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

To: Time Traveler who wrote (32173)	4/25/1998 12:24:00 AM
From: Adrian Wu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583494

Re: <Is it true that when Intel ask the Taiwanese to jump. Then the Taiwanese would ask Intel how high.> In fact, I invest quite extensively in Taiwan and China high tech firms, and know a lot of people who distribute for these companies. There is no danger of these board makers abandoning socket 7 in the foreseeable future. As you can see, Intel refuses to license slot 1 chipsets to anyone else. Ceasing socket 7 support would mean the end for companies such as VIA and SIS. Taiwan companies fear Intel, but they also know that they must band together and fight to survive. For example, All of Asus's BX boards allow the user to choose bus frequencies, which contradicts Intel's wishes. The computer press in Hong Kong, and some of the advertisements from board makers quite openly "suggest" that users buy a PII-266 and run it at 100x3.5, thus saving themselves $400. This must piss Intel off, but such is life. The fact is, the slot 1 design holds no advantage over socket 7. It is quite possible to get beyond 400MHz on socket 7. The width of the frontside bus is equal. The only advantage is the backside bus design of the PII, but this raises the cost significantly. As you will see from the K6-3D and K6-3D+, a more efficient processor core design will easily negate any advantage the backside bus has. (case in point, without the L2 cache, the Celeron performs not even as well as a K6-200). The K6-3D+ will have a pipelined FPU as well as 256kB of on chip L2 cache, and an optional L3 cache on motherboard. In Hong Kong, I see more socket 7 boards displayed than Slot 1 boards in the large computer arcades. Legend computers, the largest computer maker in China, will be using K6s for their socket 7 computers when Intel pulls the plug on the Pentium MMX. Compaq designs some of their own motherboards for the Deskpro series, which are made in Singapore, but their Presario series use almost completely outsourced parts. Most of the components in a Compaq Presario are made in Taiwan, the reason why they can be made so cheaply. Dell sticks to Intel parts for their desktops, but their laptops are completely OEM from Taiwan. Dell also says that they will stick to higher end computers. We shall see.