Intel Corp (INTC)

[Elmer Phud]

Dew -

the rumors are what I am most interested in. t.i.a. Dew

Well the rumors are that yields are terrible and binsplits stink, but take all rumors with a grain of salt. One thing's not a rumor. At this time, AMD is incapable of producing a competitive Hammer and this is 100% consistent with what you would expect to see if the rumors are true. That doesn't prove they are true though because there could be other reasons. It's just getting hard to explain it away in any other terms after all this time. Someone is bound to remind us about all the Itanium delays but Itanium was always on a standard process that was producing high volumes. Itanium was a totally new architecture and it took more time to work the bugs out. No other was to explain it. But Opteron isn't a totally new architecture. AMD has never produced a single product on this SOI process and it's hard to believe there's any other problem that would prevent at least a Clawhammer release, unless of course the performance is just too poor for release. This possibility should not be dismissed. AMD claims world leading performance, but what else are they going to say under the circumstances?

My personal guess is this:

Yields are bad.
Binsplits are bad.
Performance is disappointing.
Opteron suffers from the same process problems plus complexity issues have yet to be validated.

EP