Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"D'YA suppose maybe, perhaps, perchanch he had an inkling of this "

Sure. And using AMD is attractive in a number of ways. For the near future, they are going to be at least competitive in performance, if not superior. It is going to be late 2006 at the earliest before Intel can possibly introduce anything that drops AMD down to a solid number 2. In addition, total system cost is going to be lower, the lower power draw and less heat has a large system impact. Plus a Socket939 system generally needs less support chips and the board layout is simpler than for a LGA775. The cost differential isn't huge, but every dollar counts if you get high volume. It should also show up as lower support costs, but other factors can come into play for that. Another factor that can be attractive is that AMD has show a lot of flexibility in producing specialized processors for HPaq, and I am sure they would do it for anyone who buys enough units. I am not aware of Intel having done this recently, if ever.

And lastly, there is Dragonfly, assuming it will actually exist. The possibilities of that are enormous...

What AMD does lack is enough capacity to fusl a major Dell attack. If Lenovo wants to do this and use AMD as the enabler, then Hector's actions in lining up capacity makes a lot of sense. They don't need that capacity now, but next year it would start to be important. In this scenario, AMD will be milking 90nm at Fab30 for a while. The chips are decently competitive and provide needed capacity. It would make sense to shut it down at some point and convert it to 45nm, though.