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To: Don Green who wrote (67546)	3/13/2001 11:48:39 AM
From: Don Green	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

AMD to push Intel with new Athlon pricing By: Mike Magee Posted: 13/03/2001 at 15:26 GMT theregister.co.uk AMD plans to rapidly move its forthcoming 1.3GHz and 1.33GHz Athlons to the price point currently occupied by the 1.2GHz processor to continue to keep pressure on Intel in the desktop sector. The 1.3GHz and 1.33GHz Athlons, which are already on a number of price lists and available in Japan, will drop to the level of the 1.2GHz part by early to mid-May, according to current plans by AMD. This is intended to queer aggressive pricing by Intel on the Pentium III in the same timeframe. The pricing scheme is intended to give AMD a chance to ship its current level of microprocessors through its existing channel, and at the same time keep Intel on its toes. AMD is keen to keep its distributors and dealers happy - last year Intel antagonised the same group of people by announcing unexpected price cuts and an inability to supply microprocessors to anyone but tier one vendors such as Dell. Dell remains an Intel stronghold. Despite reports from the US, AMD has no shortage of Athlon parts, and is also redoubling its efforts to sell Durons. In order to capture the low end of the business and educational market, AMD has to establish Durons in entry level machines, and is currently discounting these chips to attract manufacturers to build machines targeting this sector. It does not need to discount its Athlons in the same way, as these processors generate a fair profit for the firm at the current pricing level, while still undercutting Intel's Pentium III family. As reported here last week, AMD has already completed its 760MP dual chipset and is readying this for a launch also likely to be in the middle of May. ®

To: Don Green who wrote (67546)	3/13/2001 2:14:21 PM
From: Don Green	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Market fragmentation puts more stress on DRAM makers By Crista Souza, EBN Mar 13, 2001 (11:09 AM) URL: ebnews.com SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- While the last five years in the DRAM market have been pretty difficult, the next five may prove even more challenging, as the remaining handful of suppliers struggles to navigate a maze of memory architectures, processing technologies, and end applications, according to memory executives speaking Monday at Semico Research Corp.'s annual semiconductor summit. “Specialization will happen all over the DRAM supply base,” said Jan du Preez, president of Infineon Technologies North America Corp., San Jose. “Buyers will have to make procurement decisions much more strategically, and this will be one of the most compelling elements in the DRAM market in the next 12 months.” Market fragmentation is a relatively new phenomenon to DRAM makers, which as late as last year were still dependent on the desktop PC market for over a third of their business. According to Phoenix-based Semico Research Corp., by 2005, 54% of DRAM consumption will be by a diverse set of communications and consumer electronics systems, with desktop computing dropping off to 12%. Different suppliers, however, offered somewhat different solutions. Infineon, which is a large supplier of communications ICs, is positioning its DRAM manufacturing capability as an added value to give customers “one-stop shopping,” du Preez said. In addition, he said, the company's system-level experience prior to being spun out of Siemens AG, is an advantage not all of the top DRAM suppliers have. Elpida Memory Inc., a pure-play DRAM supplier, is instead looking to its customers for more collaboration on specialty memories, as exemplified by industry-standards groups like JEDEC, AMI II, and ADT in the conventional DRAM area. “I am proposing a joint effort between users and vendors in the application-specific memory market,” said Tokumasa Yasui, executive vice president of Elpida in Tokyo. “Users must be involved [in the creation of new memory technologies] if we are going to have success.” The problem is, too few OEMs are proactive in setting standards, noted Sanjay Srivastava, chief executive of Denali Software Inc., a supplier of memory compilers. “At the recent JEDEC meeting in San Diego, I'm told not a single communications OEM was there. We've got to change that.”