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

To: Process Boy who wrote (97455)	3/8/2000 2:44:00 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571549

I give AMD credit for the Athlon design's scalability, and ramping their .18 process in a stable fashion without significant manufacturing issues. AMD has executed very well to date. Intel will have to tough it out until Willamette, keeping the gap as narrow as possible, and maybe (a suggestion here) concentrate on improving supply at a spot a speed grade or two below, i.e., huge quantities. I believe Intel could do this as capacity increases over time. PB, You show more candor in this post including the comments above than in any other I have seen you post since I have been with SI. Its very, very appreciated. ted

To: Process Boy who wrote (97455)	3/9/2000 1:27:00 AM
From: Charles R	Respond to of 1571549

PB, <BTW, I do not see this situation as part of poor yields or any such thing on the part of Intel. Actually, they are quite good, even at 1GHz. Intel probably could do some things that could potentially increase the odds of better availability at the top speed grade, but there would probably have to be a trade-off wrt to capacity to run an accelerated schedule to accomplish this.> Agreed. I never doubted CuMine yields - just the bin splits. And, I doubt if any amount of process tweaking will get Intel match what is coming out of Dresden. Anything is possible but the odds seem overwhelmingly against you guys now. <I give AMD credit for the Athlon design's scalability, and ramping their .18 process in a stable fashion without significant manufacturing issues. AMD has executed very well to date. > I remember the days when the process experts on the board kept saying that AMD will gain a speed bin or two after the transition from 0.25 to 0.18 and there have been 6 speed grades since then. I still wonder how grossly Athlon ramp was underestimated. <Intel will have to tough it out until Willamette, keeping the gap as narrow as possible, and maybe (a suggestion here) concentrate on improving supply at a spot a speed grade or two below, i.e., huge quantities.> I agree with you and I have been saying this for a while - it has been incredibly dumb on Intel's part to push MHz given the clear advantage Athlon had in scaling. Harmones seems to have gotten ahead of cool thinking in Intel's board room. Chuck