Re: Circuit City in Poughkeepsie N.Y. yesterday.
I was in a SAMS's club over the weekend.
They had skids of Celeron 733, Duron 850, PIII 1GHZ, Athlon 1.1GHZ, Athlon 1.3GHZ, no P4, 2 Intel notebooks.
I think these stores have become pretty sensitive to deals, and restock with a truckload of "what's on sale" as needed. So, recently, SAM's got a deal on mostly AMD systems while Circuit City got a deal on a load of Intel systems. The news about 5 AMD notebooks out of 20 is great for AMD. Most of the stores I've visited have about half their displays stocked and half the displays "last one" remainders. Given the newness of AMD in the notebook market those 5 SKUs could well indicate more than 25% of current activity.
The missing AMD desktops is bad news, unless it was just because they sold out first and CC was hesitant to bring in more stock until they had unloaded those remainders (Intel PCs) - but that would be more than a little too good to be true.
Another possibility to consider (though probably only briefly) is that AMD could be beginning to bump up against capacity constraints again. The mobile palominos are larger than the thunderbirds and probably don't yield as well yet, so AMD's effective unit capacity is likely flat or even down a little this quarter, despite Dresden continuing to ramp, and now they have to fill what appears to be a rather astonishing number of orders for those larger mobile chips, as well as covering ongoing desktop orders. Add to that orders for a few thousand server chips, and they may actually be in a sold out condition.
Regards,
Dan |
