I sure hope AMD can make us rich. I hope that they can get their
CPU's up to speed by Jan next year. I now have way too many Jan 15
calls, and they are getting cheaper every day. It seems that they
won't make the mistake the Cyrix did, and try to sell their chips
for too much. They need to sell them to get rid of them. Whatever
price that takes. If there isn't a price that gets rid of them.
But they do need to work on some cheap chips. Cyrix has the 5gx86
which contains graphics, sound, and soon modem hardware on the
same chips as the CPU. The chip was designed to be low power, and
cheap. I beleive that there is a large untaped market out there
for cheap systems, and if this is true, then AMD should be in a
position to take advantage of it. The 5k86 is not a chips for
this as it is not designed specifically to be cheap, and reduce
M/B costs like the 5gx86. The word is that Cyrix plans to make
a 6gx86 for higher power cheap systems as well. These chips also
have ram controllers on the chip. To make us rich with the high
end market, AMD will have to make chips faster than Intels, so
that they can demand premium prices for them. They also have to
keep their costs below Intels to prevent a price war. I doubt
that AMD or Cyrix will be able to do these things, but I am
confident that they both will be able to get close to Intel
performance for a while, and gain some market share. If AMD gains
the market share that they had with their 386s, and then their
486s, and their Flash memory problems are solved, and no new
problems arrize, then their stocks should be back up to the $30's
by next year at least. 3x investment in one year isn't bad. Anyways,
who knows, Intel might come out with 0.18u chips soon, and if
AMD doesn't have it at the same time, then their costs will be
to high to compete. All three of these companies are working their
hardest to come out with the best first, and the battles will
continue for a long time. We'll just have to wait and see what
happens with the stock prices.
Terje |
