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

To: dhellman who wrote (38983)	5/10/2001 11:10:18 PM
From: dale_laroy	Respond to of 275872

>Now Papken der Torossian, chairman of SVGI, says they won't de delivered until Q4.< If this is true, SVGI's previous claim that the delays were due to a shortage of material for lenses sounds hollow. A three to four month delay could be from lack of materials, but Q4 would be more like five to seven months. If the problem is due to design problems rather than materials shortages, AMD could very well be getting their ASML equipment on schedule. >Intel is investing heavily in licensing Numerical's technology -- including a patent-license swap last month that surely hurt.< I wondered about this. With only a 3-4 month delay, by the time Intel could apply Numerical's technology, they would already have the delayed SVGI equipment running. OTOH, if the delay is 5 months or more, possibly with no clear idea of when the problem would be resolved, the Numerical approach would make more sense. >You could argue that the market is perfectly happy with present, slower CPUs, that delivering these new, faster CPUs is not critical for Intel. But at a time when it is reporting disappointing quarters and falling demand, and seeing erosion of market share to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD:NYSE - news - boards) -- when Intel's credibility with its OEM customers, analysts and perhaps computer buyers is eroding -- failing to deliver reasonable quantities of new chips announced as long ago as these were is a serious stumble.< An even bigger problem for Intel is that AMD is not standing still. While Intel has nothing new (other than Foster) on the drawing board at 0.18-micron, AMD has Palomino coming out. AMD also has two wild cards in their deck. The first is that ASML has 130nm step & scan equipment for 248nm lasers, so AMD can accomplish the equivalent of Intel's Numerical technology approach using off the shelf equipment that they were going to be using for some of the mask steps in their process anyway. The disadvantage is that AMD might not gain much speed grade using this approach, which could also be a problem for Intel. It may be that AMD will gain less than 300 MHz from the move to 130nm using 248nm lasers, versus well over 500 MHz for 130nm using 193nm lasers even without SOI. If this is also the case with Intel, they may have difficulty pushing Northwood to even 400 MHz faster than Willamette, but for Intel reducing the die size would be the overriding concern, at least for P4. For Tualatin, on the other hand, it is ramping the speed grade that is most important. AMD's second potential wild card is IBM's SOI process technology. AMD might be able to adapt IBM's SOI process technology to Fab30's 0.18-micron equipment as quickly as Intel can implement Numerical's technology. And chances are that IBM could adapt AMD's Palomino design to their own SOI foundry services even faster.