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

To: kash johal who wrote (90938)	2/1/2000 5:26:00 PM
From: Scot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575178

First having your own chipset ASSURES quality and performance. Pretty DUMB to have a BILLION dollar fab investment wasted by crappy MB's and chipsets. True. But what help were all those 750's last summer without MBs? Are you suggesting AMD get into the MB biz as well? Perhaps you can come up with a real good reason - besides motherhood and apple pie. What's wrong with apple pie? <g> All your reasons are good ones. All I can do is make an argument in support of the status quo. So I guess the best one I can make is that chipsets alone are not determinative of MB supply and overall PC performance. Since AMD is not ready to enter the MB market, I would rather have them focus their limited resources on cpu development and leave chipsets to partners. Now VIA comes along with a crappy chipset. Intel must be rolling on the floor laffing their assess off. I didn't realize the kx133 was a crappy chipset. All we have are limited performance specs from a single reviewer which suggest that the performance is comparable. The chipset, however, has additional features not available on the 750 (e.g., AGP 4x and pc133 support...some of the same BS Intel has been pushing). But talk about fiascos....does i820 ring a bell? Intel phases out the BX only to push a chipset with inferior sdram performance! Awesome! Check out the Anandtech review when you get a chance. anandtech.com Here are some of the Quake benchmarks: anandtech.com The MTH heavily penalizes the i820 + SDRAM setup here as it is beaten by every since competitor, BX, 133A and i820 + RDRAM, on a clock for clock basis. The performance hit the i820 takes from the MTH is so bad that even at 825MHz the FC-PGA on a BX running at 682MHz has no problem beating it. -Scot

To: kash johal who wrote (90938)	2/1/2000 5:39:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Respond to of 1575178

Kash - Re: "Thirdly, VIA is a predator. AMD is getting pretty NAIVE if they think these guys are a valuable LONG term partner they should nurture." Excellent observation - and conclusion. Paul

To: kash johal who wrote (90938)	2/1/2000 9:54:00 PM
From: Goutam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575178

Kash, First having your own chipset ASSURES quality and performance. Very true, but requires additional resources with added risks. Pretty DUMB to have a BILLION dollar fab investment wasted by crappy MB's and chipsets. Motherboards were an issue in Q3, but not in Q4. So, I believe FAB25 over capacity was the main reason behind the idling Dresden fab. Secondly it helps on the margin side. One can bundle the CPU,MB just like INTEL did to kill AMD's K6 margins mid last year. That was a one time tactic used by Intel. It was effective when there weren't any Athlons and AMD had difficulty of producing high speed K6-Xs. Thirdly, VIA is a predator. AMD is getting pretty NAIVE if they think these guys are a valuable LONG term partner they should nurture. This is very true :^( Fourthly, clearly chipset makes a real world difference in performance. 3rd parties have alway suffered against Intels chipsets in performance. AMD own seems like a pretty good solution. Now VIA comes along with a crappy chipset. Intel must be rolling on the floor laffing their assess off. And finally there is history. Many folks hated the Super 7 MB's due to crappy chipsets and MB's. This definately limited theiracceptance. Admittedly 3rd parties have gotten better - just not as good as intel. Perhaps you can come up with a real good reason - besides motherhood and apple pie. IMHO, only option AMD had left at the time of Athlon introduction was to focus on the Athlon chip + a basic chip set as a backup plan + a reference mobo, and leave everything else to the partners. You were forgetting AMD's situation last year - dwindling cash reserves, heavy losses, decreasing market share, manufacturing problems, Intel the perfect machine, RAMBUS + i820 + Coppermine threat (similar to Willamet propaganda that's going on now ) without the problems that were surfaced much later, law suits, low stock price, etc. At the time of Athlon release, AMD was not in any shape or form to take any additional risks other than the Athlon itself. Growth in business requires capitol and AMD was not in a position to garner any additional capitol required to manage chipsets and motherboards' growth. Also, AMD couldn't have foreseen everything that we see now - the manufacturability and scalability of the Athlons, the success of Athlons in the market, and most importantly the problems experienced by Intel. The success of Athlon would have been a lot tougher if it were not for the glitches experienced by Intel in the past 5 months. Given their situation in the first half of 1999 - IMHO, the decision by AMD to leave the chipset and motherboard business to its partners was a wise and a good business decision. I also see many strategic advantages behind this - effective way (combined strength) to compete against a formidable competitor with more than $300B capitalization, provides great resistance against proprietary standards by the competitor that could obsolete your technology in no time (this business is 30% architecture and the rest is marchitecture), empowered(great incentive) partners to fuel the proliferation of the new architecture and any future architectures, etc. As per the recent CC and comments from Via, my understanding is that - AMD will concentrate on the high-end chipsets for the Athlon, while the Taiwanese chipset manufacturers concentrate on the low end solution for the Athlon platform. So AMD is not leaving the entire chipset business to its partners. Best regards, Goutama