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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (56876)	4/30/1999 2:13:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578097

<OK, here's where your argument kind of falls apart. Just because the EV68 will cost less to make than EV67 doesn't mean that the EV68 will necessarily sell for less. For example, Intel was selling two kinds of Pentium II's at one point, the Klamath (0.35 micron) and the Deschutes (0.25 micron). The Deschutes is just a shrink of the Klamath, so it would naturally cost less to manufacture. Yet because the Deschutes ran at much higher speeds than the Klamath, it sold for much more. Pentium II 400 and 450 MHz CPUs (Deschutes) sold for $500 for a long time, while at the same time Pentium II 300 CPUs (Klamath) dropped in price to around $200. Same thing when Coppermine coming out. Coppermine will be on Intel's 0.18 micron process. The die size will likely be similar to Katmai (0.25 micron) because Coppermine adds 256K of on-die cache, but the whole processor itself should be cheaper to make than Katmai because there's no more off-chip L2 cache to worry about. Yet I'll guarantee you that when Coppermine is released, Pentium III's running at 600 MHz (Coppermine) will sell for much more than Pentium III's running at 500 MHz (Katmai). So when you say that EV68 price will be less than EV67 and EV6, that's like saying the price of Coppermine will be selling at the same price as a Slot 1 Mendocino (Celeron) just because their die sizes are similar. It doesn't work that way.> "It doesn't work that way." Well, you did a fine job of extrapolating my comparison across shrinks of EV6 into the Intel world. Instead of refuting you point by point let's visit the obvious. The EV68 will be shipped in different speed grades, just as the EV6 is today. Compaq is set to announce the DS10 ( a single processor server ) at ~$3500 .. this box has a 466 MHz 21264 in it. You can bet the low clock has a lot to do with being able to ship at that price. More concrete is the AlphaServer 8400, several speed grades were shipping at once, the 440 MHz CPUs made for system prices THOUSANDS less than the 533 MHz boxes. Customers will pay for a speed bump and much easier at the time to bin the 440 MHz part. The EV68 should be available in speed grades from 800 MHz to 1000 and you can bet the 800 MHz will be a very nice priced part. The EV67 will top at 800 MHz, the EV68 at 800 MHz should be cheaper as it smaller and bins easier. <So when you say that EV68 price will be less than EV67 and EV6, that's like saying the price of Coppermine will be selling at the same price as a Slot 1 Mendocino (Celeron) just because their die sizes are similar. It doesn't work that way.> The EV68 at 800 MHz will be cheaper than the EV67 at 800 MHz because the die size is smaller and more will bin at that speed grade on EV68.. and yes it does work that way. By the way, did I say the die sizes of EV68 and EV67 were similar? Where? EV68 die size should be considerably smaller. And again, don't hang your hat on what I say.... you may want to check out and bookmark this slide: digital.com They show the EV68 priced like a 533 MHz 21164PC. That is a nice priced part. Likewise, they do show the EV68 being priced less than the EV67 and as you notice the EV5 lineup came down in price (we know this to be a historical fact, it did occur) with the EV57 allowing a < $1000 Linux box to ship Real Soon Now. Since the EV68 is graphically displayed at the same level as that EV56 21164PC at 533 MHz , it isn't much of a stretch to anticipate $2000-$4000 EV68 workstations, 1Q 2000. Hope that helps you understand some of the current Alpha pricing trends. Does Intel have a similar "roadmap" available?