Buggi,
Maybe I should qualify the 180 degree. CompUSA desktops were never as dominated by AMD as they were at BestBuy or Circuit City in recent months. CompUSA always had more Intel desktops. See my last post on the subject here:
Message 21949462
This time, my rough count was something like 4:1 in Intel favor on the desktop side.
As I said, the notebook situation shows slow but steady progress. Every time I am there, I seem to notice more Turion notebooks.
As far as Q1, I think AMD will outperform the forecast (of flat to slightly down) by being slightly up (1 to 3% from Q4). That will still be a great result, and you can even call it a blowout vs. Intel's expected result, but not on sequential basis.
My concern primarily is that at the time AMD could have sold more (January, February), the supply was constrainted. Now when the supply is increasing (and adequate), Intel is slashing prices, and has probably stolen some sales from AMD.
So we may have had AMD capacity constrained for some 4 months (November to February), which coincided with stock highs. Are we now entering period like we did in Q4 2000, when capacity constrains suddenly completely disappeared, Intel slashed prices, and market did not grow much?
Are we entering a period when the best place, as far as CPU makers is to be on the sidelines? I have a strage feeling that Intel will see low teens in the next 6 months, Analysts will keep saying how bad the market is, and AMD will either go nowhere, or will go down in sympathy.
Joe |
