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

To: Yousef who wrote (75900)	3/30/2002 12:05:00 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 275872

Re: "UMC and TSMC have been gaining rapidly on IBM and Intel in recent years." RE:"The FACT is ... UMC is behind INTC at .13um on 200mm OR 300mm." Both statements are likely true. Jim

To: Yousef who wrote (75900)	3/30/2002 7:06:35 AM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Yousef: The FACT is ... UMC is behind INTC at .13um on 200mm OR 300mm. I don't disagree with you. UMC (and TSMC, for that matter) is behind INTC on .13µm (for MPUs). No question about it. However, they have both been gaining rapidly on the industry leaders in recent years. Taking this into consideration, AMD has to make a choice: - Go it alone. Develop their own MPU process with no partners. - Continue with Motorola as a development partner. - Switch to UMC with a deal that (apparently) grants AMD the IP even though the companies split the development costs. So the question is (and I really am interested in what you think here): Is AMD worse off with UMC as a process development partner than they were (are) with Motorola? -fyo

To: Yousef who wrote (75900)	3/30/2002 7:52:36 PM
From: dale_laroy	Respond to of 275872

>According to the following link, AMD's Sledgehammer part appears as though it will fail to achieve any traction in the original target market. Without any demand, AMD will either have to cancel the part, or qualify it for a lower priced market (i.e. Sledgehammer becomes the mainstream desktop part with Clawhammer becoming the next Duron). theinquirer.net Despite the success of AMD in the corporate market, they have failed to convince customers to demand the Sledgehammer product. A major component of AMD's future plans, this will have a materially devastating impact on AMD's future plans and profitability. Intel's Prescott will likely be a major redesign of the entire Pentium 4 core. It will likely contain at least 1 MB of L2 cache, AMD's x86-64, and other performance enhancing features. I believe that not only will Prescott match the performance of Clawhammer, but that it could also match the Sledgehammer. This would also force AMD to move the Sledgehammer into a lower price range. Prescott will make use of Intel's state of the art new SRAM technology, as well as their new .09 process technology, resulting in a die size competitive product with both Clawhammer and Sledgehammer. Intel will beat AMD to .09 process technology by at least 6 months, which will materially and adversely affect the company.< He is partially correct, but for the wrong reasons. Prescott will not support x86-64, at least not initially. And Sledgehammer will not be relegated to the desktop so much by failed acceptance in the server market as Clawhammer not being as marketable versus dual channel DDR chipsets rather than not being as marketable versus Prescott. Intel will continue to bias benchmarks towards bandwidth and AMD will need a dual channel DDR offering on the desktop to wrest market share away from Intel. Clawhammer should do just fine at introduction, with Intel's dual channel DDR solution not yet ready for prime time, but with the introduction of Prescott, AMD must be prepared to reposition Sledgehammer, or a crippled variant thereof, directly against Prescott on the desktop. AMD could cripple Sledgehammer, disabling HTT links, and possibly even disabling SMP entirely, to create a 90nm variant of Sledgehammer that would be well positioned to tackle Prescott, even in bandwidth biased benchmarks. Of course, with Sledgehammer repositioned to take on Prescott on the desktop, Clawhammer would have to be repositioned, not as a Duron replacement, but to compete directly with Intel's Celeron P4, with ThoroughbredS displacing Duron.