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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: that_crazy_doug who wrote (18401)	11/9/2000 4:19:44 PM
From: Gopher Broke	Respond to of 275872

which it probably won't start to do until Jerry Sanders retires After watching the conference call, I think there will be a real void in the AMD board when Jerry retires. He was the only guy there projecting a vision and responding vigorously to cross-questioning. The others were competent, but they weren't enthusiastic enough. They would answer the questions superficially without using them to put the AMD message across. For example we heard that "Fab 30 ramp will cross over with Fab 25 production no sooner than 2002". Does that mean that "Fab 30 ramp is good but we are being careful not to compromise production quality by ramping too quickly" or is it "Fab 30 ramp is great and we will achieve crossover by 2002 which is better than we expected". I have no idea what to read into the flat response we got.

To: that_crazy_doug who wrote (18401)	11/9/2000 9:45:12 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

<doug: The no one ever got fired for buying Intel philosophy will be going strong until AMD can repair it's tarnished reputation (which it probably won't start to do until Jerry Sanders retires).> No disrespect, but I think you have it all wrong. While I realize this makes me seem pretty contrarian, I am adamantly convinced that the market is performance driven. Sure, putting the right spin on things can quicken a transition a bit... The thing is, AMD has NEVER had a full year with a good, competitive platform. NEVER. Not even in the 486 days. Even when the K6 briefly matched the P2 (kinda, in most benchmarks), there was not question as to which PLATFORM was the best. Socket7 was never and could never be a good platform. I remember Engel, Elmer, Tench and Scumbria discussing this matter ad infinitum a couple of years ago. There was really no doubt as to which platform was by far the superior. The same could be said of the 486 to pentium transition. Even though AMD 486 chips beat pentium chips significantly in the benchmarks of the time, there was no doubt where the future lay. The 486 platform was just no match for the pentium platform. Only the Athlon and the current EV6 platform have given AMD a good platform - competitive both in stability and speed. I think people vastly under estimate this factor. If AMD can just retain something approaching parity - they don't even have to lead - then AMD will do much, much better than they are now. Both in terms of profits and in terms of stock price. A prime example of this is the statement I quoted earlier, regarding the commercial Beowulf clusters: ``The AMD Athlon processor provides an excellent solution in a Beowulf cluster supercomputer,'' said Lee Little, Director of AMD's Field Marketing for the Americas. ``Its floating point unit, stability, and scalability offer leading-edge performance for business, government, education, consumer, and scientific research applications.'' Now that's an endorsement if I ever saw one! I cannot - even in my wildest, most ludicrous dreams - imagine ANYONE having said that about ANY AMD platform before the K7. Sorry for the rantish nature of the post; like Paul I tend to get somewhat overexcited at times. -fyodor