>AMD can have not one, but 5,000,000 sub $50 parts (Austin Durons) But it would not grow market share and revenue one cent. That's because Duron is no longer a desirable part. Nobody wants to buy any more than AMD is selling currently.<
This argues as much against renaming Athlon XP to Duron as it does not producing parts at Austin. The Athlon name currently sells, the Duron name does not. But the real reason that AMD lost market share in Q4 2001 is that Intel aggressively pursued the low end market in Asia.
> AMD can grow market share by producing desirable parts. Having parts available that have the lowest acceptable desirability has lead AMD nowhere, yet this is what you seem to be suggesting that AMD continues to do.<
For the most part, what makes parts desireable is marketing, not technology. If AMD fails to pursue market share prior to the launch of the AU Pte Ltd. fab, they will have a very had time selling out its 200 million processors per year capacity.
>If AMD completely trashed Morgan, and produced Palominos in Austin with frequency just below that of Dresden Palominos. The part would be desirable, more of them would be sold, and cost to AMD would be exactly the same, since Austin is some 75% idle, and the fab employees are just playing frisbee with wafer blanks. There were reports of some spot shortages of low speed Palominos (1500 and 1600).<
Well, Palominos from Austin would produce somewhat more to produce because more wages would have to be paid and more wafers and chemicals would need to be purchased. However, this would probably amount to less than $10/processor extra cost.
Palominos produced at Fab25 would not be just a little lower frequency than those from Fab30. They would top out at 1.4 GHz, possibly 1.467 GHz at most. But this would be at the QS1600+ or possibly even QS1700+ range. Selling a QS1600+ Athlon XP would be significantly easier and more profitable than a 1.4 GHz Duron.
> Anyway, the management of AMD is starting to remind me of the Soviet Politburo. They are so slow to react, they are entrenched in following everything that Intel does, and they probably lost the nimbleness to fight guerilla warfare with the Gorilla.<
Agreed.
> AMD has no obligation to provide value processors to anybody. The value processors are those processors that a company is unable to sell for higher prices. Setting out to make a "value processor" is like the recipe of our socialist/Democrat/buearocrat to low income housing - build ugly crappy structures, that will only get uglier and crappier as the time progresses. Instead, the goal should be build (encourage building) of mainstream middle class, and high income housing only. After a period of time, middle class will want something else (better), new middle class housing will be constructed, and the low income people will move to what once was the middle class housing.<
Agreed, but this would have been an argument against the initial launch of Duron (or at least the Morgan variant of Duron). AMD now has a lot of money invested in the design of Appaloosa, and the best course is to continue with it.
>Having Appaloosa on the roadmap is just so retarded, it is beyond comprehension. It has not lead AMD anywhere in the past, and is a dead and now. It is just following my housing example, of builing something ugly, crappy and undesirable from the start, rather than shifting downmarket the existing Palominos, while supplies and .18u wafer processing lines are running, and shift Athlon higher.<
Your argument makes sense only in the context of discontinuing the Duron name. AMD could probably sell more Appaloosa processors renamed Athlon (whatever), than Palomino processors renamed Duron.
>I can tell you with absolute certainty that when you have a processor that is only just as good (bad) as Intel, Intel processor will be sold. If AD wahts to sell this processor, which is only just as good as Intel processor, AMD has to drop price to 25%, even 50% below Intel.<
What makes you think Appaloosa would be just as bad as P4 Celeron? The only inherent advantage P4 Celeron would have is clock speed, and AMD intentionally downbins Celeron clock speeds to protect the Pentium market.
>I seem to recall that Sledgehammer will be 140 to 150mm^2 at 130 nm, more or less the same ballpark as Northwood, probably even smaller than NW would have been if it had 1MB L2, not much bigger than 120mm^2 Palomino. And most importantly, it will coexist throughout most of its life vs. 90nm Prescott which will have 1 MB L2, while AMD has their uual 3 to 9 month delay in introduction of newer process technology.<
I suspect slightly over 150mm2, but Northwood is currently only 131mm2 and only six metal layers.
> If AMD is caught 1 year from now with only Clawhammer to compete with 90nm Prescott, we will have an exact repeat of the sorry situation AMD is in today. Waiting for process / core upgrade, while competition is running away with market share.<
Well, Prescott will not become an issue for about 15 months, and it will not quite be the same situation. Clawhammer will be closer to the peak speed grade of Prescott than Palomino is to Northwood. Additionally, it is possible that at 130nm Sledgehammer will not be able to reach quite as high in MHz as Clawhammer.
> Jerry will be left patting himself on the back how efficient the 5 million Clawhammers (left unsold in the inventory) are, with only 100mm^2 die size. The tradeoff would have been 2.5 million Sledgehammers not being in inventory, but being sold for $200 ASP, bringing in half a billion dollars of revenue.<
Well, AMD should launch a "crippled" Sledgehammer as quickly as possible, but getting aggressive with it would be a mistake. The "crippled" Sledgehammer should initially sell for exactly the same price as the similarly performing P4, and be targeted at the workstation/high end gaming machine market (Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo etc.). It is only as AMD moves to 90nm that this "crippled" Sledgehammer should be aggressively marketed against Prescott.
The initial function of the "crippled" Sledgehammer would be to enable lines of high end desktop systems to be benchmarked against Prescott based systems.
>Again, you are suggesting the minimum, rather than moving in front, defining what the high end desktop standard is, and forcing the competition to scramble. AMD did this with Athlon, to a certain extend.
Intel already has a dual channel Rambus chipsets, that is being used for PR and benchmarks, Via and Sis will have dual channel chips ready for Christmans season, and possibly, Intel will have one as well. I have seen conflicting report on whether it will arriv in Q4 or Q1 of 2003.<
The lack of dual DDR for Clawhammer at launch is a major mistake, but 512KB L2 cache is not. Indeed, Intel will need to encourage benchmark developers to stress the advantages of 1MB L2 cache in order for this to have any significant impact on perceived performance.
> So you are suggesting that AMD is in eternal catch-up mode. Well, it may turn out that that is the best AMD can do. But to shoot yourself in the foot with the misguided Appaloosa / Clawhammer strategy of selling crippled parts, to save die space, only to have an unsold die space size of Texas left at the end of the quarter, that's something else. That's the roadmap AMD is on.<
It is with process technology that AMD is in eternal catch-up mode, not processor performance with equivalent technology. AMD's problem is not performance, it is clock speed, and nothing you have suggested would improve this. Indeed, at 130nm shifting to Sledgehammer could limit clock speed.
> AMD's plan is to produce twice as many chips, all crippled, they would sell for 1/2 of the ASP ($75), half will go unsold, so the result will be 6.6 million chips sold at $75 ASP, resulting in revenues of $500 million.<
I question AMD's ability to sell 12.5 million or more processors in Q1 or Q2 2003, but I also question their ability to produce this number of processors. I think that realistically, AMD can sell 9 million processors in Q2 2003 with Clawhammer hitting on all cylinders. |
