Not all IT departments will be validating P4 in Q1 2002. Indeed, if Intel is right about the 3 year replacement cycle beginning in Q2 2002, the number of IT departments doing validation before Clawhammer ships could be much less than half. But most of the validation should be over with by mid-2003, so if it takes AMD as long to rally platform support for Clawhammer as for Athlon, that could be all she wrote.
Fo the corporate market, yes... not for the retail PC market. Of course, based on what I'm seeing in the way of AMD process technology, their 0.13 micron SOI process is going to result in a VERY high COG, so they may price themselves out of their traditional niche...
AMD's best move would be to guarantee that Athlon will remain an actively supported product through the 0.10-micron generation, right up to the switch to 0.07-micron. Of course, to guarantee optimum acceptance AMD would also have to commit to ramping a new 300mm wafer fab no later than mid-2003.
That would be a good start, but I honestly don't think that AMD has the capacity to do that. I also don't think they have the capital to put the capacity in place to do that.
AMD has for years served as a foil for Intel. They've always been there chugging along helping to speed up the advance of technology. Now I'm afraid that the company has delusions of grandeur, and is betting their future on moving into areas which they have no ability to compete effectively... x86-64 is a huge undertaking, and requires a level of software support unprecedented in AMD's history to gain any benefit. AMD has had more than enough trouble simply getting optimized drivers for the K7... and that's a successful retail processor. How do they expect to get software support for an unproven 64-bit processor when World + dog has already committed to the Itanium??? I honestly think the vast majority of software run on K8-core processors will be in native 32-bit... That means AMD won't be able to command a high ASP for them, which means AMD will be in serious stuff as their 0.13 micron SOI and/or isotopically pure Si process will result in a damn high cost per wafer. |
