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

To: Ali Chen who wrote (64775)	7/11/1999 3:01:00 PM
From: Fred Fahmy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1584550

Ali, 1. <As far as design is concerned, they have never been "bad". AMD's products are not what have held down this company.> Question: what makes you think this way? What is "good" design and what is "bad"? The design has to generate a product that performs competitively. Functionally, AMD CPU's have been a decent competitor. The design also has to be something that can be manufactured efficiently, not just good on paper. Whether or not AMD's manufacturing problems are related to poor designs or AMD's manufacturing processes themselves are poor, the result is the same....poor yields. I'm sure even within AMD there are design engineers blaming manufacturing/process engineers and manufacturing/process engineers blaming design engineers for their yield problems. Both of these are technical issues and until AMD launches a chip without having a major yield problem blow up in their face...I don't see how anyone can claim that they have "improved technically". Bill Jackson said that AMD has "improved technically"....and I say, prove it. <2. <There is not a single shred of evidence that AMD has improved one iota on the yield problems that have plagued every new chip announcement.> AMD is sitting on 2.3M perfectly working chips, and who knows on how many millions (10? 12?) sorted working dies. Which problem are you talking about? I am talking about the major prolonged yield problems that occur every time AMD introduces a NEW chip. The inventory AMD is sitting on is already getting dusty and is a result of earlier yield problems. I look for AMD to take a one time charge in one or two quarters to write-off some of this inventory. At any rate, I would hope by the time they are getting ready to "announce" K7 that the K6 yield problems would have been largely fixed. This is hardly what I would call a technical achievement. Let's see what kind of manufacturing/yield problems materialize with the K7. FF