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

To: Charles R who wrote (68633)	8/12/1999 3:47:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573004

RE:"K6 PCOAC"... Haven't heard that before. Very interesting. Jim

To: Charles R who wrote (68633)	8/12/1999 3:51:00 PM
From: Yougang Xiao	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573004

Gary Bixler Interview: He's the Athlon marketing guy. Major points: 1. Confirmed that AMD has an integrated MPU based on K6. 2. 30% market share in 2001 is on conservative side. idgnet.com AMD's Athlon: Will lightning strike twice? by Clare Haney, IDG News Service\Hong Kong Bureau August 12, 1999 Once again, the microprocessor race is Advanced Micro Devices' to lose. On Monday, AMD announced its new Athlon family of processors, including one 650MHz version that the company says is the fastest x86-type processor on the market. AMD is hoping that the Athlon will boost the company out of its current position as a seller of cheap PC chips to a supplier of processors for higher-end workstations and servers. In short, AMD has to deliver on its promise that the Athlon can compete with the best processors chip giant Intel Corp. has to offer. The bold claims marking the Athlon's launch are reminiscent of those AMD made a couple of years ago when the company announced its K6 family in a bid to re-establish itself in the PC processor market. Although the K6-2 and K6-III processors were well received, their rollout has been consistently plagued by manufacturing and design problems. With the Athlon, AMD hopes to reassure its partners and customers that history isn't going to repeat itself. IDG News Service sat down yesterday with Gary Bixler, Athlon marketing manager at AMD's Computation Products Group. Based in Austin, Texas, Bixler talked about the challenges facing AMD and its new chip. He was in Hong Kong for the local launch of Athlon. IDGNS: How can you avoid the kind of manufacturing problems you had with K6 as you bring Athlon to market? How can you convince customers that such problems won't arise again? Gary Bixler (GB): We'll prove it in the marketplace over a long time. We expect people to be skeptical and that we'll keep getting questions like these until we can demonstrate our ability to deliver Athlon on a regular basis in the right quantities. Athlon is a brand-new design for us, it has no relationship to the K6 design. K6, which came from our NexGen acquisition, had a very different design goal. It was about how much performance we could get at a given frequency, which made it difficult for us to scale to higher frequencies and was what caused us (manufacturing) yield difficulties. Our number one design goal with Athlon is scaling to very high frequencies. Our design team is led by the key designer behind the Alpha chip, the fastest chip in the world, so that's the mind set of our development team. IDGNS: What's involved in the switch to 0.18-micron manufacturing and how important is it to Athlon? GB: 0.18-micron manufacturing is going to be a very key part of our Athlon strategy and will help us maintain our frequency advantage. At the moment we're using enhanced quarter micron technology to build Athlon which is very easy to transition to 0.18-micron manufacturing since it already contains the key features. We are doing all Athlon production in our Austin, Texas fabrication plant Fab 25. In the fourth quarter of this year, we'll move to a 0.18-micron aluminium process. In early 2000, we'll be using an 0.18-micron copper process at our Dresden (Germany) plant known as Fab 30. The copper process gives us the ability to build more efficient silicon and transistors to operate at higher speeds. We'll have a 700MHz Athlon in the fourth quarter of this year and 1GHz Athlon sometime in 2000. IDGNS: What's the future of your K6 brand? There was talk that the Athlon sub-branding campaign, which will yield four different brands for the chip, will get into full swing when the K6-2 and K6-III reach the end of their life cycles. When do you expect that to be? GB: We will continue K6 where the chip is strong. In the near term, there will be more new K6s with new speeds and the chip will continue this year and all through 2000. The Athlon Professional and Ultra brands will be introduced when customers are ready, they're not related to the K6-2 or K6-III. life cycles. We will launch Athlon first in high-performance desktops. The Athlon core, K7, will migrate down into the value space where we may use the Athlon Select brand or K7 or something else. It's not clear what the future names will be. IDGNS: How long is AMD likely to manufacture its own chipsets for Athlon? GB: We designed and branded chipsets for Athlon because we weren't going to rely on our partners because that could limit our time to market. We have to control our own destiny. We are enabling our partners like Via [Technologies] and ALi [Acer Laboratories Inc.] to deliver optimized chipsets for the high-volume market. We're very open with sharing our technology with our partners. If their chipsets have the same capabilities as our own, then we'll step aside if we can be sure about their delivery. IDGNS: What threat will Via pose to AMD in the PC chips arena now that it is acquiring Cyrix and IDT technologies? Is your relationship with Via likely to change? GB: The products they're acquiring aren't taking us on head-on today and never have. Via's really brought integration technology which is suitable for a very specific part of the market below entry level -- the appliance market. We've had very high level meetings with Via recently and they're very committed to continuing our current relationship where they optimize the infrastructure for our products. We've made a lot of money together, it's silly to think that they'd walk away from a very lucrative business. Via will absolutely continue to be a very key partner. If we end up competing, so be it. We also have an integrated processor business with K6 in Austin. IDGNS: Do you think that Via's purchases are more to do with gaining access to patented technology? GB: That very well may be the case. So what Via's purchasing are the rights to build things without Intel harassment. IDGNS: What about AMD's estimates that the company will have 30 percent of the world's total x86 processor market including desktop, server and mobile chips by 2001? GB: Look at the numbers, it's simple math. We have 15.5 percent of the worldwide market now with our Fab 25. Our Fab 30 in Dresden doubles our capacity. I think 30 percent is a little too conservative. IDGNS: Any idea when AMD will appoint a replacement to Atiq Raza, company president, chief technical officer and chief operating officer, who suddenly resigned last month? GB: No comment. Atiq was a very important part of the company and played a very important role in the development of Athlon. Our Athlon road map and development is continuing to go on and our performance has not been impacted by Atiq leaving. Everyone can be replaced. AMD, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., can be reached at +1-800-538-8450 or at

To: Charles R who wrote (68633)	8/12/1999 3:53:00 PM
From: Cirruslvr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573004

Chuck - RE: "All the data I have suggest that Intel is about to go full blast supporting PC133/200/266 but they have lost some valuable time with their aggressive push of RDRAM." There was an article the other day which said Intel may support PC133 in Camino when it comes out. But a few weeks earlier, there was an article where an Intel rep said Intel may be able to add PC133 support in their chipsets by the beginning of next year. Do you know if Intel is going to support PC133 in Camino initially through one of those MTHs? "From what I gather K6 PCOAC will support PC133/200/266." K6 PCOAC? "And so may Timna, but again Intel may have lost some time here." Wouldn't that be pointless if it is supposed to have a DRDRAM controller on the chip?