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To: kash johal who wrote (15660)	10/23/2000 11:15:31 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: portland is a pilot line which will be copied exactly at several places. Kash, What you are writing is reasonable, but it is almost verbatim text from last summer when Intel was going to bury AMD with its massive ramp to .18 with coppermine. The same words about infinite resources, copy exactly, Intel's famous process expertise, etc. And all they had to do last time was shrink some features on what was basically the same process they've been using for several years. And this hasn't been a great year for Intel - the supposed massive ramp resulting from the shrink not withstanding. If AMD had been given the benefit of the doubt (i.e. chipset and motherboard support) it would have been a downright bad year for Intel. Now Intel has to get to copper, get to a new core, shrink the new core, get to a new chipset, get to a new socket, then another socket after that one! This time AMD isn't on the verge of bankruptcy, has proved itself to be more dependable in terms of meeting release schedules, and has chipset support coming from 6 companies. AMD was showing slides of .1 micron test runs made at their submicron development FAB a year ago last August. By next summer they will have been developing their .13 copper process for two years. Intel's probably been working on theirs at least as long, but they tried to do it without copper and without SOI and wasted a lot of time. Sanders said in the last conference call that the issue for AMD at this point for .13 was polishing, not lithography, and that they were making progress there. AMD has been out of the lab perfecting production high volume copper processes for the last year, while Intel is just getting started. Intel made some high level strategic decisions over the last several years that were, in hindsight, mistakes. Rely exclusively on Rambus, wait on copper, and wait on SOI. Like Pickett's troops at Gettysburg, Intel's engineers have been endeavoring to carry out impossible orders - and it shows. IMHO, they aren't going to solve all of their problems in 6 months by buying two FABs - it's not going to be that easy. It was going to be that easy last year, when it would have been a lot easier, and look how it turned out. Regards, Dan