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

To: Dan3 who wrote (23141)	12/21/2000 4:00:52 PM
From: milo_morai	Respond to of 275872

AMD's turnaround While AMD's market share hasn't radically improved, its place in the market has moved. Rather than being confined to the low end, the company now has a spot in the more lucrative performance segment. *In the U.S. retail market for PCs in the $1,000 to $1,500 range, AMD saw its market share go from 3.3 percent in May to 22.8 percent* by September, according to figures from PC Data.** Key to the company's success was improved manufacturing. Historically, AMD has flubbed chip launches, leaving them vulnerable to Intel price cuts. "They went from having a product they couldn't build to having a product they could," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. The credit for turning around the manufacturing situation belongs largely to Bill Siegel and Jim Duran, two AMD executives, said Kevin Krewell, an analyst at MicroDesign Resources and a former AMD employee. Intel has always prided itself on a manufacturing methodology called "copy exact" in which each fab is identical to the next, allowing the company to accelerate manufacturing on a new chip. "AMD had a process called 'somewhat similar,'" Krewell joked. Siegel, a former IBMer, began to correct AMD's situation in the mid-1990s, but the real benefits of his work came to the fore with Athlon. Duran, meanwhile, worked at both the Austin and Dresden facilities to see that the manufacturing improvements were carried out. "He was sort of the behind the scenes guy who ironed out the problems at Austin," Krewell said. "It was really those three guys," Meyer, Siegel and Duran. Additionally, some of the credit for the turnaround, Brookwood said, goes to Atiq Raza, AMD's former president, who left in 1999. Brookwood also gives credit to the new German plant. "It was a piece of luck that (Athlon) came out just when the industry had a capacity shortage and they had a product the industry wanted," Brookwood said. In addition, the Dresden plant allowed AMD to shift relatively painlessly to producing chips with copper, rather than aluminum, circuits, a migration that has caused problems for some other manufacturers. Intel will make the copper jump this year. Of course, both companies now face a new dilemma. Because of a worldwide economic slowdown, both Intel and AMD have warned that fourth-quarter revenue will be lower than expected. "What they are praying for is that PC demand is less than expected," said Nimal Vallipuram, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. The two will also face new challenges in notebooks. Transmeta burst onto the scene with its Crusoe chips, which consume less power than other chips, according to the company. Low power consumption became a reigning theme in notebooks. Despite a few hitches, Transmeta landed contracts with Sony, Hitachi and Gateway and saw its stock price more than double on its first day of trading. Who will win? Stay tuned for the next two years. yahoo.cnet.com

To: Dan3 who wrote (23141)	12/22/2000 2:15:15 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: "Remember how accurate Intel was about copper not helping at .18? I wonder if they'll be just as correct about SOI on .13." You are now admitting this?