Dan, Re: "This wasn't a bad year for CPUs, at all. AMD has experienced record units and revenue in CPUs, despite a huge marketing push by Intel, much more competitive pricing by Intel, a substantial MHZ advantage for Intel, and a legal climate that allowed Intel to use marginally criminal sales tactics. It has been a bad year for flash, which hurt Intel somewhat, but hurt AMD a lot more."
AMD was only able to get record volumes of CPUs by driving prices to the ground. They used to have a processor ASP with the K7 of over $95. Last quarter, their premium 1.4GHz chip sold for about $100, and their blended ASP was a paltry $60. It's no wonder that they were able to maintain "record volumes". The newer Athlon XP may have stabilized ASPs a little, but it's not certain what that will do for unit volumes in the future. Obviously, AMD has capitalized (like they usually do) from the shortfalls of Intel - more specifically, Intel's inability to meet the high demand for Pentium 4 CPUs. This has caused a number of OEMs and channel distributors to use AMD instead. It has been this way for years. Once Intel can meet demand, these players usually switch back, and that means that AMD could potentially revert back to huge losses next quarter.
In terms of megahertz advantage, AMD may have bought themselves time with their Quantispeed garbage, but that will eventually die out as soon as they can't prove a performance advantage at their rated numbers (and Northwood very well may topple AMD's straw house).
Lastly, I have no idea how you figure on criminal sales tactics. If you have any proof, please present it. Otherwise, keep your lies to yourself.
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