Replies to post #9630 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[KeithDust2000]

Elmer, Just because they are available on pricewatch doesn't mean much. That's a flea market for excess inventory. With no significant design wins it's no surprise that there are plenty for sale on PW. Demand constrained, probably but it's a good think too because I don't think AMD can make them in any volume. The long delays and absence of A64 tells me AMD can't produce them but I know you guys would prefer to attribute these things to lack of boards, no Win64, Intel threatening OEMs etc.

I wonder if you´ve seen anything in the marketplace that does not contradict your position? There are no problems whatsoever with Opteron availability. As for pricewatch, there´s the OEM channel and then there´s the retail channel. Many of the vendors listed on pricewatch are official AMD channel partners, and to suggest that they only dump excess inventory into the market is utter nonsense, I´m sorry to say.

[jhalada]

Elmer,

constrained, probably but it's a good think too because I don't think AMD can make them in any volume.

"Any volume" needs to be qualified. What do you mean? The entire market of server CPUs is 1M per quarter. It would be a dream come true if AMD could gain 10% of that in its second quarter of availability. IMO, an optimistic scenario is for AMD to gain 5% this quarter, which is 50,000 units, and that is a piece of cake, if the demand is there. Even at very low yield of 50 good die per wafer, you need 1000 wafers in total, or 77 wafers per week to meet this demand, which is about 1.5% of possible wafers per week output.

The long delays and absence of A64 tells me AMD can't produce them but I know you guys would prefer to attribute these things to lack of boards, no Win64, Intel threatening OEMs etc.

I never claimed A64 delay to be because of any of this. It seems clear that it is delayed because the clock speeds AMD was getting were not competitive.

Itanium on the other hand was never intended to be the high volume product and I'd be the first to say that Intel couldn't meet the desktop demand with a 374mm2 die.

AMD couldn't meet the desktop demand either. AMD could meat the entire server demand (If Intel decided to stop selling server chips) and still have capacity left over for desktop.

The way I see the ramp of K8 this:

 
        Wafer starts 1000s       CPUs out 1000s 
       Barton  K8-130  K8-90   Barton  K8-130  K8-90 
 Q203    57       3      0      8,550       0      0  
 Q303    48      12      0      8,400     150      0 
 Q403    39      21      0      7,200     600      0 
 Q104    29      27      4      5,850   1,050      0 
 Q204    12      12     36      4,350   1,350    500 
 Q304     0       0     60      1,800     600  4,500 
 Q404     0       0     60          0       0  7,500 
 

The assumptions for good die per wafer are:

 
 Barton 150 
 K8-130  50 
 K8-90  125

Of course, AMD doesn't sell 8.5 million Bartons, instead, somewhere between 6 and 7 or 7.5M, which should allow AMd to put some in inventory, and next quarter to increase the number of wafers to K8 by that much, so the ramp can be steeper.

Also, it is possible that AMD will introduce a smaller version of K8 on 90nm, that will not start with 1 MB, or it is possible that they will figure out how to make the cache smaller, which would result in more die candidates per wafer.

Joe

[yourbankruptcy]

Elmer, the meaning of pricewatch is different from product to product. In the case of Xeon it is flea market for excess inventory, like you suggest. In the case of Athlon, 40% of all machines are made by whitebox vendors and probably close to 5% are assembled by individuals. So very significant (up to 40%) volume of Athlons is sold in lots from 1 to 100. How do you suggest to sell them without using online retail stores?