AMD issues fresh, bracing Cebit roadmap
By: Mike Magee
Posted: 22/03/2001 at 17:18 GMT
Chip contender AMD has issued a fresh roadmap to
coincide with its introduction of its 1.3 and 1.33GHz
Athlons earlier today.
At Cebit, it also demonstrated dual Athlon systems
and a 1.5GHz chip with a core named after a breed
of horse dubbed Palomino.
The 30 page document claim AMD is still on target
for its Morgan and Palomino processors, which will
be ready in Q2 onwards, although to us it seems
there is a bit of a slippage.
The "slippage" could, however, be an attempt by
AMD to maximise its profits. Its Athlons are
undercutting Intel offerings, it appears to be gaining
market share, and, as we reported here a couple of
weeks ago, the Athlon 1.3GHz will drop in price as
early as May. It simply may not need to launch the
Palomino yet.
Palomino desktop cores, the roadmap says, will
arrive in quantity in Q3 of this year. The Hammer and
Appaloosa stuff comes next year. Appaloosa is a
shrink of the Duron-Morgan core.*
But it is AMD's chipset strategy, which is the
potential Achilles' Heel in its strategy. It is perfectly
capable of producing solid, well performing chipsets
by itself, but has shown a marked reluctance to
commit to staying in that market and seems, to us at
least, to be placing undue reliance on third party
companies to support its processors.
For example, we know that some of the Taiwanese
motherboard vendors which have helped the Athlon
gain the market share it has in Europe and in Asia,
have been pointed towards future chipset support
from firms such as Via.
Via, as it competes with AMD in the microprocessor
market, certainly the low end and especially in
emerging markets like India and China, is not
particularly interested in giving it a hand up. Via has
other fish to fry and Jerry Sanders' and Hector's firm
are not the first of CEO Wen Chi Chen's priorities.
AMD is evidently conscious of the fact that Intel will
not sit on its haunches and let the smaller competitor
run away with its profits, whether it be in the
consumer or at the low end of the business market.
We will return to this subject later in the week -- Intel
appears to have a rather powerful combination of
Tualatin technology and DDR memory up its sleeve
for Q3/Q4.
Meanwhile, and on the subject of busta blood vessel
firm Rambus, it appears that AMD is firmly on the
track of double data rate (DDR) memory.
Dataquest's barely noticed volte face last week on
the subject of market share of the disputing memory
technologies suggested that Rambus is unlikely to
ship the quantities it was predicting even one year
back.
AMD has chosen Cebit in Germany to launch these
technologies because the European market is highly
important to its strategy. There seems to be a
greater willingness in Europe to adopt non-Intel
technologies and the channels to market are also
much more diverse than in the USA.
AMD will have quite a job on its hands to grab
significant shares of the notebook and server market,
certainly in the next nine months or so. And it should
take care it doesn't lose the plot on the chipset front -
Intel knows how much that can hurt. ®
* For non-technical readers, in the jargon of chip
manufacturers, a shrink is not someone who listens
to your psychological woes but a technique for
making the chip smaller, cooler and hopefully faster
theregister.co.uk |
