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

To: TGPTNDR who wrote (69262)	1/28/2002 12:47:24 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

"AMD said they were demand limited in the fourth quarter." Here is the problem. We know that AMD has been demand limited on the Duron from the start for a number of reasons, none of which has to do with yield. AMD was initially expecting Durons to outsell Athlons by a factor of 2 or more, it never worked out that way. Until Q401, AMD was pretty upfront with the mix relative mix of Durons and Athlons, either giving a precise number, or giving a general one (about half). For Q401 they broke with that pattern. All they would tell us is that Athlons substantially outsold Durons. They did say they manufactured over 4 million XPs in Q4, but they didn't say how many were sold. "We shipped tens of thousands of model XP 2000 in the quarter and produced 4 million Athlons XP." Clearly, they intended everyone to believe that they sold 4 million XPs, but they didn't actually do that. So they sold less than 4 million XPs. So how many did they sell? How many Tbirds? They didn't even come close to saying. I will say this, to get their ASPs up to $90 or so, they didn't sell many Durons at all. I suspect the number of Athlon MPs were not a whole lot more than in Q3, 10's of thousands again. A4s probably were up, 1 million maybe? As far as Durons go, 2 million? Less? Assuming that it takes exactly 1 quarter to produce a packaged chip from wafer start through packaged and tested chip, and using a yield of 145 good die per wafer, and AMD reached their max. of 5k wafers per week at the end of December 2001, then AMD should have made 7.66 million Athlons in Q3 for Q4 sales (3750 wafer starts at the first of Q3, 4375 at the end, for an average of 4063 per week). Since likely only Fab30 was making Athlons in Q3, unlike previous quarters, if we knew the number of Athlons of all flavors, we could get some idea of the yield. We can't do this. I suspect that all of their statements are true, but there isn't enough information to get the numbers. The statements are: 1) They sold all the Athlon XPs they made. 2) There were more Athlons sold than Durons. 3) They sold 7.81 million units total. 4) They had an ASP of almost $90. But that is no where enough information to guess on the yield. Heck, it is even possible, although not very likely, that AMD actually sold 7.66 million Athlons and only 15 thousand Durons. The point is, we don't know and cannot calculate it with the information released.