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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe C. who wrote (12622)	5/17/1999 9:46:00 AM
From: VincentTH	Respond to of 16960

Anyone has STBI earnings? They said pre-market didn't they? Zacks' estimate is $.21, which seems to be high compared to recent revised numbers. //V

To: Joe C. who wrote (12622)	5/17/1999 12:22:00 PM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Umm, let me see... Patrick, for the uninformed readers like me, what does this quote mean in terms of potential product introductions/cycles: but 3dfx currently has 4 concurrent ASIC development teams, and probably 20 PCB development designs around these products. 3dfx has already stated that they are on 6 month cycles for new product development. This means that 3dfx is working two years in advance of their next products or they are going to have some products come out concurrently. I'm guessing the latter. If I had to guess what the team composition it would be the following given what we know about how 3dfx is working the product cycles: A) Responsible for next-generation of architecture with a development schedule of 18-24 months B) Responsible for incrementing advances of current architecture with a development schedule of 6 months C) Mobile product design D) Motherboard chipset and set-top integration Pat

To: Joe C. who wrote (12622)	5/17/1999 4:27:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

ASICs are custom made chips. So 4 ASIC teams means (potentially) that 3dfx is building 4 different chip sets (which is different than running the same chip at different clock cycles as is the case with the current V3s). So my guess is that two of these are Rampage (say with or without various options) one of them is the generation after Rampage, and perhaps one of them another variation of V3. PCB stands for the printed circuit board. This is the actual flat panel on which all the chips are mounted. Contrary to public opinion, building the PCB is not a simple task and can be sometimes as difficult as the actual chip design. 20 PCB designs implies that there will be 20 different products based on the above 4 chip designs. Again, I suspect that some of these designs are for the existing V3 chips and some of them are "parallel" efforts to ensure a working PCB in time for the chips. But the rest of them are new product lines. Unlike ASIC design, PCB design can be very different for any small change in specs. For example, a product using a 100MHz chip and the same product using the same chip running at 200MHz may have very different PCBs. 'hope this helps, Sun Tzu