Intel Corp (INTC)

[Dan3]

Re: You cleverly left off the fact that the "current schedule" represents a 6 to 9 month slip from AMD's "prior schedule".

It's pretty clear that you've never had anything to do with R&D or high tech in general. When projects are first scoped out, early timelines project problems being solved easily, but they often aren't - that's why it's R&D and that's why the schedules are always off, if they already knew enough about it to make perfect schedules, it wouldn't be new technology.

If AMD is shipping in high volume by the end of the year, Athlon64 will be about 2 years later than the very earliest dates. That's not bad when compared to Itanium (which was a more complex project) that is about 4 to 6 years behind the very first plans.

Since some models of Opteron have now been shipping for several months, and the systems have been fine (and I know they are, since several of our Opteron servers have now been running for a couple of months), it's fair to say that things are looking pretty good for the Athlon 64 launch. The current Athlon64 is basically an Opteron 2XX with a different sticker on it, so AMD has a pretty good handle on how the launch will go. Given that support from motherboard and chipset makers has been strong, and the existing products have been rock solid, the Athlon 64 launch is looking pretty good.

The Opteron/Athlon64 program has been a spectacular success for AMD. To understand just how tremendous a job AMD has done, you need to consider that Itanium, which was not constrained by the need to maintain backwards compatability with anything, hardware or software (though it was complicated by the use of a different instruction set) has taken 2 to 3 times as long to bring to market at (at minimum) 20 times the cost.

The Opteron/Athlon64 is an incredible achievment and the markets are starting to pick up on that fact.