Spokeshave, Re: We will just have to agree to disagree that Intel has a much more competitive product line. That may be true today, but may not be true next week..
I wasn't aware until now that you were arguing this.
My opinion on Hammer is somewhat mixed. It does have extra performance features, which is good, but too hard to tell whether these will give them performance leadership over Intel. It has 64-bit programming possibilities, but I only see this as a marketing attempt, since mainstream 64-bit applications are years off, and more likely to start in the enterprise, rather than for the desktop. In terms of frequency, we already know that AMD is struggling. Assuming they could get in the upper 2.xGHz range, they would be more than competitive vs Intel. SOI was supposed to get them their, but that seems DOA right now. I expect that if Hammer could even yield reliably at 2.0GHz, AMD would launch it in a heartbeat. I don't think AMD is having any huge functional issues right now, so that only leaves yield issues, bin split issues, or both, and I'm leaning towards both. Yes, I know that speculation is worth little, but I think many of the signs are already pointing to AMD having its fair share of problems. And even assuming that AMD can successfully redesign the core, as rumored, to give it extra speed, will it be competitive with Intel's product in the Q2 time frame (3.2GHz Pentium 4)? If not, I see AMD losing any chances at the performance crown by the time Intel launches the Prescott core in the second half of next year, which should run much higher than 3.2GHz, and have plenty of performance enhancement features as well.
Re: Market share is a bit tricky. Contrary to the popular opinion that Intel has the tier one manufacturers in its back pocket (except Dell obviously), I believe that AMD could gain several design wins and get tier one penetration if they were better able to meet the tier one needs in terms of volume and support. I have heard grumblings that support to the tier one companies is one of AMD's biggest shortcomings.
I think most of the OEMs keep a tight relationship with Intel because Intel is a reliable long term supplier, and they usually realize that even as AMD gets ahead for some amount of time, Intel can usually catch up eventually. I don't really see much of a change from the way things currently are. HPQ already sells Athlons, so I don't see their position changing. Dell has always been strongly Intel, so I don't see a change there, either. IBM has Intel deeply entrenched in their business lines, so I don't see that changing. Gateway has suffered greatly by changing suppliers multiple times, so I don't see them changing, either. Who's left?
If Hammer becomes a long term threat, then it might be time for the deeply entrenched Intel based OEMs to open up their product lines to AMD. Longer term, anything is possible, but based on current low confidence on Hammer, I don't expect it to wildly impress the industry when it launches in 2003, and ships a quarter later.
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