You made some good points about C6 180-200 but may be off the mark on some of your other points, IMO.
WinChip 2 has been verified and is already sampling to customers. The ability to ramp the part is still uncertain but IDT now has IBM as a fab partner. The part is said to be 40% smaller than AMD's K6+ so it SHOULD yield better and be more easily produced. Of course, don't bank on it until IDTI delivers something to show.
IDT recently announced a new family of 32 bit MIPS parts that were designed internally rather than at QED. The claim for these parts is that they deliver the lowest cost per/performance in the industry. You can't believe everything you read in product announcements but IDTI has a fine reputation so far for delivering as the leader in MIPS.
Less than 25% of IDT's business is in SRAMs and most of that is in specialty SRAMs. An insignificant amount is in PC cache SRAM.
My reaction to the statements that the shortfall in sales was due to softness in SRAM was that this is largely an excuse to cover up for having mis-fired on the ramp of volume production and higher Mhz ratings of the C6 - Lame, Lame , Lame.
I agree that IDTI has been long on promises and short on delivery.
Management grossly miscalculated on what the market wanted in the X86 market and how fast their ramp would be.
They also misjudged the ability to design Fusion memory into applications to gain significant benefit. Fusion is still a reality but has not become a major contributor.
IDT miscalculated on the development of a 3D graphics processor. A part was designed for introduction this Spring but by the time it was ready it was too little, too late for the market. Intel, 3Dfx, Rendition, S3, and others have come out with 3D chips that apparently would beat the IDT 3D chip's performance and are priced at or bellow the price they intended to come out at.
The C6 was supposed to be in volume production last fall. The amount of production last fall was a joke and hardly classified as more than a test run. The part was supposed to have scaled to 240 Mhz and higher speed grades by late last year as well. That didn't happen and IDT was left with too few parts that met the sweet spot of market demand. My "execution rating": 3-Ss - Sick, sick, sick.
No doubt about it, IDTI management has twice as much to prove now than they did a year ago: They spent huge sums of money on new production facilities and have failed to produce parts profitably. They spent a large percentage of revenue on R & D and have failed to generate enough winning designs to turn the company around. And they have consistently fallen short for several quarters on promises for sales and earnings growth.
Is there any question why the stock has reached a near the 52 week low? We should have some tee shirts made up with the word IDioTs across the front and a stock graph on the back to present to management at the annual meeting!
Maybe things will finally turn around. The "darkest hour is (sometimes) right before the dawn". But do we trust management to begin walking the walk and talking the talk?
At this price, IDTI looks attractive if they have just a fair chance of delivering on their current promises. But I can't blame you for still being out of it. |
