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

To: steve harris who wrote (72818)	9/23/1999 10:36:00 AM
From: Charles R	Respond to of 1572354

Steve & Thread, <It was a horrible experience from a manufacturing standpoint. The qualification process was twice as long as a comparable Intel product and the quality of the processors coming in was very poor. The motherboards still had jumpers and the known problems list at product release was around 70 items long although not all were critical. That's huge. Thermal problems prevented production startup and cost Gateway nearly 200 million in lost revenue. The order backlog grew to 60k units and GW was unable to ship for 5 weeks. Roughly 50% of the first orders were cancelled prior to shipment. > I did not hear this exact story but it is pretty clear that AMD has itself to blame more than anyone else for the Gateway loss. Several weeks back I heard that AMD had won the Gateway socket. I posted it to the thread with a caveat that it is not done until it is done because at that time it looked like AMD did not have its act cleaned up. Several weeks later, when motherboard issues were supposed to have been eliminated, customers were still scrambling - MSI had problems, Compaq pushed out, IBM pushed out, Cybermax pushed out. I think some modicum of stability was achieved only in the last week [given how bad this motherboard situation has gone so far obviously this should be taken with a grain (or pound) of salt]. Int he mean time, Intel came back with a good alternative and delivered better than the aggressive schedule they committed to. As much as I disliked AMD losing this socket, I can see why Gateway would go for Intel given AMD's execution to date. Clearly gateway did not think the risk-reward was in its favor given the enormity of the Christmas season. Chuck P.S.: I am sure there were a lot of other factors that contributed to the loss such as Intel's aggressiveness and soft dollars but if Intel didn't deliver CuMine this early, I do not believe Gateway would have taken the risk of not having a competitive product at the high-end.

To: steve harris who wrote (72818)	9/23/1999 4:54:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572354

Stevie - Re: ". . . .There was only one reason that Gateway was shipping AMD product and that was to some insecurity at Intel. It worked but was very painful. It was a horrible experience from a manufacturing standpoint. The qualification process was twice as long as a comparable Intel product and the quality of the processors coming in was very poor" Sounds like AMD was real GodSend to Gateway ! I sure hope Gateway has a LOOOOOOONNNGGGGGG Memory ! Remember - you Get what you Pay For ! Buying CHEAP gets you CHEAP ! I had a great day today - as I do EVERY DAY ! How is your Day, Stevie ? You're even deeper underwater on your AMD stock - aren't you ? Paul