Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[bobs10]

Even with the Athlon, until about a year ago, AMD was an INTC tech follower. That all changed with the K8. But taking market from INTC, even with a clearly superior and differentiated product, is no piece of cake.

Even though market penetration has been slow it has been constant. One of the problems about living on the bleeding edge is that all the pieces aren't always in place. This has certainly been a factor in the slow transition to 64 bits.

Another thing has been the relatively slow uptake by the OEMs. I can't, for the life of me, see why HPQ isn't pushing k8 harder. Quarter after quarter we read that Dell is taking market share from HPQ yet HPQ refuses to wholeheartedly support k8, which has got to be their best weapon against DELL. I do believe though that HPQ is finally waking up, but probably due more to competition from SUN than DELL.

Anyway, in the meantime AMD has product to sell and is doing what it has to do to get the stuff out of inventory. Actually, given the stable to rising ASP's one would have to conclude that they have been fairly successful at it so far. Still AMD is producing more high-end stuff (A64's mostly) than the present market can digest without affecting high-end ASP's. So their doing the rational thing and down-binning it to lower price break points.

When MSFT finally gets a 64 bit OS into the market all this will change quickly. The challenge for AMD is going to be maintaining a differentiated product and the technical lead once INTC has an AMD64 compatible product to sell.

A little more enthusiasm, in actual product, not just verbal support from IBM would be helpful too.