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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (94311)	2/20/2000 12:47:00 PM
From: Charles R	Respond to of 1576615

Joe, <The question is: could AMD sell Spitfire manufactured on .18u process for $35 and still make money? Maybe at $50 they could, but $35 seems tough.> By the time X-box gets to market (IF it ever does) AMD would be at 0.13 or worst case 0.15 (Q3 this year). Athlon core on that processor would have be less than 100 mm2 and be fairly low powered to go into a cheap package. With those assumptions making incremental profits at $35 is not a problem. Embedded processors get sold well under $35 routinely - no big deal. However this kind of business would contribute very little toward fixed costs - the key to making real money is to ship lots of product at higher ASPs into the mainstream PC space. Chuck

To: Joe NYC who wrote (94311)	2/20/2000 1:01:00 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 1576615

Re: The question is: could AMD sell Spitfire manufactured on .18u process for $35 and still make money? I'd guess spitfire at about 125mm2 at .18, and 75mm2 at .13. The projected timing for the release of the X-box gets into the time frame for .13. At .13, there could be as many as 400 dice coming off a wafer, so Jerry's $10K/wafer occurs at $25 ea. But at .18, I think your $50 number is about right. I'd guess such a machine would have a DVD ROM, a good sized chunk of PC266 RAM, and no hard drive. 256 meg of RAM would fit on 2 32x32(megabit) chips. When you changed applications, such as going from a game to the special version of Microsoft Office designed for X-Box, you'd swap DVD disks in the drive. The box would be sealed, the appropriate version of the OS would reside on the DVD with the application. Installation issues and DLL hell would be forever banished and with it 98% of Windows support problems. An optional floppy/hard disk combo would be available, but you'd be offered storage space from webservers to save your work (and that storage would be kept backed up, and marketed as such). A .13 Athlon should be powerful enough to function as a DSP to support software dial-up, DSL, Cable, or other (future) standard modem. Cost of a box like this would be $100-$200 (w/o monitor - but a TV could serve initially). Retail would be $150 to $400 depending on whether they elect to sell razors or blades. Everybody's writing off the X-Box as too little, too late, but I'm not sure they've thought the whole thing through. If it's competitive with PSII for games, and lets you surf the web and do email and run MS Office, etc. all for the price of a PSII - and never gets screwed up by some software incompatibility like the inexpensive PCs that have caused some consumer frustration - it might be a successful product. Software developers would have to love the need to insert the original (copy protected) DVD in order to run the program. It might even be a very successful product. Regards, Dan