Re: Don't you ever get discouraged when AMD's "business plan" never turns into reality?
I got involved with AMD in July of 1999 (when I joined SI). Since then, AMD has come through the semi collapse in much better financial shape than it entered it, and is still at a higher price than it was at when I first bought in.
Over the same period, Intel's financials have deteriorated substantially (though they're still very, very, good) and Intel's stock price has fallen to about half of what it was back then.
The present AMD lull. prior to AMD's moves to .13, .13 SOI, and 64-bit chips (all expected within the next 6 months), is about as bad as it can get for AMD, and about as good as it can get for Intel.
However good a time 1999 was to invest in AMD, I think right now is a lot better.
In 1999, Intel was able to frighten off the motherboard manufacturers, leading to things like Asus shipping Athlon motherboards in plain white boxes and not acknowledging that they existed on the Asus web site.
In 2002, we see Asus, MSI, and other manufacturers showing motherboards for Hammer before it's even released.
There is a lot more momentum behind AMD this time. In 1999, Intel was able to block AMD by crippling OEM and chipset/motherboard support. In 2002, the AMD platform has better support than the Intel platform! There is nothing for P4 than can compete with the NVidia integrated chipset available only for AMD systems.
Similar momentum is building for AMD in mobiles and workstation/servers. AMD's chips are just better and cheaper, especially if you don't want to turn your business upside down patching software to accommodate the fussy P4 instruction set and to work around the P4 performance flukes.
Intel has still been able to limit OEM support for high end AMD mobiles and workstation/servers, at least among the top tier OEMs, but that dam is starting to leak. AMD's lower powered mobiles and their higher performing workstation/server chips and chipsets are making it too risky for the big names to continue to bow to Intel's demands that they not sell AMD into those segments.
Maybe I'm wrong - but I was right about copper, right about Rambus, and right about Athlon back in 1999. While Elmer, Paul, etc. were all wrong. |
