Replies to post #28167 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Mysef]

Dan,
speaking of Engle, I do hope he's doing well.

Subzero hasn't posted since 2/16.

Looks like a buy signal for AMD to me.
Mysef

[wbmw]

Dan, Re: Now that Intel has to face the same issues AMD faced 2 years ago, that post is looking pretty good!

I think a more likely parallel is to view Intel's position at the time of your previous post. It was just before the Northwood launch, and you reveled in the fact that Willamette underperformed Athlon XP while having a larger die size. I admit that it didn't look good for Intel at the time, but a few things happened.

First, Northwood was surprisingly better than Willamette, but it couldn't clock much higher at first. It launched at a low volume 2.2GHz, but as we know, it scaled to 3GHz over the course of that year. Intel then increased the front side bus bandwidth and added DDR support. They also came out with a fairly competitive mobile solution that stopped the Mobile Athlon XP in its tracks.

The argument of die size fell quiet very quickly when Intel began selling die that were much smaller. Prescott is only 112mm^2 to Athlon 64's 193mm^2. Only the 90nm parts with half the cache can get down to the same range. You made a big deal on die size when it wasn't really a big deal for Intel to ramp a die size much larger than AMD. They still managed to be profitable in spite of your doomsaying.

Now, there's a lot of people who still think that Prescott won't scale because it was launched at the same frequency as Northwood. People still underestimate Intel's mobile competitiveness, in spite of their very aggressive push in this area. Furthermore, you take a snapshot of one chip on a new process, and assume the process is broken and will take 2 years to fix. Sorry, Dan, but that theory is not credible at all.

I think a lot of people here underestimate Intel's competitiveness.