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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (50296)	8/8/2001 12:39:39 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

Re: You don't go from fifth in world chip sales in 1990, or so, to first with the Pentium, and stay there by being stupid Intel management has made some decisions in recent years that have been puzzling, at best. It could be that they are convinced that an aura of invincibility (such as microsoft has) is worth just about any sacrifice. These days, when a new software product is conceived, and Microsoft later decides to enter that market, innovative new companies generally just sell out to Microsoft at whatever price Microsoft is willing to offer, rather than even attempting to stay in that business. Having standards can be a great benefit if you're the standard setter - if a competitor starts to put pressure on you, you just change the rules and lock them out. This is what Intel was doing when they changed CPU sockets and pushed Rambus. It didn't work out the way they'd hoped, but forcing AMD to create its own socket and infrastructure delayed AMD quite a bit. Trouble is, now AMD has an independent infrastructure, and since Intel has 3 sockets right now, this quarter will see about as many AMD socket A systems being produced as any other socket, leading to it having as much benefit from being the "standard" as any Intel socket. Intel's frantic attempts to block HyperTransport from becoming the next major industry standard may be rooted much more in their concerns about how AMD is perceived by the industry as anything else. In other words, Intel has concluded, right or wrong, that its image as market standards controller is as important as its products or sales, and is desperate to avoid any appearance to the contrary. And the result of that kind of thinking could be a repeat of the "cut off the BX supplies and make 'em move to rambus" strategy - this time the effort is to force the industry to socket P4/478 and away from PIII/370, whether buyers want to go that way or not. Intel is looking pretty stupid right now, Willamette, the KILLER chip from the Pentium PRO team, has been on the market for 9 months without generating much interest. Having claimed over and over that P4 is experiencing "the fastest ramp in the history of Intel" - when it clearly is just about the opposite - Intel feels its credibility is at stake. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and sometimes desperate measures, like choking off the BX supplies, don't work out. OTOH, sometimes they work out great. We'll have to see what happens. Dan