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

To: Process Boy who wrote (62244)	6/17/1999 10:52:00 PM
From: Yougang Xiao	Respond to of 1571691

Pentium III delays could give AMD the lead By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com June 17, 1999, 5:45 p.m. PT URL: news.com A two-month delay to Intel's "Coppermine" Pentium III chip could mean that AMD will take the performance crown in desktop processors. The potential turnabout will likely become one of the more closely watched issues for the personal computer market during the second half of the year and provide an opportunity for Advanced Micro Devices to crawl out of the red. In many ways, the opportunity is a product of the respective road maps of the two companies. The delay to Coppermine--a high performance version of the Pentium III--means that the chip will not appear until November, which may mean that it will not appear in many PCs this year. Meanwhile, the summer release of the K7 means that AMD will have several months to market the new chip. The K7 is expected to outperform standard Pentium IIIs but be closer to Coppermine. "Assuming AMD should manage not to trip up and actually deliver the product, AMD will have the fastest PCs," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. If all goes well for the company, "AMD will be able to maintain that position until the end of 1999 and into 2000." Intel today confirmed that it will delay the 600-MHz Coppermine Pentium III processor from September to November. Faster than current Pentium IIIs, Coppermine will also be built on the more advanced 0.18-micron manufacturing process and contain 256KB of integrated secondary cache. Standard Pentium IIIs are built on the less-advanced 0.25-micron process and contain more, but slower secondary cache memory. In addition, the first Pentium IIIs for notebooks, still due in September, will only come out at 500 MHz. The 600-MHz version will be delayed to November as well. Intel has delayed the release of Coppermine because of lower yields, said an Intel spokesman. Intel is getting adequate yields of Coppermine at 500 MHz but not at 600 Mhz. Because of the delay, Intel will now release a standard Pentium III running at 600 MHz in the summer. Under different circumstances, the delays might be irrelevant, but AMD is currently preparing to release its K7 processor. The chip will be announced later this month and start to roll out in volumes later in the zummer at speeds of 500 MHz, 550 MHz and 600 MHz, said several sources. Benchmarks released by AMD recently show that the chip will outperform the Pentium III and even the Xeon processor on certain benchmarks. "It does seem likely that the K7 will be no slower than the Pentium III. It is also clear that, unlike the situation with the K6, the K7 will be no laggard in floating point and multimedia performance," wrote Michael Slater in a recent Microprocessor Watch newsletter. The Coppermine delay essentially lets AMD exploit the advantages of the K7, noted Brookwood. With Coppermine postponed, AMD can more effectively claim to have the superior processor. The headroom built into the K7 also gives the company the means to keep up with, or potentially even overtake, Intel in clock speed. More interestingly, the summer release of the K7 means that K7 PCs will come out this year. PC makers typically don't like developing new models in the fourth quarter, added Brookwood, which means they could delay Coppermine units until 2000. The expected slowdown in buying because of the Y2K bug won't help Intel either.