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

To: Robert Walter who wrote (28034)	1/20/1998 2:00:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Respond to of 1573954

Robert - Re: " Does this product sound like it has potential to take market share? " From the press release, it would be difficult to make this assessment. The one note of importance is the high speed possible for pipelined operations. Altera and Xilinx are way ahead in the density race with 50,000/100,000 gate devices already being shipped. AMD will have to provide some very FAST logic capability to win designs that are speed critical. Moreover, designers invest a lot of time, energy and money in becoming proficient in the use of any one company's FPGA/PLD chips AND SOFTWARE. And Altera and Xilinx are way ahead on software tools. ALtera offers the convenience factor and Xilinx offers "stick-shift" manual routing on top of auto routing capability. To win away designers from these camps will be a major obstacle. The new parts may help AMD maintain their existing accounts and grow their sales, but only in line with the market. At this stage of the game, I'd say the chances of them regaining significant market share are pretty slim. AMD took their eye off the PLD/FPGA ball awhile ago and are faced with a diffcult task to recapture mindshare. Don't forget - the press release would imply that they are not yet shipping SAMPLES of this new product. The time lag between evaluation (once samples are received), feasibility/capability study, design in, system design/debug and volume production can easlily be 12 months or more. These devices are not like CPUs where AMD can offer a pin-compatible device that will allow customers to plug in AMD's device into a socket already designed/in-production for an Intel chip. Applications must be designed from scratch for unique programmable logic chips. ANd this takes time, luck, perserverance and more luck! Paul