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

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (31112)	4/6/1998 5:50:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580138

Kumar of Piper Jaffray said 100 % yield on K6-266, 75% yield on K6-300 SAN FRANCISCO, April 6 (Reuters) - Shares of Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD - news) and National Semiconductor Corp (NSM - news) both jumped Monday as investors viewed the two Intel rivals as being increasingly better positioned against semiconductor giant Intel Corp (INTC - news) in the low-cost PC market. On Monday, analyst Ashok Kumar of Piper Jaffray initiated coverage of Advanced Micro with a buy rating and said that the company is achieving manufacturing improvements in production of its K6 processors, saying its yield problems are fixed. And as expected, Monday National announced its plans for a new chip that will put most of the functions of a PC on one chip. Shares of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro added 1-9/16 to 30-1/8 in active trading. Kumar said in a note to clients that AMD's yield problems are fixed and the speed grades for its K6/K6-3D processors look attractive. ''The production lots have come out and they look fairly good,'' Kumar said, adding that AMD is getting 100 percent yields of its 266 megahertz version of its K6 chip and 75 percent yields of its 300 megahertz K6 chip. AMD has been having manufacturing problems with these higher speeds of the K6 chip. Yields refer to the number of good chips that come out of the manufacturing process that can be shipped to customers. ''Low product cost should enable high market share capture in low-priced PCs,'' Kumar said. He said AMD's front side bus on a new K6 will also have faster speeds than the bus on Intel's Celeron family for low-cost PCs, due to be unveiled next week. A bus enables a chip to interact with other system components. umar also confirmed rumors reported last week that International Business Machines Corp (IBM - news) is going to invest in AMD. IBM has already signed a deal to manufacture K6 chips for AMD as a second source supplier. A spokesman for Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM declined to comment on rumors and speculation. Kumar also said that AMD chief executive Jerry Sanders will begin to groom Atiq Raza, AMD executive vice president and chief technical officer, to eventually replace him as CEO. A spokesman said AMD will update the analyst community on its manufacturing progress and any other issues during its conference call Tuesday after it announces first quarter earnings. AMD also said Sanders has an employment contract that stipulates he will be CEO until 2001 and chairman until 2002. Separately, National's shares were up 3-1/16 to 23-1/4 in active trading. Analysts said that National is uniquely poised to become a leader in the very low-cost computing arena. ''In these highly-integrated products, I'm just not sure it's going to be a product that Intel is going to attack,'' said Mark Edelstone, a Morgan Stanley analyst. ''I don't think the $500 PC is going to cause Intel a lot of heartburn. From that perspective, National becomes a company that can create some new markets...Whether or not we even call these things PCs is a question unto itself.''