This Is PR? . . .

From here:

“ATI said in front of 150+ journalists that the R600XT won’t be able to compete with the Geforce 8800 GTX. The dream is dead and Radeon HD 2900 XT won’t be able to catch up with the six month old Geforce 8800 GTX.

“ATI said that R600XT, Radeon HD 2900XT has about the same performance as the 8800 GTS. Radeon HD 2900 XTX won’t be launched in mid may and will be delayed to Q3 2007.”

You fly 150 press people to Tunisia to say that?

And yes, they’re not going to be on time, either.

AMD paid over five billion dollars for this?

And not a word about Barcelona.

In contrast, we see this about Intel.

“However, industry sources recently told TG Daily that a whole bunch of non disclosure agreements (NDAs) for the pre-release and distribution of 45 nm processors are already in place and carry a July 15 expiration date. “Pre-release”, of course, does not mean that Intel will launch the processor at this time; however, we received confirmation from our sources that initial sample shipments of Penryn are scheduled to begin late in Q2 and early Q3. We also expect the NDAs also to apply to the press, which means that first real-world Penryn benchmarks are likely to be published on July 15.”

I don’t think this means you’re going to be to buy a Penryn July 16, but you’ll probably know all about them July 16, just in time for people to decide between them and the K10s. If that’s too long a wait, take a look at XTremesystems.org occasionally, starting maybe a month from now. 🙂

Now AMD could have beaten Intel to the punch by months by making some K10 machines freely available to those temporary Tunisians, and give them something better to write than “Our video cards are going to suck.”

And if they did that, the financial people, God forbid, might actually like that, and maybe be more willing to buy your $2 billion issue, and maybe think twice about downgrading your debt from junk to “this may turn into trash.”

And maybe it’s just echoes of Good Friday in my head, but when I read that AMD planned to webcast its annual shareholder meeting, my first thought was cries of “Crucify, crucify” from the crowd. 🙂

OK, “Crucify” isn’t going to happen, and I’m not recommending it, but imagine somebody yelling, “Bulldung” during the meeting, and someone recording it. That ought to be popular on YouTube.

There is no, repeat, no legitimate business reason for AMD to withhold this kind of information if they have the real deal. This has nothing to do with satisfying geek curiosity; it has everything to do with the financial health of the company.

No adequately aware (and relatively sane) person can draw any other conclusion from AMD’s actions up to this point than to conclude that, for whatever reason, clock speeds, bugs, yields, other problems with process technology or design or something, K10s aren’t the real deal at the moment.

Because if that isn’t the case, if AMD does have the goods ready, doing what they’ve been doing would be so insane that every major exec should be sued and fired.

Ed