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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: kash johal who wrote (57220)	5/5/1999 3:20:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) of 1572270

Ref- "Why do you have a problem with this picture" The K-6/Celoron Scenario will be repeated for the following reasons. IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY THAT THE K-7 WILL BE PERCEIVED AS EQUIVALENT TO INTEL'S BEST PRODUCT. A. The K-7 will only be marginally superior to the PII at the the same clock speed. The K-7 CPU is a significant evolutionary enhancement over the K-6/Pentium II.It has 3 ALU units allowing an integer operation in 0.33 clocks as opposed to 0.5 clocks. The Dual FPU will allow a floating point calculation in 1.5 clocks as opposed to 3 clocks. Unfortunately for most work the CPU is not the bottleneck. A L2 cache miss gives a penalty of 30-60 clocks. So the more elegant CPU microarchitecture is for naught. It will give a marginal improvement at the same clock rate for some floating point intensive benchmarks. I asserted this in December 98, and rumored K-7 benchmarks fit my beliefs. B. The K-7 will be perceived as inferior to PIII. The SSE instructions can reduce the incidence of L2 cache miss, and so on benchmarks written for the PIII, the K-7 will be toast[ eg Photoshop] The intense Intel media campaign will further feed this perception, and given the large amount of announced software for SSE, the K-7 will be fighting an uphill battle, and may end up as perceived as only equivalent to the existing PII/Celeron. C. The Intel 0.18 micron process has already shipped production quantities of Dixon. So the Coppermine will have a smoothly running process.[ The Coppermine is the cache Celeron equivalent of PIII]. If this design ramps up as smoothly as the cache version Celeron, Intel will be shipping a PIII at 700MHz by fall with an on chip cache. AMD is at least 6 months behind production of 0.18micron. D. The new infrastructure for K-7 will have have the inevitable start-up technical glitches compounding AMD's problems. It is very unlikely that AMD will make significant penetration in the server marketplace for a year or so because of the new infrastructure. THE UNIT COST [ VARIABLE COST ] FOR THE K-6 WILL BE HIGHER THAN FOR COPPERMINE A. The K-7 will have a cartridge and off chip cache. The Coppermine will not. Add $20-40 to AMD's cost. B. Intel has leveraged its economy of scale, is further along the learning curve and will continue to have lower chip costs than AMD for the immediate future. C. The new K-7 infrastructure will inevitably be more expensive because of lower volumes and being behind on the learning curve. THUS THE K-6/CELERON BATLLE GETS REPLAYED. SINCE THE K-7 WILL BE PERCEIVED AS INFERIOR, AMD IS FORCED TO CUT PRICES OF K-7 AND ITS SUPPORTING INFRASTRUCTURE SIGNIFICANTLY BELOW THAT OF INTEL. UNFORTUNATELY INTEL's COSTS ARE A LOT LOWER, ALLOWING IT LATITUDE IN SETTING PRICES AT A LEVEL WHERE IF AMD GETS ANY SIGNIFICANT MARKET SHARE, AMD WILL BLEED TO DEATH.

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