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

To: tejek who wrote (77356)	10/27/1999 2:08:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573023

Ted, Re:"I have a hard time buying into the idea that the shortage is due to demand as opposed to manu. problems (claimed by one analyst this AM). To me a shortage doesn't fit with intc's last earnings report. Do you think that demand is that great? " This whole situation is bizarre frankly. With Intels manufacturing prowess I cannot believe that they can not manufacture/have manufactured several millions of cumines. And Paul has excellent contacts as well as PB who is in the middle of the mfg/development team. So yields cannot simply have crashed. The only scenario that makes sense to me is that HP/Dell/IBM/GTW/CPQ all will want to push cumines. So even 5M units spread across the big 5 players gives only 1M each for rest of Q4. And the best bang for the buck is with Camino/DRDRAM. So maybe there is no real supply for tier2/tier3 players. And they are all basically waiting for the 820 with 2 RIMMS. All i can assume is that Camino is on track for release by 11/15 at the latest and this does give enough time for everybody to sell 500K-1M units each by christmas when coupled by a huge launch. In addition this was Intels "biggest ever launch" and yet there has been nothing in the consumer space about it. If we recall the SSE/PIII launch from earlier this year - there was quite some hype and ads etc. So I expect they are holding off the "real consumer" launch till mid-novemberish. The only other scenario I can see is that wafer yields etc are great but there is some yield/bin split killer at final test. But if this was the case they surely would not have done the launch on monday. I have to believe they must have had yield/final test history on several millions units before the formal launch. I imagine tomorrow we will know a whole lot more. regards, Kash

To: tejek who wrote (77356)	10/27/1999 2:16:00 PM
From: Goutam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573023

Ted, re:< I have a hard time buying into the idea that the shortage is due to demand as opposed to manu. problems (claimed by one analyst this AM). To me a shortage doesn't fit with intc's last earnings report. > I agree with you. Given the Intel's enormous capacity (4 fabs @ 180nm), I think they are having problems meeting whatever demand there is due to manufacturing problems. <I also can't buy into the concept that everyone is replacing their desktop with a laptop. Not a major issue but do others see it that way?> It's not going to happen right away, but as the TFT LCD displays prices come down and with proliferation of wireless networking solutions, the notebook market will increase by leaps and bounds considering the very low current market share of the laptops. IMHO, it's very crucial for AMD to come up with higher speed grades of K6-xx mobile cpus, and Athlon mobile cpus to maintain its laptop market share. Regards, Goutama

To: tejek who wrote (77356)	10/27/1999 7:09:00 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573023

ted, how could CuMine shortage be due to high demand? The die size is 2/3 as big as today's PIII, Intel should be able to make 40M of these. There are four other potential causes for a shortage: 1. It takes time to reconfigure fab equipment from 0.25æ production to 0.18æ production. Not likely because this should only cause a 2 week hiccup in production so why didn't they just wait two more weeks for the intro? 2. Chipset shortage causing motherboard shortage. This is a cause, but not the only one. There's no i820 and VIA's production is limited to about 5% of Intel's. No one wants to use the i810e. What I don't understand is this: if there's really a BX chipset shortage, why aren't these chipsets being allocated to the PIII700E, PIII650E and PIII600E, where they will make the most profit? 3. Yield problems -- hard to imagine that Intel would have yield problems 4. Intel simply pre-announced the CuMine to avoid "embarrassment." Probably CuMines are only starting to trickle out of one of the 4 0.18 plants. (They would convert them serially to avoid a big hiccup in supplies.) So explanation #4 makes the most sense. If so, Intel really shot themselves in the head by doing this because all these announcements for vardware (vaporware hardware) killed demand for their other products. Plus, they had to lower prices on the stuff they're still selling with no revenue coming from the new vardware. Its too early to tell whether there is also a yield or a speed distribution problem. Intel may just be inventory-ing the current trickle of CuMines waiting for the chipset problem to be fixed, especially the high speed parts. Petz