Jim, you better check your sources with Gabrielle. She thinks the 400 K6-2 wont be out until next year!!!
joey
Market Downturn Rains On
AMD's Parade
(08/27/98; 7:45 p.m. ET)
By Gabrielle Jonas, TechInvestor
Advanced Micro Devices was the victim of unlucky
timing Thursday, releasing its new chips into a hostile
stock market.
As investors -- frightened by Russia's spiraling
downturn -- fled technology stocks in droves, AMD
trotted out its new 350-MHz K6-2 processors to an
unappreciative audience.
The AMD (company profile) chips are comparable to
Intel's 350-MHz Pentium IIs in terms of performance
on mainstream business applications, said S. Atiq Raza,
AMD's president and chief technical officer.
But the announcement did little to help AMD stock.
Just before market close, AMD [AMD] shares were
off 1 5/16 at 15 11/16, a loss of 8 percent, while Intel
[INTC] had fallen 2 13/16 to 80 13/16, down just over
3 percent.
"We would have seen a slight uptick around that
announcement today, if hadn't been for the
macroeconomic conditions," said Paul Mansky, a chip
analyst at Piper Jaffray. "We still may, once people
come back to the water trough."
The chip sector has been hit particularly hard this year,
due to a slowing of PC demand, particularly in Asia.
Last week, influential Merrill Lynch chip analyst Tom
Kurlak downgraded AMD competitors Intel and Texas
Instruments, sending shares of both semiconductor
companies down.
Kurlak's downgrade, as well as a recent profit warning
from National Semiconductor, suggests that optimism
about a recovery as the buying season kicks in may be
premature.
But AMD's longer-term timing is also off, thanks to
product delays. The 350-MHz K6-2 was supposed to
be delivered eight weeks ago, and now AMD's
400-MHz and 450-MHz chips won't arrive until the
first quarter of next year, missing the Christmas buying
season.
Mansky is skeptical of AMD's ability to supply the
350-MHz chip in volume, which could limit the number
of PC makers that adopt the chip, despite its price point
of 20 percent to 30 percent lower than the Pentium II.
In addition, Intel's aggressive move into the sub-$1,500
PC market is slowly eroding AMD's price advantage
there.
The first system to use AMD's 350-MHz processor is
IBM's Aptiva E4N, also announced Thursday. Other
PC vendors such as Acer, Compaq, CTX, and Fujitsu
will soon introduce systems based on the chip.
Brian Connors, vice president of World Wide IBM
Aptiva Brand, praised the processor's high quality and
price. The 350-MHz K6-2 processor is selling for
$317 in 1,000-unit batches.
|
