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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (84704)	1/2/2000 11:04:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1573268

Paul, Re:""And think of this - when nearly all cell phones contain integrated logic/flash memory components, where will that leave AMD's flash business ?.... With lots of potential?" Nope. It will leave AMD aced out in a market that recently brought them from a LOSS to "potential profits". When flash goes by the way-side for AMD, expect AMD to return to red-inksville." Are you really serious in this analysis or just AMD baiting. I am led to believe that wireless phone folks are NOT integrating large amounts of flash for next generation chips. They are looking at integrating DSP blocks and controller functions and RAM memory etc onto as much a single chip as possible. The reasons for not including flash are: 1. There is an exploding demand for very large flash amounts as wireless phones take more and more capabilty of a wireless PC. As phones add functions like voice dialing, voice activated browsers, e-mail, etc this dictate larger Flash capacity. Varying amount of flash for different models allows end product differentiation just as different SRAM/HD allows PC OEM controls. 2. The flash process utilizes many more layers than conventional digital/SRAM processess and are very inefficent for building dense fast logic blocks. This is one reason that TIMNA - Intel's PC on a chip doesn't include the flash BIOS on chip - it would ruin the chips performance and double the chip costs. Intel is indeed trying to put the pieces together for this exploding market but it is NO prescence in the wirless hand held area except in commodity flash. Intels DSP group so far has been a non-starter in this area. Now if Intel had purchased ADI or LSI they might have something they can bring to the party in the near term. Craig Barret has purchased a number of tier 2/3 outfits and also diwurstified into Internet hosting - it may be a great strategy - but the jury is definately out. They seem to think that buying a tier 2/3 supplier and adding Intels brand will ensure success against tier 1 folks like MOT,IBM,LSI,TXN,ADI, LU etc etc. Intels acquisition history has been exceptionally poor - its attempts to dominate the graphics market have been very poor, and the Chips and Tech acquisition has clearly been a bust. It purchased the server chip sets guys (corrolory???) and have lost tons of design wins to reliance. regards, Kash