> This is 20/20 hindsight. Who would have thought Intel would have screwed
> up as bad as they did. They handed profitability to AMD on a silver platter.
This may be 20/20 hindsight now, but when I believed it a year ago, it was 20/20 foresight.
> Imagine if Intel had not initiated the race to 1.0 GHz.
Then AMD would have had a rather solid performance advantage. In full niceguaic fashion, I point out that they would have had a solid edge and, in fact, they would have fabbed more parts if they didn't have to focus as much on ramping frequency.
> And it didn't hurt that AMD made the transition to 0.18-micron
> in November 1999 instead of Q1 2000 as they had previously announced.
Um, what? The 180nm transition was not ahead of schedule, to my memory. Any source on this?
The Coppermine, though superior in some respects, was an overall weaker processor compared to the K75. It was inherently harder to ramp, and this would have guaranteed at least some of the things you perceive as "screw-ups", such as the "vapour releases" at most speed grades of the product. And this isn't hindsight. It's what I solidly believed as much as a year and a half ago. Well, except that both Intel and AMD actually executed far, far beneath my expectations, making loads of mistakes that really made them look stupid.
-JC |
