I'm expecting a very substantial launch of Northwood.
In the past 24 months, Intel has spent $15 Billion expanding their chipmaking capacity - that's enough to build from scratch, then equip, 7 Dresden sized FABs.
Northwood isn't much bigger than Athlon, so Intel had damn well better be able to crank out boatloads of the things at this point.
But I don't think Northwood will make things that much better for Intel. The problem for Intel is now more a marketing one than a production or performance one. They can't price the 1.8GHZ and 2GHZ P4s too high, or they lose sales to Athlon XP, and they can't price them too low, or people will refuse to pay the price Intel has to charge for the top of the line 2.2GHZ chips.
Intel has to get high prices for the 2.2GHZ chips, or they'll never come close to getting back the money they just spent on all those FABS.
And Intel can no longer afford to trash desktop ASPs - AMD's Athlon based mobile chip is a better notebook solution than Intel's P4 based solution can be. AMD's volume (one and two processor) workstation/server solution is also better, but that's a small market and a conservative one, so it's less susceptible to AMD encroachment.
This marketing squeeze, and Intel's need for high ASPs to cover the costs of its FABs means that Intel needs to be close to 2.5GHZ before AMD gets beyond the 2000+, or they're going to have revenue problems even if faced only with Athlon 2000+ CPUs. There is also AMD's upcoming move to .13. AMD has been quite coy about making any performance predictions about "plain" (not SOI) .13 Athlon.
Remember that AMD tricked Intel into thinking that Athlon on .18 wouldn't get past 800mhz. When Intel started shipping .18 coppermines and knew they could get to 1GHZ, they were sure they would be able to easily finish off AMD and its 800mhz Athlons. It didn't work out as Intel expected, to say the least.
Later in the year, AMD will be introducing its SOI process that will put even more pressure on Intel - particularly in mobile, multi-processor, and corporate-style small footprint PCs. The SOI Athlons may or may not run a lot faster than Northwoods, they will certainly run cooler.
If AMD has any significant success with SOI, then Intel will find itself sitting on a bunch of obsolete FABs that it just paid $15 Billion to equip - and Intel will have to do a rush rebuild, at an unexpected cost of $5 Billion or so on top of the $6 Billion or so it was expecting to spend or see its revenues collapse.
So, I do expect a very large volume of Northwoods next month, but I don't see it as a significant threat to AMD. |
