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

To: hmaly who wrote (80364)	5/20/2002 11:34:25 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"Or AMD may just be sitting better than most people think. In this case, I am referring to the market. Dirk has made impressive contributions to AMD's product, and I have no reason to believe he will fail to impress this time also. Just look at how long Seymor Cray bested the likes of IBM and Univac. " Cray is a poor comparison to make, unless you want to portray AMD as a usually-unprofitable, ultimately-parted-out company....on second thought, perhaps it _is_ a good comparison! Item: During Seymour's tenure at CDC, the 6600 was a revolutionary success, the 7600 was a lesser-but-still-notable success, and the Star was a massive flop. It came in the product history of CDC roughly where the Hammer will be in AMD's cycle. However, CDC faced little competition from either IBM or Univac in those days. IBM had ceded the scientific market to CDC and Univac was essentially nowwhere to be seen. (The Burroughs B5000 was a more worthy competitor.) Item: When Cray Research was formed, circa 1973-4, its specific market was intended to be government computers. It faced dying competition from CDC, but little to none from IBM, Univac, Honeywell, or Burroughs. Item: The Cray 2 was a mega-flop (pun intended). Item: By the time Cray Research was fragmenting into two businesses, the continuation of the Cray 1x line, with Steve Chen doing some advanced development, and the dramatically different line led by Seymour Cray, to be spun off as Cray Computer, the whole operation had become superfluous. The "attack of the killer micros" had succeeded, and Cray Research/Cray Computer were side shows. Item: As Chen left to form Supercomputer Systems (IIRC), and as Seymour spun his wheels working on hypercubes of Intel processors, the only part of Cray still in business was being acquired up in Oregon: the assets of Floating Point Systems, makers of the famous AP-120B array processor in the early 80s. Cray bought the outfit, which was using SPARCs. Item: Then SGI bought Cray Research, what was left of it. A bit later, they sold or swapped the division with Sun, which wanted a SPARC computer builder. This division lives on as part of Sun's multi-processor family. (Seymour Cray, no longer affiliated with Cray Research, the public company, died in a traffic accident in Colorado. His system was never finished, never marketed.) Item: But the big picture for Cray the company was not a bright one. Years of deteriorating to non-existent profits and eventual dissolution of most of the company, with only a tiny branch out in Beaverton, Oregon surviving. Some legacy. Is this the model AMD wishes to emulate? Sure seems so. --Tim May

To: hmaly who wrote (80364)	5/21/2002 1:57:32 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

hmaly, Re: "The simple truth is that Intel needed to go to .13 in order to stay competitive. AMD didn't need to, and has maintained its market share while still on .18. I would agree that the shift to .13 is tardy, however it hardly has been that detremental, as AMD hasn't lost market share" You mean that AMD hasn't lost much market share? I believe they are a bit lower than their high of 22%, though, which I'm sure a .13u transition would have broken. But, if you want to look at it in another way, then Intel's .13u process certainly has allowed them a competitive edge, while .18u manufacturing would have left them with a larger and hotter, even if they decided to add the extra cache to their older core. I'll agree that unless Intel has some inventive new ways to reduce power, then AMD seems to have found a way to have a lower power core with smaller die size at the same manufacturing process. And although some people consider it second nature, Intel really doesn't have that many more transistors in their design. It just seems that the custom design has not been very efficient in terms of density. Maybe Intel will change this in the future, since it seems to have given AMD a competitive edge in terms of cost. And I think that's where the main advantage is. Right now, it seems that AMD's .13u Thoroughbred, and Intel's .13u Northwood may be evenly matched. Hammer will turn the favor back to AMD, but it still remains to be seen how well AMD will do on the marketing side, which by now most people agree is a key ingredient in selling CPUs. And even if AMD is able to get a far more competitive product that has the marketing to back it up, how long will it take them to increase ASPs, and will the market continue to expand, and allow AMD to grow in volumes? These are the things important to the stock - not a few benchmarks on Anandtech.com, even though they may be interesting for the technical speculators to study. If you are long on AMD stock, you might want to consider how long lived the Hammer processor will really be. It's likely that Hyperthreading in the Prescott CPU will give Intel an enormous marketing advantage, since they will be able to brag two CPUs in one. Will marketing Hyperthreaded performance in single threaded applications be more effective than marketing 64-bit computing without 64-bit applications? Maybe. There seems to be other things at work, too. Speculation about Prescott New Instructions, larger cache sizes, dual channel DDR memory, and other things that could make a difference to Pentium 4 based systems over the next year or so. Hammer isn't necessarily the end to all of it. wbmw