Hammer Schedule is no Mystery
AMD always hits the end of their target quarter. If they are now saying Q2/03 for Clawhammer, then we should see volume shipments and sales revenues in June 03. They will hit their quarter in terms of finally putting something to the bottom line. I hope.
Actually, Barton seems more messed up right now-- you read some radically different "credible" rumor every week. It's going to be SOI, then it's not, and then it is. It will be fabbed by UMC, then it will be fabbed by Dresden (is Austin all flash now?). It makes me think that AMD suddenly got *very* serious about Barton as a way to maintain competitiveness (and market share) only when they had to slip ClawHammer another qtr (or two). This may have prompted them to pull back from the UMC plans and dedicate Dresden production to Barton.
My guess is that we will see no Bartons until Feb-March 2003. It will probably be introduced as a 3000+ part, perhaps even 3200+, depending on whether Intel stands pat. My only other worry is that this jump to 166/333MHz fsb is not the snap AMD now maintains it will be, for the reasons they originally said they would not move Athlon to a higher bus speed-- it's not a question of whether it can work, but instead whether they can validate motherboards, chipsets, and memory, or whether they will just have to wing it, like they did with the first Super-7 boards that officially supported 100MHz FSB for the K6-2 (and those first S-7 boards really sucked). It's one thing to make a board that is overclockable to a given bus frequency, another to have to eat RMAs on every board that can't do it with complete stability.
AMD needs to think about their vendors, esp. the small OEMs that are living on tight margins in a very bad PC market. These are the guys that are going to pay for a misstep to 166/333MHz systems that are sold at that rating to achieve AMD's QuantiSpeeds but that have stability problems. I also think that Barton is almost entirely an enthusiasts chip; larger OEMs will wait for ClawHammer and continue to sell Athlon XP (T-breds) in their value/budget lines. |
