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

To: Xpiderman who wrote (74632)	10/8/1999 8:57:00 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573242

Re: Is AMD a growth company? There is blatant evidence that the accusations posted by Tom Pabst were true. I am seething right now because I have had it confirmed by Asus that the K7M will not be available in the states until November/December. Asus was to be one of the primary initial suppliers of Athlon motherboards. Unlabeled boards, or Freeway labeled boards have been available in Europe and Asia for some time, but Asus will not sell them in the United States. I have looked the specifications for these boards, have had extensive favorable experience with Asus products, and would like to use these boards - but I can't. My supplier tells me that among the available boards for Athlon at this time is Gigabyte, but a search of their web site yesterday revealed no information regarding that board. There have been many references to upcoming Tyan boards supporting Athlon, and Tyan's site has preview information for unavailable Intel (and now Intel supporting VIA) boards but no mention of Athlon support. Asus was one of the initial 5 Athlon board suppliers that was to provide support at the product launch. There were then stories that Intel had threatened all of the motherboard manufacturers with retaliatory actions such as withholding Intel products if these companies sold product that supported Intel's competitors. I was skeptical of these stories, thinking it was more likely that there simply weren't enough Athlons to go around. That AMD ended the quarter with nearly half the chips produced unsold because there were no motherboards for them is startling. They also reported that chipsets were not a constraint. The projects that I am responsible for are computation intensive, and benefit from using the most powerful systems available - particularly in floating point. We also push these systems pretty hard, and try to find the most stable motherboards we can. That we are denied our platform of choice because the racketeers at Intel have extorted promises of denial of necessary supplies to their competitors is nauseating. If Intel can make money while cutting prices on its products - great - I've never complained about that (since my procurements benefit from the lowered prices - that's how a market economy is supposed to work). But if Intel uses corrupt practices to deny the marketplace the superior products of its competitors - it's damaging to everyone. It's bad enough when these tactics were used by the mafia run garbage collection and fish distribution markets in New York (as was detailed in various prosecutions during the past few years) That these practices could determine the course of one of our country's premier industries is disgusting. I hope that I am misreading these events, but the emerging pattern of hidden product releases, and product being available everywhere except the United States - where product is most visible to Intel - is pretty compelling. Dan