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

To: Petz who wrote (86145)	7/31/2002 4:46:57 PM
From: rsi_boy	Respond to of 275872

>>Good news from Inq: AMD will produce 333MHz front side bus Hopefully this is a sign of good engineering sense (a free/easy speed boost and only the cost of increased validation and a more complicated product list) and not a sign of desperation (oh crap! k8 is late and the P4 gap is yawning wider)

To: Petz who wrote (86145)	7/31/2002 5:26:18 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 275872

Petz, Re: "the K7 is likely to co-exist with the K8 now for a long time, and will scale better than AMD first thought" This means that AMD is reallocating resources to give K7 a longer life, and thus directly translates to Hammer not being the total solution that they thought it would be. Switching over to a new front side bus specification requires a serious change in infrastructure. The best time to do this is with a new product line, or perhaps mid-way through an existing product line. However, my previous impression from AMD is that they wanted to transition to Hammer as soon as possible. I think at one point, that was AMD's plan. They expected Hammer to be strong enough, and to ramp fast enough, that K7 could go EOL mid-way through next year, with Barton being including the final incremental changes to the design. Last year, however, there was a big change in the Barton POR. Instead of being the SOI lead vehicle, AMD changed the Barton design to be a larger cache version of Thoroughbred. That told us two things. First, that SOI will not be ready in 2002, and second, that Barton with 256KB of cache was an uncompetitive product. Now, bringing 333MHz to the K7 and prolonging its life should tell us more about how well Hammer is progressing. I am not suggesting anything dramatic about Hammer's schedule, but I think that things are slightly worse off now than they were several months ago. Changing the K7 design this late in the game must have been a tough decision for AMD; even the Inquirer remembers them firmly denying a front side bus transition only a little while ago. I see the situation as being one of three possibilities. The first is that Hammer will be further delayed, giving AMD a large competitive gap, where Intel will have Hyperthreaded 3+GHz Pentium chips, while the Athlon is still stuck ~2.1GHz. The second possibility is that SOI isn't going very well, and that the Hammer ramp will be very slow. Either yields or bin splits would be at fault. Either way, without volumes of Hammer to replace the Athlon, AMD will be forced to extend the life of K7 design. Third, SOI continues to have a huge cost disadvantage, and that this will prohibit AMD from getting desktop level price points. Therefore, it's possible that they will launch in Q1 with a server part (UP/DP Clawhammer), and then move onto the desktop when they can control costs. This will obviously require a longer K7 lifespan as well. These are just possibilities, though. I doubt that AMD would take steps to extend the Athlon life span if the Hammer launch, as well as the Hammer ramp, were both still on schedule. Therefore, this should be telling us that AMD is continuing to have problems, but at least they are aiming to ease the competitive situation in the mean time. wbmw