Elmer,
As an AMD shareholder you might be interested in this...
realworldtech.com
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Industry News
Industry
News
1997
News for 6/20/98
AMD has been literally shocked by the popularity of their K6-2 300MHz
processor. A recent shipment of 6000 boxed units to one distributor sold out in
less than 4 hours! The popularity is apparently due to both the timing and pricing
of the release of this product. The unfortunate result of this is that you can expect
some serious availability problems over the next 4 to 6 weeks at least. Prices may
even start to creep up as vendors begin to take advantage of the supply problems.
AMD has been notified by us of this situation, and we have been assured that they
will be investigating ways to minimize the problem (though production ramp-ups
are not likely in the near term).
Riding on the crest of the K6-2 popularity are the Super 7 board manufacturers. It
seems that most of the industry experts failed to recognize how popular this
platform was going to be. Early on, VIA was unable to deliver chipset quickly
enough which resulted in availability problems for some manufacturers (most
notably FIC and Soyo), and prevented other manufacturers from being able to
release theirs on time. AOpen failed to have enough PCBs manufactured, and just
ran out, resulting in a 2-week delay in their next production run. At this time, Soyo
appears to have good availability, while FIC has spotty deliveries.
IDT is sampling their Winchip II with the 3D-Now instructions. Our sources tell
us that they are fine tuning the chip so that it will run at 100MHz bus speeds -
even the 200MHz chip! It remains to be seen how successful they will be, but if
they are able to get these to market before the end of July, we think that they have
every chance of surpassing Cyrix/National Semi for the #3 spot in processor sales
for the quarter. Let's hope they are successful!!
One other issue that has had a big effect on Super 7 board availability has been the
stability of the chipsets. Many manufacturers had put their hopes into the ALi
Aladdin V chipset, but that has proven to be a very flaky product. We already
know that SiS failed to make the grade with their 5591 chipset, and ALi appears to
be having only limited success with some motherboard manufacturers. Many
manufacturers simply abandoned their plans to use the ALi chipset after several
months of failure to produce a stable board. Even the VIA MVP3 chipset has had
it's problems, but it appears that most manufacturers have worked those out. It is
no surprise that the Super 7 offerings are very sparse at this time
Due to stability problems with the ALi Aladdin V chipset, and availability problems
with the VIA MVP3 chipset, some manufacturers elected to put all their eggs into
the Pentium II basket. Unfortunately, with the success of the Super 7 boards and
K6-2 processor the Pentium II market has lost quite a bit of steam. At this time,
only the OEMs are purchasing Pentium II boards and processors in any quantity,
and it won't be long before they realize that there is a huge market using the K6-2
chips. We wouldn't be too suprised if the other major manufacturers suddenly
tried to rush a Super 7 board to market before the end of summer. If this happens,
be careful, because there are a number of issues that current manufacturers had to
work through to get a stable design."
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The article is interesting but the author is mis-informed...AMD CAN supply......they "have" ramped up.
Jim |
