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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (67139)	7/31/1999 6:15:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575623

Re: and their yields will take the inevitable AMD nosedive. Could be, but the players are a little different this time around. When INTC began pushing the rambus initiative, not so thinly veiled as an independent company with a significant intel investment, they either were, or were setting themselves up to be perceived as, creating a new business model. A model similar to the one IBM used when it tried to push the industry to microchannel, asking only for full control over this piece of the technology pie and 4% royalties. It appears as thought intel may assert control over, and gain substantial royalties from, every piece of the PC. The rest of the industry joined together to resist the effort, first with VESA, then to EISA, and then to PCI. Remember, at the time IBM had always fully prescribed the motherboard structure, from the PC dawn of time. Now intel appears to be making a similar move - denying AMD access to the socket 8 / slot 1 / slot 2 architecture and specifying a new memory bus. Are there signs of an industry wide response? Motorola and AMD have been making joint announcements regarding FAB technology recently. Motorola appears to be taking a direct hand in bringing up the Dresden facility - and Motorola and IBM partner in CPU and copper technology. The issue of the importance of fast static cache is repeatedly brought up - Motorola is in volume production of fast static ram using its copper FAB technology today. If AMD gets in trouble at Dresden they get help from Motorola, and through Motorola, IBM. This hasn't been the case in the past. Meanwhile the ghost of Digital Equipment has stepped forward and contributed a proven mainframe quality bus / socket architecture with years of development behind it. The same memory companies that intel has had to pay to implement rambus are, on their own, shipping 133 and 166 MHZ DRAM and (so called) 200 and 266 DDRDRAM. Just as when IBM tried to force microchannel on the industry, many players have stepped forward to contribute to this effort. It is about technology and process, but not just Intel and AMD process. And there is a significant chunk of politics involved, as well.