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

To: Mani1 who wrote (111675)	5/20/2000 5:19:00 PM
From: Alighieri	Respond to of 1583405

Mani, Intel seems to be getting the message. This was published yesterday. Al theregister.co.uk Intel does u-turn on Willamette and synchronous DRAM Sources close to Intel's plans have confirmed that the firm is readying a backup plan which will mean that its Willamette IA-32 processor, expected to debut the end of this year, will support synchronous memory as well as Rambus.

To: Mani1 who wrote (111675)	5/20/2000 6:42:00 PM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583405

Mani, <There is got to be something that we are missing! SOMETING!> This is possible but unlikely. The intelligence on this thread is non-trivial. Someone would have figured out Intel's angle by now. <1. Intel is stupid. I just don't buy it.> To rephrase this in a technically accurate way and say "Intel's IABG management is stupid, that's clearly within the realm of possibilities - just look at the last year or two. The recent big decisions coming out of Intel stink. <2. Because they are financially invested in RMBS. Again makes no sense. Intel market cap is over $400 billion. Their annual profit is $10 billion. Intel is way too big to benefit materially in a long run from their equity in RMBS.> I agree. This has gotto be one of the weaker arguments. <3. RDRAM is indeed very advantages to SDRAM and over the long term should only have a slight price premium. If that is what they thought, how could they have been so wrong? They should have known that even if yields are high on RDRAM, a 30% bigger die as well as the royalties to Rambus is a substantial price penalty. Also I find it odd that their estimates of DRAM performance advantage has not materialized in the real world.> Here again one has to be nearly blind to not acknowledge that RDRAM incremental bandwidth bandwidth benefits are unlikely to justify the cost premium in the near term. <3. Intel wants to make a proprietary standard to shut out all competitors. Anyone can get a Rambus license, AMD already has it. Could be that Intel thinks that there is such a significant technical challenge to develop RDRAM chipset and mother boards that its competitors will not be able to do it? Maybe. Maybe they indeed thought that if they could convert all the DRAM makers to make only RDRAM and AMD or any other competitor could not develop a RDRAM platform, then INTEL would be the only one standing. Could it be?????? It is far fetched but it is better than anything I can think of.> This is one angle that I think could have some weight. It is conceivable that Intel has a backdoor way of picking up RMBS once RDRAM is established and renegotiate licensing with other parties. However, I think it is a long shot because of anti trust issues and because AMD and other players may have thought this through carefully when RMBS agreements were signed. <All and all, Intel has made a real fool of itself over this RDRAM fiasco. All the DRAM makers just told Intel to shove it and now Intel is left trying to bring up a whole new CPU with a likelihood of not having adequate amount of memory. This is at a time when Intel desperately needs a smooth launch of Willamette to fend off AMD.> So, the question, again, is could Intel's management be this dumb? Chuck