Re: But what makes you think AMD's marketing department can even get a $100 premium for a 64-bit marketing bullet?
I think they can get a $100 premium over what they'd get for a 32-bit Athlon. It may be tough for even for Intel to get much more than $125 for a 32-bit chip next year.
It really looks like the days of big prices for any CPU are fading. It started with desktops, is spreading to mobile, and I still don't see why Intel is slashing Xeon prices - but they are.
The recent mobile announcements from Intel seem to indicate that there won't be any $3,500 notebooks with $1,000 of that going for the CPU anymore. What would have been a $700 sale for Intel last fall will be a $300 sale this fall.
That certainly does block AMD from making any windfall profits from the 1.2GHZ Athlon 4s, but at what cost to Intel? How many people would have paid big bucks for an AMD notebook, anyway? And AMD will still be ecstatic to net $175 for a 1.2GHZ A4 - their revenue requirements and expectations are quite low.
The only possibility I see for bringing industry revenues back to any where near what they were last year would be a strong push towards dual processor systems. It would help Intel and it would help AMD by sopping up the huge excess in capacity that has been built up. And, since Microsoft gets twice as much money for the dual processor version of WindowsXP, it would help Microsoft, too.
It doesn't seem that more than a handful of buyers are willing to pay the $1,000 extra for speed that they once would (which put $600 in Intel's pockets, instead of the net $200 that even high end processors are heading for. But if you can convince buyers they need 2 processors, at least you can pick up $400 from each box sold.
But I've seen no evidence at all that a push for dual processor desktops is underway.
C'est la guerre. |
