Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[yourbankruptcy]

Consumer SMP. I want to ask you to think about this topic. In fact, I don't recall that Intel was ever making, promoting or encouraging manufacturers to produce consumer dual-cpu systems. The only one I recall it's a bunch of unofficial dual-Celeron boards few years ago. Those dual-Celeron systems were the best price/performancers in the world.

I think Intel was always wanting to keep Jeenee in the bottle. If consumer will realize that good dual-cpu system with two $80 cpu's is as fast as the one with single $350 cpu, Intel is in trouble. Moreover, with SMP system the most important is not the raw cpu speed, but price, power consumption and scalability. Attacking this market spot is in fact exploring the Intel's Achilles point.

I'm glad Opteron is directly targeting this empty space. I think dual-Opteron boards will be cheap, stable, popular. AMD is the guy who prefer to sell two $80-$150 cpu's instead of competing with Intel in $350 space (I mean consumer, not servers). I beleive Tejas will be faster than Opteron, but dual Opteron SMP system will completely dust Tejas.

The second attack must be to overbloated Celeree. Look, Celeron costs $100, while Athlon XP with better performance $45. There is nothing but branding here. How to tell consumer Celeron is cr*p? I think the only way is to have top-of-the-line SMP systems in every Comp USA. If consumers see that this new AMD 64 bit cpu is on display as the fastest pc around, they will start asking for entry-level variants of it, or, at least, will not agree to pay so much for Celerons.

I also beleive that with its Opteron clone Transmeta can establish itself on the laptop and mini-sized desktop and help AMD to spread the same architecture to the low level. I think if you put two Transmetas into SMP system, it will outperform any Celeron big way.