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

To: Charles R who wrote (65497)	7/15/1999 2:24:00 AM
From: Cirruslvr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573642

A few important things from CC Here are the things that stuck out when I heard them: R&D will be flat in Q3, it was up 7M this Q MG&A will be up 5-7% because of Athlon. AMD better make good use of marketing it... non-micro business book to bill ratio is above 1 with flash being especially strong such that demand is "accelerating" beyond supply and prices are going up "significantly". Expect 10% growth this Q. (AMD said that about Q2 and it was up 30% in memory.) 1M Athlons Q4 K6-X won't get any better than this. Expected ASP of $55. Expect to retain market share, but that is it. AMD needs at least 500M per Q in microprocessors to be profitible, which isn't expected until early 2000 (around the corner, AGAIN) Dresden is "on schedule" 700MHz Athlon is from .25 process! main potential Athlon limitation will be with motherboards AMD shipped 4M, but 3.7M recorded (something along those lines) with less than 10% of K6-Xs shipped being K6-IIIs --------- What I get from the CC is that AMD has the confidence to make the Athlon, but not the same confidence it will be accepted against the PIII in the marketplace. The flash thing is good, but it obviously can't negate enough of the losses. Nothing else new really stuck out.

To: Charles R who wrote (65497)	7/15/1999 2:33:00 AM
From: kapkan4u	Respond to of 1573642

<I was a bit surprised that Athlon varients for the $600 PC will not show up until mid-2000. I was expecting to see them by Q1. This indicates a longer than expected life for the K6. It is beyond me why AMD would like to ship K6s beyond Q3/Q4 if their forecasted ASPs in Q3 are mid-50s. One possible explanation is that they are moving up in speed grades but I do not feel warm and fuzzy about that happening.> Chuck, I think AMD needs to establish a premium brand in Athlon. Pushing it into the $600 PC segment in 2000 would be counter productive. At best they can build 15M Athlons in 2000. That's only about 13% of the total x86 CPU unit shipments. They should aim to sell all of them into the high-end desktop and mobile segments. On the other hand AMD needs to build k6-2/3s to keep Intel honest and prevent them from inverting the price curve in favor of Celerons. Kap.