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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (113678)	6/1/2000 12:14:00 PM
From: RDM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573432

There are many times that you can demo a chip when you cannot ship it. Perhaps this is the current situation with the 1.5 GHz T-bird. Cooling problems may exist that shorten the expected lifetime of the chip, for example. Redesign of production packaging to help the cooling may take time. I do not know anything specifically about this chip but I believe that if AMD could ship 1,000 chips a week of reliable super speed parts they would. After all at $1000 premium per chip this would add $13M profit per quarter. However, reliability is the key concern. If they cannot ship parts then they should judge the PR necessity of a public demo. If things are going well in the market, and you are shipping all you realistically build, you should hold some good news in reserve. Private demos to top-tier customers may always be arranged. Experimental parts, even with heat problems, may sampled to key customers as well. The market rewards mostly highly consistent performance. The normal forward/backward chaos of product development is best hidden from customers and investors. I would rather they bank their "public demos" at this time since I believe we are on track for $200 by the end of the year and I do not believe it will get there any faster with just a demo. Once Willamete is released, or close, perhaps they should reveal some more "futures".

To: Joe NYC who wrote (113678)	6/1/2000 5:18:00 PM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573432

Joe, <Suppose AMD has a chip that can run at 1.5 GHz (or let's say 50,000 of them). > Here lies the fundamental problem with this whole 1.5GHz story. I think it will take many months for AMD to have 50k 1.5GHz parts. <Are you suggesting that AMD sells them as 1 or 1.1 GHz for $750 to $1,000, because that's the limit of how much a consumer PC can bring? I don't like that strategy.> Whether you like it or not AMD is routineely downbinning products by 2 to 4 speed grades because consumer market is not willing to pay high ASPs. Let's face it, no amount of MHz lead will help AMD in this space. Need to win the corporate space before the ASP equation can be improved. <The second strategy is to let them sit on the shelf, let them depreciate in value, and sell them when the marketing is ready to introduce the speed grade. I don't like this strategy either.> I agree this makes absolutely no sense in times of shortage like we have today. <If the chips have the "available" sign on them, it is up to the OEM's to figure out what to do with them. Maybe they would fit into the category of performance workstation well, or a single CPU server.> At the beginning of the quarter when all the K6s were sold out AMD had good availability at 800MHz and above. So, to be blunt, no OEM has "figured" out a way to push high ASP consumer systems effectively into the consumer market. <I think AMD should have just made all Thunderbirds, and sell the lower speed Thunderbirds from Austin at the Duron prices (or slightly less). > The strategy you are proposing will work if there is excess capacity and if there is a problem with speed bins. When a company is pressed for capacity, it should try to make as many chips as possible with the limited number of wafer starts. Chuck