Scumbria:
"Hasn't Elmer been telling us that P4's have been selling like hotcakes? Was Fuchi right about Elmo?"
Yeah...The hotcake P4's came right on the heels of the flood of 1 gig P3's...or to rephrase Paul, "INTC's lowering the P4 prices because the P4's are selling so well at the higher price..."
By the way Scumbria, what card does INTC play if P4's don't sell at lower prices? What if even Kmart Blue light special pricing is too much for P4?
Seems to me that INTC is exceedingly close to having used up all its wild cards...while AMD is about to play one or two more of its wild cards out of a hand flush with wild cards, when the "server" announcement is made this week and when the palomino ponies surface this month...(Two more gapimg cracks in the castle wall are about to filled by AMD product)...Yet more margin pressure on INTC...
No matter what INTC does, their ASP's are bound to rapidly decline and margins along with 'em...just not so with AMD...AMD can keep lopping off the low ASP's and replace 'em with new high end intro's like the 1.4 gig as they raise the entry bar further negatively impacting celeron and P3 margins, all the while raising demand for 1 gig and up Athys...Each quarter, AMD's MHz mix probably rises by 100 MHz... AMD servers and mobile ponies will improve AMD ASP's whille initiating a deterioration in margins, perhaps painfully so, in, hitherto uncontested mobile and server spaces...
With the intro of Dirk's Athy, AMD is no longer beholden to INTC in the low, medium or high end, and consequently no longer vulnerable to the historically succesful INTC tactic of subsidizing lowend price drops with high end margins...It's a very, very different terrain now that AMD can no longer be backed into a corner at INTC's will as AMD now has superior price/performance product across all MHz ranges...In fact, when I look at the terrain today, it seems to me that it is now INTC who is being backed into a corner by AMD as evidenced by the despate, panicky even, P4 price cuts, price cuts not meant to subsidize the P3 and celeron, as historically has been the case, but price cuts attempting to stave off the distinct possibility of the P4's withering on the vine!!! |
