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

To: Mani1 who wrote (91400)	2/4/2000 1:37:00 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1575201

Mani and thread, here's why AMD should court Apple, or Apple and the AMD "End Game" This thought is prompted by the sudden bearishness of Scumbria ("Willy has me spooked"), Maxwell ("Intel will win the end game") and to a lesser extent, Kash. First the short term. Is there any doubt that AMD is continuing to take market share away from Intel in R. the retail market W. the white box market B. the business market W.r.t. R, look at the ads and walk in a few stores. W.r.t. W, Intel has nearly stopped shipments to distributors W.r.t. B, HP is adding business systems, and Gateway is selling big to small business. The improvement in just 5 weeks is so good that the worst case for the CPG group at AMD is flat sales and that could only happen if the K6-2+ failed to ramp and K6 prices dropped even more. With flash and networking products increasing at least 40M, Q1 is in the bag. But the long term fear is WILLY. IMO, the clock-for-clock improvement from Intel PIII to Intel COppermine is larger than the improvement from Coppermine to Willy. There is only a certain amount of parallel execution that can take place in any x86 program, and Athlon with on-chip cache and Willy will both approach this limit. OK, what about Willy's MHz. Rumors are that Willy will run at 1.4 GHz right off the bat. If that comes out before November, I agree its a problem for AMD. It that comes out in December, no sweat, because that means AMD sails through Christmas '00 with the worlds fastest x86 CPU and a whole year to build more market share. Well, what if I'm wrong, and Willy DOES come out at 1.4 GHz on something like November 1. Well, there's still a nice "end game" available to AMD. It's AMD taking over Motorola's role as the manufacturer of Apple's CPU. IMO, Apple will have 10% of the PC market forever. 10% is a nice number for a company the size of AMD, along with flash memory and continuing growth in the networking products. Motorola is badly fumbling with Apple right now. AMD's 64-bit Sledgehammer can be tweaked into Apple's 2001 solution, without having to worry about the Gorilla stomping on you. Now certainly AMD ought to be looking at this proactively whether or not WILLY WINS, but if the Gorilla womps with Willy, it looks like a nice end game to me! Petz