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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (34231)	3/30/2001 8:08:21 AM
From: dale_laroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"My beef was with the speed (I mean lack of speed) in introducing K7 to low end and replacing K6." AMD has claimed that Hammer will move into all the segments of the market faster than K7. I doubt it, and hope not. I, for one, believe that Duron was released prematurely. AMD should have waited for Unified Memory Architecture Socket-A boards to become widely available first, then moved on to the Duron. Until then, they should have used the different binning between Fab25 and Fab30 to extend the Athlon product range. The lowest speed grade TBirds from Fab25 could have been sold for exactly the same price as the same speed grade Celeron (at those points where the speed grades matched). And the highest speed grade TBird shippable from Fab30 could have been priced 20% higher than Intel's 1.0 GHz P-III. While waiting for UMA boards to become widely available for the introduction of Duron, AMD could have been launching desktop variants of K6-2/3+, with the highest speed grade desktops (and all mobile variants) being produced at Fab30 using copper interconnects. Using copper interconnects, AMD should have had no problems shipping a 650 MHz K6-2+, or better yet, could have boosted Super-7 to 133 MHz and introduced at least a 667 MHz desktop K6-2+. The reason that I do not believe the Hammer series will make the transition as quickly as the K7 series is twofold. First, I think AMD learned their lesson with the disasterous launch of the Duron. Second, just as AMD has delayed the introduction of desktop Palomino because of the P4 nonevent, they will almost certainly delay moving Hammer into the value segment of the market. Thoroughbred, if it does indeed support SSE2 and have a 512K L2 cache, should be even more competitive against Northwood than TBird is against Willamette. And, AMD seems to think Willamette poses no viable threat to TBird. Keep in mind that Clawhammer will also be available to go head to head versus the highest end Northwood.