What's up with AMD?
Tom's Hardware pointed out the Loser AMD K6-3 before AMD released it Q4 earnings. This report did save many AMD investors big $$$ by selling shares before it flopped on Wendesday after market close. And, please note: Don't buy any AMD chip with 'AFR66' stamp on it! Thanks a lot, Tom!!!
What's up with AMD?
www5.tomshardware.com
I can hear some the AMD-supporters getting angry with me. Why does Tom not speak of the glorious K6-3?
Well, to be really honest with you, there isn't too much to say about K6-3. Yes, we all know for quite a while what great performer K6-3 is going to be. However, this will only be valid as long as Intel isn't selling Merced for 50 bucks a piece at the same time.
In the last months AMD has told us a lot of nice stories, I could e.g. think of that one here "K6-3 is ready, we were only asked from the OEMs to not launch it before the Christmas business isn't over" - yeah, sure! The question is only which Christmas! Maybe they meant Christmas 2000!
If you ask around larger OEMs, you'll find out that there are not many, who have got a K6-3 yet. The majority were asked to wait for an evaluation sample until the end of February 1999. Can you imagine what it means if AMD is shipping samples on the end of February? This means that K6-3 will not be on the shelves before April this year. This will be four months after the launch of the Celerons for Socket370 and at least one month after the launch of Pentium III. Actually it will be four months after Christmas 1998 as well. It seems as if AMD wants to make really sure that the Christmas business is certainly over.
When I spoke to Intel last year, I tried frightening them with AMD's upcoming K6-3 and K7 processors. I always got the same answer "wait and see if AMD will be able to ship!". It seems as if Intel was right again and they were lucky too. AMD has production problems, K6-3 seems to be more difficult than it looked in the fist place, but this is not all …
AMD K6-2 'AFR66' - don't get framed!
There is a large amount of K6-2 CPUs that has a problem too. Last year AMD changed the method of certifying the clock rate of their K6-2 CPU. They pushed the limits for a successful pass further down, and as a result a lot of K6-2 CPUs failed in low to mid-quality Socket7 motherboards.
AMD noticed the mistake and changed the certification procedure back to where it used to be. The 'lower quality' CPUs from that time are now on sale marked with 'AFR66'. Be careful not to buy one of those. They are now only guaranteed to run at 66 MHz FSB. Be careful that the 'K6-2 300' or 'K6-2 333' CPU you buy does not have 'AFR66' on it, because then it might not work at 100 or 95 MHz system bus!!
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