Less Than A Hit

Digitimes had an article yesterday from AMD Taiwan (Update: Digitimes has now corrected the article to cite their sources as being Taiwanese mobo makers) saying that Athlon 64 sales are “better than expected” at that they expect to ship 600,000 of them this quarter.

That’s all???

A figure of 600K Athlon 64s is far below any estimates or projections that AMD has previously made for the chip, roughly half the previous lowest estimates, and about a tenth of what AMD was promising a year ago.

True, this doesn’t include Opterons, but toss them in and you only get about 750,000 Hammers sold. This accounts for roughly a tenth of AMD’s production capacity at 130nm (even after figuring in additional die size).

Not too good for a processor that’s been out a year. Prescott, which has been out a shorter period of time, now accounts for a far higher percentage of Intel’s production, probably more than 50% at this point.

Let me put it another way. Six months after launch, Intel is making more than one Prescott for each Northwood made, maybe approaching two Prescotts per Northwood.

In contrast, twelve months after launch, AMD is making one Athlon 64 for every ten Athlon XPs they make.

As we pointed out about a month ago, low yield and high prices have been a problem for AMD.

Next quarter, though, the Digitimes articles says that production ought to roughly triple, even though 64-bit Windows will still be in beta.

We’ve heard this before.

Let’s face it, in its first year of existence, the Athlon 64 has been a sales flop. (Opterons have done OK, but they’re still rather less than 10% of the server marketplace).

Total Athlon 64 sales have probably been less than 2 million units. Granted, most of the fault is probably self-inflicted, either through inability to make the things and/or pricing them too high.

But let’s give AMD the benefit of the doubt here. Let’s assume that now they can make a lot more.

What can they now sell them for?

Price Parity Cracking?

For the first time since introduction, prices for some Athlon 64 processors are now selling at a significant discount to AMD prices (which in return are connected to Intel prices).

While they are nowhere near the 33-50% discounts usually seen in Athlon/AthlonXP days, this is a new development.

If you compare AMD’s official prices on the lower end of the totem pole with those offered by ZipZoomFly.com, you’ll get the following (prices used are prices for PIBs):