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

To: Yousef who wrote (30080)	3/21/1998 6:22:00 PM
From: Kevin K. Spurway	Respond to of 1575535

Re: "If [CyberMax] can't get product from AMD, they have a right to be "griping"." I completely agree with you. If, in fact, my theory is right, AMD is doing business very badly. Actually, if AMD has supply and are denying it to CyberMax because they're pissed, AMD is being just plain stupid. My theory is partly based on conversations I have had with CyberMax salesmen where they have really gone way out of their way to loudly pan AMD. Obviously, CyberMax has a right to complain about AMD--I just think that AMD might think they went a little too far. Kevin

To: Yousef who wrote (30080)	3/23/1998 6:29:00 PM
From: Xpiderman	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 1575535

AMD: Facing big question marks AMD: Facing big question marks Monday March 23 dailynews.yahoo.com; It's no longer just about processors - it's about architectures. PC chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is in danger of becoming boxed out of the PC industry by Intel's move towards a proprietary PC architecture, according to industry analysts. "AMD is going to be left to develop their own computer architecture to compete with Intel," said Nathan Brookwood, industry analyst for market researcher Dataquest. "Unless they get 10 to 20 percent of the market, they are in trouble." With Intel's announcement of the low-end Celeron Pentium II processor, the company now has a full line of Pentium II chips for a broad range of users. This means that, soon, almost the entire PC industry will be using Intel's new -- so-called Slot 1 -- architecture. It's a market that will be tough to crack. With a combination of patents and trade secrets protecting the way Intel's Pentium II connects to the motherboard, creating a compatible chip is a tough job. The enemy of my enemy Making a chip is no longer enough. The highly integrated way that Intel's Pentium II connects to the PC motherboard makes it harder than ever to clone the chip without creating a whole new -- and expensive -- platform. Originally, industry watchers speculated that Intel's competitors would band together to convince the industry to offer an alternative to Intel. While PC chip makers AMD, Cyrix Corp., and Integrated Device Technology Inc. are cooperating on developing [LINK: zdnet.com] an accelerated version of the Pentium architecture, dubbed Super 7, next year that alliance could break apart. On Thursday, National execs revealed that its subsidiary Cyrix would discontinue its support of Super 7 after the speed of the architecture reached 133MHz, twice the speed of today's computers. Cyrix became a wholey-owned subsidiary of National last July, when the chip giant bought the Richardson, Texas firm for $550 million. Steve Tobak, a vice president with National, declined to comment whether Slot 1 would replace Super 7 in its products, but acknowledged that "development [with Slot 1] is being considered.". The company has the rights to use Pentium II thanks to a legal agreement between National Semiconductor and Intel. Haunted by past agreements AMD doesn't have that option. As part of a previous agreement, the Sunnyvale, Calif. company cannot reverse engineer the Intel's Slot 1 architecture to make its own chips compatible. "This leaves AMD all alone with Socket 7 and Slot A," said Jim Turley, a senior analyst with semiconductory market watcher MicroDesign Resources. Slot A is AMD's competitor to Intel's Slot 1, based on a design the company has licensed from Digital Equipment Corp. Yet, to create a PC based around the Slot A architecture, AMD needs special motherboards, peripheral chip sets, and a host of other services. Whether or not the company can convince others to create those products depends on whether AMD grabs a big enough piece of the PC market to make its platform profitable. Last year, AMD only accounted for about 8 million, or almost 9 percent, of the 90 million PC processors sold. Yet, the company is having trouble boosting their share this year, due to problems producing its flagship K6 chip. "If they don't solve their yield problems in the next 90 days or so, they will have trouble keeping PC makers with them," said Dataquest's Brookwood. Going at it alone As the PC market segments into low-cost PCs for the home, office terminals, servers and workstations, Intel's rivals will likely concentrate on specific niches. If Cyrix and IDT part ways with AMD, the company still believes it can succeed. "We feel that we have been and are the only Intel alternative," said Dwayne Cox, spokesman for the Sunnyvale, Calif. company. Others tend to agree. "It is going to take a lot to kill AMD," said MDR's Turley. "A whole year of not shipping K6s hasn't done it." If the company can solve its current problems, perhaps it will have a crack at the future ones.