Dear Paul:
Since you didn't blast me about real data, you can't! It just goes to show how much you are in denial about Intel's worsening situation. Guessing what I think, is a poor substitute. You are liable to be very wrong almost all of the time.
I am not worried. I just think that where Intel used to talk of CPU unit sales in a quarter, they are now talking shipments. Since you need to ship before you sell and the opposite is not true, you need more than shipments to sell, you need demand. Demand must not be as good or Intel would still be talking units sold. What happened? Intel shipped more P4s than it sold? They talked of shipping 4 million P4s. But only about 2 million sold (just take the comment that twice as many sold in Q2 than in Q1 and the overall consensus was that they sold less than 1 million in Q1) leaving 2 million shipped without being sold (if they stayed to their schedule). I assume that by the middle of Q2, they noticed this and cut prices by 50%. Even so, only a small additional sold of about 1 million. A cut in P3 production of 1 million and a slowdown in the P4 ramp to 3 million this quarter yields the increase of 1 million shipped, but no gain in sales (as in the Mercury numbers of WW CPU sales)(this might be a gain only to the US (gain of 6%) but, less than that overall). AMD reported sales of 7.7 million units where Intel did not report any unit sales figures but, according to Mercury and all other accounts, Intel sales were flat at about 27 million.
This fits all of the facts by both sides and third party numbers. This looks like Q3 may be less rosy for Intel than AMD. If AMD's assumptions (called conservative or pessimistic) are correct, disaster for Intel looms. OTOH, if Intel's assumptions (called rosy or optomistic) are correct, AMD will be a stellar performer.
Pete |
