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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kapkan4u who wrote (61712)	6/14/1999 2:30:00 AM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1584604

Kap, "Rising k6 prices are consistent with AMD allocating more wafers to K7 production." This, I believe, is an accurate statement. I have stated this about a month back on this forum. To be sure, I went on a wild goose chase more recently believing bogus postings from Sharky, Paul and other Intel die-hards and making me think that they were producing lot more K6s than I initially thought they were. As far as I can tell there is very little inventory and the K6 sales for the quarter should be close to 5M. HP cleared out most of the 350 speed grade parts and Compaq and LG and a few other Asian guys seems to have cleared out the rest of the sub-400 MHz parts. What AMD has left now are high speed grade parts and they should do reasonably well next quarter holding a small amount of inventory. On the otherhand, Intel is trying to get rid of their inventory by winning market share might be duking it out with NSM - the big beneficiary: E-Machines. Probable victims - Rise and IDT. If you have heard the NSM conf call you will notice that they are sitting on quite a few parts and probably will continue to dump them at E-Machines and Packard Bell - mostly Intel houses of late. So, net-net, AMD has very little to lose going forward. Assuming an ASP of $450 between the blended K7 speed grades we are talking about a profit of close to $300 a chip. AMD will have to sell 5 high-MHz K6s to make that much profit. I estimate that AMD is producing approximately 300Ku of raw K7 die this quarter. A good chunk of the units will obviously be lost due to low early yields and AMD may not be able to package and test these many units in short order because of capacity and ramp issues but I will go out on the limb and say that AMD will ship a lot more K7s than any analyst is forecasting this Q and next Q. And AMD will post numbers much better than consensus. The only thing that I am quite leery about is unanticipated problem with bugs or yields. I have ramped a few semiconductor products in my life and the ramp I think is happening at AMD is pretty scary. Cautiously optimistic, Chuck