Paul,
"I guess all that was just more McMannis and AMD HYPE !
Too bad you own shares in such a sucking company like Intel.
I'll bet it makes you grind your teeth, huh JIMBO ?"
You know, for the most part I just sit back, roll my eyes and laugh at the pi$$ing contest between AMD and Intel that you live your life for.
It's amazing that the 57 year old man that you are gets continually caught up in the hype. Sure sometimes it's fun but sometimes it just goes to far. You love to create enemies and live vicariously through them.
Now, just for a minute, let's separate the hype from the investing reality.
The hype: KNI...Intel needed to segment the Pentium III, so they sent out engineering teams to find possible apps that could benefit. They agreed to optimize the code for the Pentium, this addded say 30% speed. They they included support for KNI instructions this added maybe 10% speed. 30 + 10 = 40%. So then they can go out and hype
a 40% improvemet due to KNI. Find a few more apps to do this and get them used a benchmark and the Pentium III looks real good.
The reality: fortunately, Intel knows that Megahertz sells (TM Jim McMannis)...so just to segment the market on top of KNI, they raise the Megahertz 50 to 500. This IS significant.
The reality...Intel has no problem shipping Pentium IIIs in mass quantities, or any other chip for that matter, except maybe Dixon.
Intel has volume. This IS significant.
AMD doesn't have either volume on the K6-III and is 100MHz behind.
This is significant.
The K6-III runs at 2.4v, the Pentium III runs at 2.0/1.8. While this is significant to a technogeek like yourself, this is NOT significant
to the user.
Even more significant is the MHz race at the low end. Currently tied at 400 but shortly it will be 450-433 for AMD. A slight advantage for
AMD but let's call this area a dead heat. Problem here is that a stalemate in the low end hurts AMD a lot more than Intel because AMD as yet doesn't have enough volume on a higher end chip to make up ASPs. BUT now, unlike before, at least they have a higher ASP chip, the K6-III.
In conclusion, due to the late coming and low volumes, the K6-III will not make a significant dent in Intels middle end chip market this quarter and at best it will just be a good stop-gap until the K7 rolls around. At best it will raise AMDs ASPs high enough to push them back into the positive earning column.
The greater danger for Intel is that the Celeron sells so well it drags down overall ASPs. Remember that 433 Celeron in March and 466 in June. Not to mention the CPU-ID thingy...but I'm banking on Intel doing the right thing there.
So basically, you worry too much...
Jim |
