Let’s get this straight: You’re a company hemorrhaging red on the financial pages like a victim in a slasher movie.
You call a financial meeting of analysts to try to convince them that this is going to stop someday soon.
To impress them, you find the sweetest, most-blessed engineering sample you can find and get it to run stably at 3GHz. You then cobble together a beast box with plenty of video cards.
You bring it to the meeting where you desperately need to impress people, and what do you do with your “killer” box? Why, you
If you have the real deal, an Intel-killer, in your hands, is this what you do? Like hell you do!
If a 3GHz K10 quad-core can’t impress, what can AMD possibly come out with in the next year that will do better?
No one, I repeat no one, in AMD’s position would pass up a golden, I repeat golden PR opportunity to impress everyone if they had the real deal.
Sure, some would complain that benchmarks from such a box would be a stunt, a lie. I probably would, too, but even I would have to concede that such numbers would be a helluva better quality lie than we’ve been getting the last six months with “simulated” results from non-existent processors running a couple obscure benchmarks. If you have to feed us BS, at least make it tasty!
No doubt some will say that AMD is withholding such information for “competitive reasons.” Why, sure, and I’ll tell you what the competitive reason is, “If we released numbers, Intel would cobble up a box within two days and invert our gluteus maximuses with it.”
A few may say, “The BIOS isn’t ready yet.” Well, there might be something to be said for that if this were a third-party motherboard inside the box, but it wasn’t. It was an ATI board, and ATI is part of AMD now, no? And if that ATI board was kind of beta itself, shouldn’t one use whatever board yields the best results?
Maybe more to the point, why isn’t Intel having such problems? It’s not like K10 was conceived yesterday. At least ATI BIOSes ought to be reasonably mature by now. BIOSes shouldn’t be materially affected by new steppings without design changes. Is AMD fixing a lot of bugs or making on-the-fly design changes?
Wake up, folks. This is Oz; this is the Pied Piper. K10 sucks, it’s just a tweaked Hammer, and AMD is desperately trying to find some way to make this pig sing.
I know a lot of you don’t want to hear that. You want to think well of the company, if for no other reason than your fears of an Intel-only world.
Really, what can you say about the last six months? What can you say about the latest duck and cover? Whatever it is, doesn’t it just boil down to hopes and feelings about the company? Is it really so much different than the feelings we’ve all had and the excuses we’ve all made for a bad boy/girlfriend?
At what point do you say, “Enough?” and start saying, “Show me?”
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