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

To: Process Boy who wrote (65781)	7/16/1999 4:13:00 PM
From: grok	Respond to of 1574017

RE: "Jim - <OTOH, I'm surprised the P-III scales to 600 on .25, thought that 550 was about it. I wonder what the yields are on a 600MHZ P-III?> Pretty damn good, IMO. PB" That would be bad news for AMD. The danger for AMD is that the expected Athlon MHz lead just evaporates in the final analysis. AMD claims Athlon achieves 600 MHz in Q2, 650 in Q3, and 700 in Q4 but these will likely turn out to be parts shipped to OEMs and the PCs actually appear on the market one quarter later. So if 600 MHz PIII PCs are shipping in volume in Q3 and if Coppermine appears in PCs in Q4 at 650 MHz then Athlon has no MHz lead in 1999. Of course, maybe 0.18u and copper can get Athlon a lead in 2000 and the Willamette delay to oh-oh-one certainly opens that window but it would be another case of "wait 'till later." I think that AMD success hinges on their being able to ship reasonable volumes of parts which are clearly faster than Intel's in MHz AND benchmarks AND FP. Just being ahead in FP and arguing about benchmarks will cause AMD to lose again. The "clearly faster" speed bin is the only place that AMD can keep high ASP. Their low speed bin will be made to compete with Celeron and their mid speed bin will compete with Coopermine or PIII and Intel will find a way to win there too. Since speed bins follow normal distributions (unless there's a design problem) they will always be producing low/mid/high bins even though they will likely lose money on the low speed bins and maybe break even on the mid bin. All profit will be from the "clearly faster" bin where Intel can't offer a product. So it is critical that AMD actually achieves this bin in reasonable volume. If not, it will be more of the same for AMD investors. I have reason to believe that AMD has a strategy to avoid the situation above by moving into various niches where Intel competition may not be so tough. I've heard that AMD has "many" K7 derivatives in work. I think that "many" means at least four and I don't know what any of them are. Perhaps they will find some safe refuges where they can maintain better ASPs while not being head-to-head with the gorilla. Or, maybe, this will just over-extend AMD engineering...