trust an expensive P4 system? Or will they go for a "real" 1.X GHZ DDR Athlon? We'll see, I don't think that anyone really knows yet what will happen, other than the certainty that sub GHZ Pentium IIIs will soon be nearly worthless.
Dan |
