Replies to post #34828 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[bobs10]

What your seeing is introductory pricing. Eventually Banias will become Dotham. It's time to milk the market with Dotham right now. That's what INTC does best, marketing.

[blauboad]

Don't worry about price. If Intel starts churning these out on 65 with all that capacity, the price will come down to levels the market is accustomed to paying. Dothan prices will drop as production increases and after they've juiced all they can out of the early adopters and fanboys.

My point is that it is a good idea that will find an eager market when it ramps up and prices drop.

I know AMD plans dual-core Opteron, but without contracting out for fab space, they cannot dual-core their desktop chips for some time to come. But I don't think that will matter in the next 2-3 years...

I'll go on the record to say that it's absurd to believe Intel and analyst assertions that these dual-core chips will be generally available in 2005. 2006 or 7 more like it. Unless this has been a secret project for a long time (which I doubt), then there's a massive amount of work to be done, as current iAMD64 implementation is for NetBurst architecture--that will have to get designed from scratch--all dual core talk was about NetBurst--that will also have to get designed from scratch. Really, much more work than going from say k7 to k8. I wouldn't be surprised to see a single-core version of Dothan64 come out first to satisfy the market until they get all the kinks out of dual-core. And even that is more than a year away at best (worst?).

[sgolds]

mmoy, Dothan pricing, don't confuse introductory pricing with what Intel can do later. Look at the size and cost of producing the die. What you see is a chip that can be sold at practically whatever price Intel wants. It is under their control when they want to flood the market.

However, the current Dothan is still a laptop processor with mediocre floating point. As a desktop chip it would be a middling performer - better than current Celeron, no comparison with A64. Putting this on the desktop would really be for the high volume market - which means low price.

A dual-core 64-bit Dothan-derivative would be a much different product. I don't think Intel will have this product ready in 2005. In addition to aforementioned dual core & 64-bit they also need to improve the floating point execution.

Anyhow, Dothan is expensive right now because it is unmatched in the slim & light catagory. If AMD fields a competitive chip on 90nm then just watch those prices crash!