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

To: Dan3 who wrote (53531)	9/1/2001 1:01:51 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dan, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to compare micro-architectural specifications across the board to demonstrate the IPC advantage of the Athlon. The only problem is that you're preaching to the choir. Most, if not all of us here have some advanced knowledge of computers and technology, and we all recognize that the Athlon can perform better than the Pentium 4 on a clock for clock basis. It's not just the things you are listing, but a lot of things. I have never thought that the K7 was a bad micro-architecture. On the contrary, I have always admired the engineers that made such an aggressive design possible. If AMD didn't have to go up against a giant like Intel, they may have earned themselves a leadership reputation, simply based off of this one core. On the other hand, things in this industry change. Even some of your fellow AMD investors have commented that AMD's one year party has ended. AMD still has great technology in the pipe, such as SOI, Hypertransport, K8, etc, but this time, they won't catch their competitor asleep. I believe that Intel can make the Pentium 4 work. It isn't light-years ahead of the Athlon, but right now, it does have an advantage in overall performance, thanks mostly to the steep frequency advantage. I know it doesn't seem fair, since the consumer has decided to concentrate on clock oscillations rather than cache associativity, or execution issue rate, or instruction decoders, but that's what they have done. AMD has even capitalized on clock frequency in the past, and they'd do it again if the tables were turned. You can call it good marketing, or you can call it being lucky, but Intel foresaw this happening, and designed their core to reach higher performance by virtue of a very fast clock rate. AMD could have chosen a different path (i.e the path of least resistance), but they have chosen to go head to head with a company several times their size, they have chosen to go against the current market trends, and they have set their goals well above their current reach. Not only that, but AMD is run by a man who has clearly taken things personally. How do you put odds on a company like that? Sanders is not making decisions that are good for the company any more. He just wants to win, so he's betting it all on '00'. The stakes are high, and if he wins, it will probably be the jackpot. Then again, if he loses, he can easily take his company to a worse position than they were several years ago when they were losing money, quarter by quarter. Not that he cares, though, since he'd still be a rich man. Just MHO. wanna_bmw