Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices Message Board

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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: StockMan who wrote (36904)	9/9/1998 10:10:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) of 1570432

Stocky, Let me just say that they are "good enough". Use your noggin' a little. Last quarter AMD was mainly on .35u strugglin' to get to .25u and when the started fabing 266s and 300s on .25u they were getting poor yields. Likely in the teens and 20s to begin with. Not much better with .35u when pushing the highest speed grades. Most of the chips they made last quarter I estimate at a cost of $65/chip. A lot of chips were sold at NO profit. You know what my estimate is per chip for this quarter, $35. With the ASP moving toward $100...well you figure it out. Then about April someone figured out the yield problems and since it takes about 10 weeks to finish a chip...some of the first fixed .25u wafers started to be tested. Voila...about the first week of June, yields went way up....shortly before that the K6-2 was introduced. Shortly after that AMD went all .25u. Even with crummy yields and only a few weeks at the high yields AMD darn near turned a profit on the K6 in the 2nd quarter. The entire 3rd quarter has been on .25u with "good" yields. AMD is cranking out a lot of chips...and ASPs have been rising throughout the quarter overall. K6-2s will nearly replace the K6 in about a month. I do not know how many chips AMD is selling but I suspect the K6-2s are selling well or AMD is going to have one heck of a stock pile of chips. One of my biggest concerns, to be honest is the effect on K6-2 sales in the last couple weeks by the Celeron A. Sales to Intel only boxmakers like Dell and Gateway probably haven't hurt the K6 but the Pentium II. Likewise for the integrated boxmakers like HP, IBM and Compaq but the Celeron A could prevent some ordering of K6-2s. I've even heard that Gateway has cancelled some Pentium II orders in favor of Celeron As, BTW. At 350 (K6) while the Celeron A is still at 333 and since these boxmakers don't overclock, the K6 still has a nice niche...I expect Compaq and HP to follow IBM with a 350 K6-2 box. Where the Celeron A will really hurt the K6-2 for now is with the hobbiest/overclocker market, only 5% of the market they say but these guys are the cutting edge and are definitely hyped on getting a "Celeron A-450" for the cost of the 300A. I suspect right now that Intel is capacity restrained with the Celeron A . Especially the 300A. That will help AMD for a while longer. Yields should be "excellent" for this chip by the way based on it's ability to run at 450 MHz. (I've only heard of 3 instances where it wouldn't). SO basically you take a chip that could be a 450 and down bin it to 300 and yields ought to be pretty darn good. One interesting point about why the Celeron A overclocks so well...since the L2 is in the same high priced silicon as the cpu, it supposedly is very high quality L2 vs that which Intel uses for the 512k cache of the Pentium II. Like I said...the Celeron A is a superior chip to the Pentium II. Intel has to "dumb" benchmark it to get people to think it's a lesser chip. Jim

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