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

To: Ali Chen who wrote (70489)	8/31/1999 6:41:00 PM
From: Rick Jones	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574054

Ali,<Do I get a gold star or should I go stand in the corner Master?> Do you always expect extremes? How about something in between the star and corner? Something like "good boy, but only when sitting quiet"? A couple of points you missed: --- of course --- <The difference is that Intel usually ...> The difference is that AMD is not in the same category as Intel yet, therefore all your sentiments are largely irrelevant. --- you're correct that AMD is not in Intel's category, but this difference is extremely relevant in the ability to successfully launch a CPU and infrastructure business. If profits don't matter, then it is irrelevant. --- <They seem to manage their way through their own messes..> Yep, it is easy to manage having a luxury of monopolistic prices in 60% of PC market - no rocket science here. --- you miss the point, what I was pointing out was that Intel has their fair share of product launch delays and screwups, but they seem to be nimble enough to cover or recover in fairly short order (ie; Covington disaster to lose the low end, to Mendocino winning it back in less than 12 months. Product availability, performance increases and price seem to be the keys to this) There are other examples <..with low inventory levels and increasing profits.> I have no idea about their inventory, but the latter is questionable. After quarterly stock buy-back of around $1.5B, the remaining profit falls down to miserable $200M, or real gross margins are below 3%. Must be very exciting for a leader and its shareholders! --- the market values Intel at $82/shr. The balance sheet says profits are increasing. How they do it, I don't care <Merced will be a whole new ballgame, but Intel seems to have control over the initial infrastructure for Merced> Didn't you know that control and dictatorship is no good for dynamics of free market? There is a difference again: Intel continues to play monopolistic hand while AMD seeks industry cooperation. Once the cooperation is on tracks, it is unstoppable. --- what you refer to as "control and dictatorship" is generally viewed by the OEM's as lower R&D expense, quicker time to market and fewer compatibility issues. System design has gotten expensive and complex combined with shorter life spans for individual products. Projects like Profusion and Merced exacerbate this development cost and time to market situation. Most of the OEM's seem happy to let Intel do the dirty work for them. The flip side of this is the constant struggle for product differentiation. Intel's strategy has worked exceedingly well the last several years, for them and for the OEM's who have decided to "sleep with the devil" - ie; Dell, Gateway, and to some degree, HP. Those who have chosen their own path have been struggling, notably CPQ and IBM. <AMD doesn't have any of these safety nets for K7, their stated intent is ASAP ramp to millions units/qtr - it either all works all at once(CPU and chipset/motherboard ramp)or...> All at once? Incidentally I do not recollect any recalls from ASUS, Gigabyte, Biostar, BCM ....who else? (Not talking about AMD native board called "Fester B3"). The guys at MSI apparently wanted to be the first to the market. However, there is a saying: "hurried acting makes you a laughing-stock". --- Point here is that there really isn't a "standard" for K7 infrastructure. If there is one public "OOPS" on any of these, the impression, rightly or wrongly, will be that K7 systems are unsafe. I'm sure that you are more educated than I am on the availability of other motherboards, I just don't recollect hearing much about actual shipments. That's it. Now feel free to grade your work yourself. --- I got an A- (I am right, I just subtracted a few points because I know I can do better) Thanks Master