The reports were that AMD shipped 400,000 K6's in April, and yes, I do believe these reports. My guess is that they are not at a steady state production rate this high, that this probably represents more than a months's production but all shipped in April. They were having some yield problems early on, and there were no chips in the channel, you couldn't get one, you couldn't see one, there were clearly large back orders and "pent up" demand. Then all of the sudden they did start showing up, but almost all the 166 version, I haven't seen anything else. My guess is that they did get a slug of them out in April, but my GUESS is [no real knowledge on this], that their production rate is more like 250-300k/month steady state, and that they are still having low yields of 200 MHz parts. Perhaps they had the chips in March but wanted to show the revenue and earnings in April (next quarter), so they held March's production. Perhaps they had a bunch of marginal 200MHz chips that they finally determined had to be sold as 166's. Don't know, just a guess. But I do believe the 400,000 chips for April.
However I do expect them to ship 4-5 million chips this year, maybe more. |
