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

To: Harve Wolfe who wrote (31773)	4/12/1998 9:48:00 PM
From: Maxwell	Respond to of 1571855

Harve Wolfe: <<Why is IBM shooting itself and AMD in the foot? If both the E84 and the E76 were identical except for the processor I'd have paid $1799 for the K6 machine and ordered it today. Why, Why, Why would IBM confuse the CPU issue this way, maybe to the benefit of Intel? >> I have also made this observations many moons ago and are somewhat as confused as you back then. However I now understand why they (IBM, CPQ, etc.) use such pricing strategy. Here are the reasons #1) Computer box maker such as IBM don't want their products to compete with each other. If PII-300 and K6-300 are configured exactly the same and the K6 came out cheaper then most people would buy the cheaper part. If people buy the K6 then IBM can't sell their PII and if they can't sell their PII then they have wasted their resources designing the PII. #2) IBM wants to differentiate the PII and K6 systems. They want to target the PII as the high-end system and to entice customers they add in more harddrive and higher memory in the video card. These 2 components really cost them minimal but by adding it in they can convince consumers paying extra $300. The K6 IBM wants to target as the low end or valued oriented buyers. Thus they go to the cheaper components and cheaper CPU and thus save consumers $300. Had they configured PII same as K6 then they have a problem in #1. #3) Box makers are interested in making money. They don't care which product they sell. Their strategy is to maximize the revenue selling both the PII and K6. They also want to have all the varieties as their competitors for consumers to choose from. They don't want to lose any potential customers. The majority of their costs come from the parts and assembly and marketing, not from that extra 4G harddrive or 2M video RAM. OEMs can get very good price on these components. Conclusion? Well that is IBM's strategy of getting consumers buying the K6 and PII. It may not fit to your taste but to many consumers they don't care. They buy for whatever they need and afford. I suggest you build your own systems. You will get it cheaper and with better components such as a graphic card. If you really want to know the difference between the 2M and 4M video RAM I can tell you that you don't see much difference if you don't use 32 bit colors on 1024 X 760 screens. More video RAM gives you more color and higher screen resolution. The refresh rate depends on the video chipset and the RAMDAC. The difference between the 8G and 4G is about $150 (IBM is probably less than $100). Maxwell

To: Harve Wolfe who wrote (31773)	4/13/1998 12:30:00 PM
From: AK2004	Respond to of 1571855

Harve I think all k6 processors will positioned to compete against Celeron. Current high price is temorary because of probably yet low supply of k6-300 chips. So the price advantage over pII is important, IMHO. If you can wait few months for k6-3d then those probably be configured similar to pii since they would be positioned against pII computers. If not you can always upgrade the HD and video card and you would probably end up paying still less than $1800. Regards -Albert ps personally I would consider k6-266 from less recognized brand-names