Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: graphicsguru who wrote (238306)	8/7/2007 5:10:04 PM
From: pirasa2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

<<<< I don't doubt that AMD has the manufacturing capability to build a million Barcelonas. They just couldn't sell them. Brand new, highly anticipated chip, several million motherboard slots (1 to 4 slots per motherboard) already out there ready for drop-in upgrades, plus new Q4 sales. Plus a robust server market in general. A million units is not that far-fetched at all. <<<<See wbmw's post. I think he's in the right ballpark. That implies a brief peak of around 800K opterons per Q, back down to about 400K/Q right now. Note: I neither read nor respond to posts by wbmw, and doug for that matter. They are paid shills. 400K/Q implies about 10% unit market share, they crossed the 10% server market share mark back in 2004 with much fewer OEM backers. <<<<< Note that the 800K number was achieved when AMD had a significantly better product than Intel for most purposes. With Barcelona launching at 2Ghz, against 3Ghz Clovertown, that's certainly not true this time around. That's primarily why they (AMD) are drumming up energy efficiency. It appears that nothing from Intel will come close to the Barc in terms of power efficiency throughout 2008. That has become a progressively more important selling point than when Opteron came out against the P4 Xeon. The market may very well go for it with gusto. <<<<< More to the point, the single thread performance of 2 Ghz Barcelona will be significantly worse than 3Ghz Opteron for almost all purposes, so it won't even be a slam-dunk upgrade for existing Opteron users. Not all server apps are about throughput. Latency is important for many purposes. Agreed, but the split matters. A 2 GHz Barc will be a meaningful upgrade for most existing Opteron users, especially for those who care more about throughput, both from the performance and performance/watt point of views. Some will upgrade to 3 GHz Opterons instead, but they are likely to be a minority. <<<<At 3Ghz, Barcelona would be a pretty interesting product. At 2Ghz, it's a niche product. Until the clock speed gets competitive with Intel, I expect Barcelona volume to stay under 100K/Q. AMD will win a few big HPC contracts, but most people will wait until the clock speed gets a whole lot better. <<<<And by the time the clock speed gets more reasonable, Barcelona will be competing with Penryn at faster clocks, better IPC and larger cache. There is pent-up demand for it from the likes of Cray, Sun, HP and Dell. 100K units is really peanuts, several high-end HPC projects would be enough to gobble up that many chips. 100K CPUs means for example 5K four-socket + 40K 2-socket servers, Sun can do that alone easily in a Q4. <<<< As far as Phenom goes, I'm really not at all sure why many desktop users would prefer it to a higher clocked A64 x2. Certainly not for a premium price until its single-thread performance beats the x2. And remember how aggressive Intel's desktop pricing already is. Phenom isn't going to do any volume unless it's priced very low. I think AMD will make more revenue building multiple x2's in the short run. Yes, pricing is crucial. If priced in the $250-400 range, the Phenom should achieve good volume just as the quad-core consumer chips from Intel do today. Newegg for example is selling them like hotcakes, why would any desktop user buy a low clocked quad core instead of a higher clocked dual core is beyond me, but many people do just that. Who am I to tell the market what to do :)