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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (148635)	11/17/2001 10:38:53 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: What I don't have faith in is AMD marketing being able to maintain their ASPs after Intel fixes their supply issue. I'll start out by questioning your premise that Intel is in a shortage situation. Intel has been able to sell its processors for roughly twice the price AMD was charging for the past few years, with Intel's fastest chip always selling for around $1,000. Pricewatch would seem to indicate that Intel has been flooding the market recently, not that they are in shortage: $399 - Pentium 4 2.0GHz $269 - Pentium 4 1.9GHz $254 - Athlon XP 1900 1.6GHZ $209 - Pentium 4 1.8GHz $189 - Athlon XP 1800 1.53GHZ $169 - Pentium 4 1.7GHz $142 - Athlon XP 1700 1.47GHZ $152 - Pentium 4 1.6GHz $112 - Athlon XP 1600 1.40GHZ $147 - Pentium 4 1.5GHz $112 - Athlon XP 1500 1.33GHZ $105 - Pentium 4 1.4GHz $113 - Athlon 1.4GHz $98 - Pentium 4 1.3GHz $89 - Athlon 1.33GHz AMD is selling almost entirely through whitebox makers now, there are definitely fewer machines out there from the big OEMS (at least here in the US) - so why aren't their ASPs falling? Intel is supposedly having shortages (which should prop up prices) and has noticeably more shelf space at retailers, recently - so why are Intel ASPs so low? I suppose it's partly a case of 40% of all PC sales being "invisible" in the sense that what's being sold by small shops is not easily determined, but there would have to be enormous demand for Athlons to drive such a shift to whitebox makers. A year ago, even when AMD was trouncing PIII in both performance and MHZ, and they had Gateway for mail order and HP, Micron, and Compaq at retailers, Intel was still getting about double the price AMD was getting for similar chips. Now they're not too far from parity at AMD's performance rating, and AMD chips are actually selling at higher prices per MHZ vs. half the price last year. Has enough of the buying public really figured out that P4 performance is (per MHZ) awful and not to be trusted? Remember that the market's response to the RDRAM PCs thrust down their throats has pretty much been to vomit them back at the OEMs, and just about every P4 out there now is SDRAM based: Processor Speed FSB Memory Price[DM] SYSMark/2000 3DMark/2001 Quake III AMD Duron 1,2 GHz FSB200 PC2100 ... 212 3092 154 AMD Duron 1,1 GHz FSB200 PC2100 250 204 3049 148 AMD Athlon 1,4 GHz FSB266 PC2100 400 255 3331 183 Intel Celeron 1,2 GHz FSB200 PC133 300 211 3097 124 Intel Pent. III 1,1 GHz FSB133 PC133 450 215 3257 104 Intel Pentium 4 1,8 GHz FSB400 PC133 700 205 3154 167 http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jow-16.11.01-000/ (thanks to Peter Luc on the Mod AMD thread for the link) For the past 3 years, Intel has been presenting a convincing argument that "next quarter" they would have a line that would bury AMD. Their most threatening "next quarters" were for the release of coppermine (threat) and the release of willamette/P4 (huge threat). Neither had any effect at all. The collapse of the semi market has hurt both companies, but Intel's "next quarter" routine has worn out its welcome (for me, at least). *This quarter* is the period in which P4 is making its big ramp, and it's a period in which Intel has its lowest ASPs in recent history, while AMD is enjoying its highest ASPs. We'll just have to wait and see what happens next. I have a feeling that both companies will do well if the semi market improves, and neither will do particularly well if the semi market does as expected. As far as SMT is concerned, AMD's approach appears to be to go for two complete cores, either through SMP, or through CMP. They have convinced their MB suppliers to put out a large number of dual processor boards, at all but the lowest price points, and will be marketing SMP to almost all segments - marketing an SMP Duron to the low to mid range market is a rather novel approach. If Intel can get the software companies to make most apps effective users of multiple threads, then AMD has a strategy in place. However beneficial SMT may be, SMP is quite a bit better, largely because it brings with it two L1's, two L2's, additional decoders, additional pipes, etc.