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

To: tejek who wrote (77470)	10/27/1999 9:19:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573717

Ted, <Yougang is assuming that manu. costs for the 600 will have come down enough> You see, that's the false assumption. Let's assume this 600 MHz Athlon will be made on the 0.18u process. Assume it doesn't have any on-die cache on it (which will hurt performance, but cost is the issue here). The die size is still going to be close to 100 mm2. That can lead to a manufacturing cost of $40 to $50 per processor. If the selling price is $50 to $60, that's only a $10 margin per processor. That's a very poor margin for a company with limited manufacturing capacity. In essense, that processor has to be sold like a commodity. Sony's Emotion Engine is interesting in that it's trying to bring high-performance technology down to commodity levels, where Sony can drive the volumes and reap the profits from licensing fees. But it's not going to work that way for MS or AMD. AMD can't support the volumes and MS won't have the licensing fees (because of the open nature of the PC gaming platform). Did anyone forget why Athlon is generally considered to be AMD's last chance for glory? It's because the Athlon has the potential to drive AMD into the high-margin markets like corporate desktops, workstations, and servers. Why would AMD want to divert a significant chunk of their limited manufacturing capacity toward a low-margin Gamebox? Tenchusatsu