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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Time Traveler who wrote (26581)	12/8/1997 1:10:00 AM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572708

I think that you and Yousef are stating the obvious, AMD is clearly in a race against time to ship product. Intel likewise is in a similar race as is NSM/Cyrix and IDTI. With the enormous rewards at stake I am sure the product engineers have been tweaking the process and the design. It is not unusual for a complex microprocessor design to go thru multiple mask revs as vendors iron out critical paths and rev up the speed. They must have found a significant amount of product could ship as 233 by respecing, this seems to be clearly what has happened. Cyrix a while ago had to futz with clock bus multipliers to achieve appropriate PR ratings as an example. When you are in a leading edge race running at breakneck speed Murphy's law can hit you. In this case the K6 is a pretty good chip, came out on a pretty good schedule and unfortunately the fab. guys have screwed up. On the 0.25 Micron issue they could do very well or they could screw up again. I am not a process expert but a while lot depends on how agressive AMD is with 0.25. The die sizes are so much smaller that even if they get 50% of ideal yields they could make money as they will get so many more die per wafer with equivalent higher performance. My guess is that AMD will probably be in 0.25 production with reasonable yields by Q2 98 -- about 6 months behind where they anticipated. At which time they could flood the market with 300 Mhz K6 at run rates of 4M-5M pcs per quarter. I think that AMD will lose money Q4 97 and Q1 98 and that's why I watch the stock but have not invested in it. If it hits $10-12 then I may take a look at it or at the end of Q1 I will take a look at it. Best Regards, Kash.