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

To: Goutam who wrote (76625)	10/23/1999 7:55:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1572853

Goutama, Did you consider the towering Jerry EGO? I suspect he suffers from a small aspect in his personal life and compensates. The mobo argument is quite valid. Who will want a sea of different models, all 17 to 33 mhz apart in CPU speed and within a percent or two in performance. What a pain in the makers *ss Bill

To: Goutam who wrote (76625)	10/23/1999 8:29:00 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1572853

Goutama, re:<Does AMD need to release 750 MHz parts this Q?> Depends how many 700's are available from Intel. If Intel can produce a lot of 700's AMD should try to trump it. Petz

To: Goutam who wrote (76625)	10/24/1999 12:38:00 AM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1572853

<Can you, Chuck, Petz, and other posters here can provide your thoughts on the main question from the marketing perspective - Does AMD need to release Athlon 750Mhz parts this quarter? What does AMD going to gain/loose with/without 750s. In my opinion, only thing that AMD would loose by not releasing Athlon 750 on Monday, is the "fastest X86 CPU" crown for a few months.> You raise a fine point. Here is my take on the situation: 1. First of all, we need to wait till after the CuMine launch and probably till about the second week of November to see what speed grades Athlons are going to be launched for this quarter. 2. Right now AMD is juggling 5 speed bins (700, 650, 600, 550, 500) with very limited volumes of CPUs, motherboards, chipsets, you name it. There is ample data to suggest that most of the infrastructure issues will be solved by about November. Regardless of the infrastructure issues, most of the volume for Christmas is going to be around 600MHz - this is simply a matter of ASPs. Launching a new speed grade at the top end, this late in the season, is going to have very limited impact financially. It is definitely "MHz crown" issue and personally I am with rest of the longs in wanting to AMD to have the crown. 3. It is taking Intel's mammoth marketing organization to launch this lately and still have some volumes for Christmas. AMD does not have that kind of muscle. Whatever is launched now has no material impact on Christmas sales. As I have said many times on this thread, most of the Christmas builds have been committed. The few loose bricks from CuMine problems probably have been taken care of by now (and I am not sure how many of them AMD won - regardless of the speedgrade). To repeat - Q4 is DONE. Anything coming now is interesting but not material. 4. Now let's ignore the launch issues and shipments for Christmas and looking at CPU shipments for post-christmas season. CPU shipments for Q1 retail ships probably begin in about 6-8 weeks depending on if the machines are direct or standard retail [don't want to get into the argument about retail and direct again ;-) ]. I see AMD shipping at least 3 new speed grades 750/200, 733/266, 800/266. Other likely speed grades are 667/266 or 867/266 for business and 800/200 for consumers. So, a good chunk of the 0.18 builds probably will go for these speed grades. 5. Bottom line: whatever is officially launched now is only meaningful to the extent of "MHZ crown". Athlon, I am convinced, WILL be shipping higher speed grades than CuMine throughout this quarter. I am pretty certain 750s are being shipped now and I have very high level of confidence that 800 speed grade,if not higher, will be shipped before the quarter is over. Now, for the next few days, let's have some fun watching the CuMine show. I am already enjoying the commentary that says stuff like "Intel will be catching up with AMD" and "733MHz CuMine will be competitive with AMD" and "Athlon is definitely a better product but we trust Intel's manufacturing" from press, analyst community. I don;t know if anyone caught the wrap-up on CNBC yesterday but the commentary was telling - for the first time I can remember CNBC had a piece where people like Osha were talking like Intel is an underdog. Now, where are those darned motherboards..... That's my 2 cents. Chuck

To: Goutam who wrote (76625)	10/24/1999 1:42:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572853

Re: thoughts on - Does AMD need to release Athlon 750Mhz parts this quarter... Goutama, AMDs ASPs on high end CPUs are doing pretty well at this point. About as well as they are going to until people get more used to AMD as a high end CPU, more motherboards and chipsets are available, etc. I'd rather see an announcement that the K6-X chips, especially the mobile chips, are now available at higher speeds. The battle at the high end is going quite well, time to see about bringing up those low end ASPs. The expectation is still 4 to 6 K6-Xs sold for every Athlon sold (I believe). A $5 to $15 bump in those K6-X ASPs could do wonders for the bottom line. Just my take on things, Dan