Lot's of negative commentary yesterday. Here are some opposing views from a 'biased' perspective. I am currently long Cyrix, and have no position in Intel and AMD.
1). There is no big inventory problem because the inventory has been sold out. Recent .35u mask 6x86 in the market give evidence to the fact that current parts have only recently been manufactured.
2) The stock price action is tax loss primarily. Let's look realistically at the price. High in the hi forties, low in the 11's, current price 18. Much closer to the low than the high, and I suspect, weak hands were in more at the high. They need the losses to offset the gains.
3) MMX from Intel. Yes they will probably blitz ads, but the game buying season is over, and that is what the MMX is for,- Xmas, kids with multimedia, and games. The next quarters will have business purchasers, and general home use. The fact is that the game market is a limited life and cyclic market. And pizazzy boxes don't always sell even if they are advertized as the hottest item. Witness the big-screeen GW2000's. Atari, sorry, now JTS and only a hard drive company, will also attest to this. Most people use their computers for word processing, spread sheets, database, etc, especially corporations. So MMX is in the wrong season. And it is in the wrong implimemtation. 50 clock cycles to shift between FPU and MMX for the INTC incarnation. Cyrix implimentation is one clock cycle. (From a tech post I saw somewhere but don't have immediate access to.)
4) Which way is Intel going? p55c or PPro? Klamath will be out in maybe 3rd quarter. Either you argue that people are sophisitcated so they will know that the p55c with MMX implimentation offers 0-10% increase on current core adult program/business use and won't be impressed with Intel implimentation, or they won't really know what MMX is anymore than they know what a microprocesser is, and they will see a $700 higher price on a p200 mmx more than a p-200+ Cyrix (with a $200 upgrade path to a game machine before the mMX enabled software will hit the market, and before next Xmas season,) and they will say I think I'll only spend $1500 instead of $3000 for a fully loaded machine. We may be reaching a temporary saturation point for the majority of computer purchasers who are asking what real improvements are you going to get for your money? What real improvements will Office '97 offer over Office '95. When the ramp up of the Windows GUI was in full swing between 1990-1995, we had a lot of people buying GUI capable machines. Now we are hearing, the question,- "do we really need all that stuff, or do we need a thin client instead?" WHat was may not be what we will see in the future.
4) I agree that IBM is both foxy and stupid (how's that for a contradiction). You would think that they would want to make sure that Cyrix survives, because it does offer them the opportunity to break the Intel monopoly, but, by the way they are acting, it doesn't appear that they care. On the otherhand, maybe they are just biding their time until they think that Cyrix gets exhausted from having to run to compete with Intel, and then they step in, buy Cyrix, use the Cyrix technology and the IBM fab capacity to capitalize on all the up front sacrifice Cyrix (and it's shareholders!!!) expended. |
