Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

JoeP

mainly because everyone assumed hammer (or at least Opteron) would have to get near 2.0GHz before enough volume was produced to sell it.

Sorry but this makes no sense whatsoever to me.

The general assumption was the 2GHz would be achieved at the beggining of Q2

This may have been the general assumption of the AMD faithful but I don't know anybody else who believed it.

This might have been pushed back to late Q2, but at least they will have enough volume to introduce Opteron in Q1.

I don't know where you are getting this from. There is no relation between AMD announcing something and product available.

Hammer did have greater than 50% yeilds several months ago. It seems now, the problem is the binsplits. The number of CPU's per wafer that operate is greater than 50% (wild estimate 65% now). The problem is getting these CPUs to operate above 1.6GHz. Below that, a large percent of the CPUs work.

I don't believe any claims AMD (or you) make about yields. Yield numbers from engineering lots mean nothing. You need high volume over time to make any statements about yields, especially when talking about such a complex process as SOI. Process engineers can babysit engineering lots. Talk about yields when they've run thousands of wafers per week over several months. Same goes for binsplits.

EP