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

To: Saturn V who wrote (57290)	5/5/1999 3:54:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1572298

Saturn V, Sad to say most aspects of your scenario will play out as you say. Of course AMD knows this and will try to break the play by extra cache to up the hit rate and I expect a socket is on it's way to save that $20-40 for the cartridge. I would also expect to see a response to SSE soon so these will shift the curve towards AMD a bit, perhaps a survivable bit. In addition when AMD is so close that Intel must cut the price of it's leading products to suppress AMD this will play merry hell with ASP and earnings will stay profitable, but less profitable and I would expect Intel to win and the cost will be 40-50% of share price. AMD?, they will soldier on and may form an alliance to survive with CPQ/IBM/??? Bill

To: Saturn V who wrote (57290)	5/5/1999 4:15:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572298

Saturn, Re: "The K-6/Celoron Scenario will be repeated for the following reasons." >>IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY THAT THE K-7 WILL BE PERCEIVED AS EQUIVALENT >>TO INTEL'S BEST PRODUCT. The benchmarks will be king here. I have no idea what the numbers will show against Coppermine frankly. If they are better then AMD's chip will be considered equivalent or even better. If they have poor benchmarks then they will suffer just as the K6 has suffered. >B. The K-7 will be perceived as inferior to PIII. The SSE >instructions can reduce the incidence of L2 cache miss, and so on >benchmarks written for the PIII, the K-7 will be toast[ eg >Photoshop] The intense Intel media campaign will further feed this >perception, and given the large amount of announced software for >SSE, the K-7 will be fighting an uphill battle, and may end up as >perceived as only equivalent to the existing PII/Celeron. I disagree here. The SSE so far has been a joke just like MMX and 3dNow IMHO at least so far. The amount of interest in the K7 clearly shows that folks are waiting for it and impressed at least by the hype. If AMD can deliver them, folks will buy it. In the business market the SSE is a non-issue completely and if the K7 really does clock at 600Mhz this year, AMD will have no problems selling all they can make. >C. The Intel 0.18 micron process has already shipped production >quantities of Dixon. So the Coppermine will have a smoothly running >process.[ The Coppermine is the cache Celeron equivalent of PIII]. >If this design ramps up as smoothly as the cache version Celeron, >Intel will be shipping a PIII at 700MHz by fall with an on chip >cache. AMD is at least 6 months behind production of 0.18micron. I agree that Coppermine in 0.18 is the threat. Mhz will sell here. If Intel is shipping 700Mhz systems and AMD is at 500Mhz then I tend to agree that AMD has no chance of getting a good price for the K7. >D. The new infrastructure for K-7 will have have the inevitable >start-up technical glitches compounding AMD's problems. It is very >unlikely that AMD will make significant penetration in the server >marketplace for a year or so because of the new infrastructure. I think that the K7 even as a single CPU will make a good server, particularly for Linux. And lots of such devices are being bought these days. I do agree that DUAL and Quad systems will be tough for K7 for a while. In addition the extra cache of up to 8Mb will be a big factor in this market. >THE UNIT COST [ VARIABLE COST ] FOR THE K-6 WILL BE HIGHER THAN FOR >COPPERMINE >A. The K-7 will have a cartridge and off chip cache. The Coppermine >will not. Add $20-40 to AMD's cost. You are right K7 will cost more than coppermine. On the other hand raw cost should be in $100-200 range. So even with a $400 ASP that's good margin for AMD. >C. The new K-7 infrastructure will inevitably be more expensive > >because of lower volumes and being behind on the learning curve. Of course it will be more expensive. But it will compete with much much more expensive CPU's. And with AMD's modest volumes Intel isn't going to slash the high end pricing down to $200 to cut AMD off at the knees. If it does so, their stock will drop by a factor of 10. Remember even 1M pcs/qtr is a "best" case scenario for K7 volume for next few quarters. Intel and AMD IMHO will both do well as NSM has gone away, as long as Intel doesn't commit hari-kiri when the K7 comes out.