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

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (62419)	6/19/1999 3:11:00 AM
From: Yougang Xiao	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1583805

Cirruslvr: Concerning your thoughts on Athlon 3 counter points to your pro-Athlon post 1. The problem with Athlon is that there is no love at first sight for such name. Few made fuss over “Lucent” or “Pentium.” If AMD came up with a better, innovative name, I guess that the “for” crowd would be much larger and only few may against the complete replacement of K7. 2. The “lon” thing, just as you said, gives the impression that AMD lacks imagination, still maintains copycat mentality, and degrades K7 to Celeron status. 3. Intel is doing wonderful business in greater China area, partly because both Pentium and Celeron sound and look great in Mandarin Chinese. Phonetically, Athlon is “ai shi lang” in Mandarin, which can be translated into “love dead wolf”, simply awful!!

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (62419)	6/19/1999 3:22:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1583805

About that name "Athlon", I agree with everything you said. I'll just put another viewpoint on things. Brand name recognition is king. No matter how many benchmarks AMD publishes on K6, K6-2, K6-III, even 3DNow!, the fact is that people associate K-whatever with el-cheapo technology. (Please don't flame me, this has nothing to do with merit, only consumer perception.) Now AMD has a chance to try and take the performance crown away from Intel. What better way to make an impact than to create a new brand name and immediately associate it with blazing-fast performance? Everyone is talking about how the tables have turned, that this is a new revolution, yada yada. Well, if AMD wants this to be a new revolution, they not going to hail the revolution with a mere evolutionary name like K7. Now all AMD needs is a good advertising campaign. I remember how effective Apple's "Pentium II on a snail" commercials were in convincing people that PowerPC was twice as fast, even if that performance advantage was only demonstrated on one synthetic benchmark that meant squat. Perhaps AMD's advertising department is thinking along similar lines, i.e. take the brand name that everyone knows, which is Pentium, and trash it. As for how ridiculous the name "Athlon" sounds, well, I remember all of the jokes that went around when the "Pentium" brand name was first invented. Of course, Intel got the last laugh, since the name "Pentium" became as ubiquitous as "Coca-Cola". In any case, any new brand name is going to sound idiotic at first. But if AMD's marketing department does a good job, no one will be laughing at that name come year 2000. Of course, AMD's marketing seems to be as effective as Gore's campaign managers, but at least AMD has something of substance to work with. Tenchusatsu