If you can wait until 2003, XP successors will be a bargain. — Ed
Financially, pretty much the same as last quarter. AMD sold a few more processors for a little less money. Flash memory is the primary reason for AMD showing a small loss.
The items of note:
No more Durons by end of the year; Thoroughbreds to become nags: As we suspected, when Hammer shows up, Duron and descendants go away, and Athlons become the value CPU at Duron-type prices.
It would not be the worst idea in the world to plan on getting yourself a 2GHz+/2500+ processor upgrade for maybe around $75 (and that’s before overclocking), then sit back for a year or so and see what happens between Hammer and Prescott.
If I weren’t doing what I’m doing, I’d probably live with what I got for a while, do the Christmas processor upgrade, and around fall 2003 see if Prescott went x86-64, compare it to a .10 micron Hammer, then do a big upgrade then.
Hammer will come later rather than sooner:AMD said they’re pretty sure they’ll get a few of them out by the end of the year, but serious shipments won’t happen until the beginning of 2003.
Dresden to become a Hammer-only fab UMC is scheduled to start producing Thoroughbreds early in 2003, and will take over all Athlon production shortly thereafter. Well, that will keep UMC busy. It also probably helps to explain why Barton is in limbo, why full-scale Thoroughbred production is late (and maybe why we might see shortages).
At the moment, AMD is trying to do all of the following at Dresden:
I’d hate to be traffic control at Dresden. 🙂
All this will probably cause some delays here and there when the jugglers drop the occasional ball, but from AMD’s perspective, this is probably a good time to do so since Intel really isn’t going to do much for a while.
We’re not going to start the fire Intel the day before indicated that it didn’t plan on any more than normal price cutting. Of course, to AMD, that’s “aggressive,” but AMD expects average prices to pretty much stay where they are. Since AMD has no problem indicating when it’s going to get aggressive on this front, it seems unlikely they have some secret plan in the works.
. . . unless . . . AMD indicated that the world x86 processor markets was about 41 million units. It also indicated, however, that resellers built up inventories during that period.
This usually happens when resellers anticipate better times coming. If those better times don’t come, at least to the computer sector, that could trigger additional price cutting. AMD seemed more concerned about that happening than Intel aggression.
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