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

To: pgerassi who wrote (117960)	6/27/2000 10:48:00 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575931

Pete, you should get an award for making a simple concept complicated beyond all comprehension. The term "yield" to a process engineer means something completely different from what you think it means. It refers to defect density and does not consider speed distribution within normal bounds. "Binsplit" is the term used to describe speed distribution. Although a case can be make whereby attempts to increase speed distribution can impact yields, no one has presented that case here and I won't comment on that subject until someone else does. Your description of Intel speed distribution as being centered around 650-700MHz is months out of date. This information is not restricted to "a few process engineers" but is distributed amongst Product Engineers, Planners, Finance and others who need to know and must plan and predict availability months out. In fact, Product Engineering would have this number well before process engineers would. To restrict this information to process engineers would make planning impossible. You alluded to this and I wish to emphasize it. As Intel is now on it's third (officially at least) stepping of CuMine it is annoying to see so many people stuck in the mindset of the old first generation stepping. That's old history but hard for some to give up. Re: ". Now Intel will lose about 6% to 12% in gross revenue per chip shipped. This is about 500 to 1000 Million dollars per quarter. How does the stock price react to a 16% to 33% drop in profits? This would be a disaster for Intel. If the order is more like 50% or more because the delta expands to more than 100MHz range, Intel could actually start losing money. That would be like a meteor strike at headquarters. At this point Intel would have two choices, both bad, give up the Celerons, start cutting overhead, selling or closing money losing divisions, firing staff, etc, in other words a big shakeup both in management and in current practices. Or riding it out and hope that future products save the company" Pete with the world's demand for CPUs unfullfilled, AMD capacity constrained and lacking MBs, Intel's speed distribution improving well beyond the point it was months ago and capacity increasing significantly, I don't think Intel is in danger of losing money just yet and considering they have recently announced 4 new mega fabs and perhaps a fifth soon, they must see a need for even more silicon. As you say, we'll see how this plays out. EP