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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (67152)	7/31/1999 8:22:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1588367

Re: First, AMD is a RAMBUS LICENSEE - Intel is not denying ANYBODY Of course intel wants everyone using rambus - they get a chunk of the royalties and no one else has the performance advantage of low latency memory. I certainly did not mean to imply that there was any moral issue related to intel's denying AMD the Slot 1 / Slot 2 technology, only that as a business strategy, it seems to have backfired. Unlike rambus vs. SDRAM, the post socket 7 technology may have some benefits, and AMD would have been happy to pay a reasonable royalty to gain access to that technology. Intel, for perfectly legitimate business reasons decided that it was more to its advantage to force AMD to develop its own bus technology - instead they seem to have been given a bus architecture better and more proven than intel's. So now AMD has what may be the better bus, and intel gets no royalties. Not an immoral strategy, just a failed one. There isn't anything non-profit or altruistic about AMD (well, not intentionally, they do seem to be non-profit this year ;-) I'm not in love with AMD, but I see a company that seems to have a real shot at taking intel's most profitable business away from it. And AMD has a present valuation 100 times less than intel. Intel is a fantastic company that appears to have had two pieces of bad luck recently - rambus and copper. AMD is a less impressive company that has had three pieces of good luck recently - either their copper process or a process given them by Motorola/IBM, what appears to be pretty much the gift of the EV6 bus, and the rapid increase in performance of SDRAM/DDRDRAM. These circumstances may not continue. AMD has a brilliant and consistent history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, while intel seems to always have the next generation of technology ready to go when it's needed. Still... if the present picture does not change, I could see AMD in January being worth 10 to 25% as much as intel is now. So it is fun, and kind of exciting, and yes, I have risked (and I do mean risked!) some money in expectation of this (positive for AMD) outcome. When you are as far down as AMD is now, there is a lot of room to go up.