<as for the money, yeah its on the retail end. why? cause thats where the volume is. ask SGI where the money is...its in the mass market.>
Yeah, and guess who's the leader in volume manufacturing? Intel, that's who, with the Celeron. Even with all this talk about die sizes and whatever, the fact is that if Intel wanted to, they could outproduce AMD and drive costs even further down on sheer volume alone.
Why doesn't Intel do this? Three reasons. One, that FTC thing. Two, AMD really has nothing to lose at all, so they can afford to kamikaze their profits and go back into red ink. And three, the Pentium II/III line is already selling very well, so why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Of course, that goose's days are numbered, but Intel knows it. As soon as customers (retail and business) decide that they don't want the Pentium II/III anymore, Intel can easily shift the whole world to Celeron. This, I bet, is AMD's worst fear.
AMD may be the price leader, but they sure aren't the volume leader. The new Dresden "super-fab" may help, but I hear that it's tooled only to make K7 CPUs, and even if it's faster, no way can K7 compete against Celeron cost and volume-wise.
Tenchusatsu |
