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Technology Stocks : Intel Strategy for Achieving Wealth and Off Topic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sonny McWilliams who wrote (23930)	6/25/1999 10:16:00 AM
From: musea	Respond to of 27012

Sonny, Back in the 1980s, AMD was producing 286 chips under license from Intel. The future looked limited but reasonably good for them at that time. They were shipping 12MHz chips when Intel was shipping 8MHz. I don't know what happened with the 386, but the real trouble with Intel started with the 486. AMD claimed first that they had a license, then they claimed that they had a design that didn't infringe. The upshot of all of this was that they poured money and design resources into their own Pentium-class design, the K5. This effort took much longer than expected (I remember hearing the lead architect talk at the Microprocessor Forum many years ago and he said something like, "Hey, it's x86. How hard can it be?" They seem to have found out.) When they had problems with the K5 they went outside and paid an enormous sum of money for NexGen and their design team. We thought AMD was dead at that point, because they paid something like $800 million for NexGen. At the time, I thought that it was a reasonable thing for Jerry Sanders to do. If the purchase didn't pan out then AMD was probably on the death spiral anyway. If it did pay off then $800 million would seem cheap in retrospect. I never expected the story to play out for as long as it has. Well. Some possibly unwanted AMD history. -musea