On Dec 19, 2:31 pm, a?n?g?...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(The little
lost angel) wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:22:54 -0800 (PST), Robert Myers
>
> <rbmyers...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >You know that I'm not an admirer of AMD, so you won't be surprised
> >that I think AMD may be mortally wounded. Between the ATI fiasco and
> >this, AMD is a company with products that no one is going to want to
> >buy and seems unlikely to survive until it will have products that
> >someone does want to buy.
>
> Although it's a really bad piece of news for AMD, I'd have to disagree
> about it being a mortal wound. After all, I distinctively remember AMD
> prices once was at US$3+ back in the early days of the K7 which
> ironically was a comparatively better product than Intel's P3 then,
> and it's now still $7+. If AMD survived on a single key product back
> then and nobody bought over them at $3+, I don't see why they can't
> survive now with an overall stronger product ****tfolio and a share
> price double those times.
>
> Despite what you *claim* about nobody wanting to buy AMD products, I
> see regular messages about AMD/ATI 3850/3870 selling out locally.
> That's at least one wing that's still flying reasonably even if not
> outperforming the competition. The X2 processors are still selling due
> to their relatively cheap prices for the performance.
>
The "nobody wants to buy" is obvious hyperbole, but there is a really
big problem here that I actually haven't seen get much discussion.
AMD's huge win in the last few years has been to get Tier 1 vendors to
take them seriously. People stuck with Intel because they knew that
if they got burned, so would everyone else. Now those who have taken
a chance on Barcelona are in trouble in exact pro****tion as they
banked on AMD. The fact that I don't particularly admire AMD has
nothing to do with it. People don't want to take risks that won't pay
off. A bet on Opteron was a bet worth making, and it paid. What
corresponding bet does AMD have to offer now or in the forseeable
future that would justify vendors risking getting hung out to dry like
they just did? Why *would* anyone want to buy on a scale that will
matter to a company of AMD's size (and with the debt it has on its
balance sheet)?
> >That AMD is publicly whining about the
> >pounding its stock price has taken should tell you something. Vendors
> >who *finally* took a chance on AMD after years of hanging back have
> >been fried. First there was the lame roadmap. Now this.
>
> >What's the difference between this and Intel's botched FDIV bug?
> >Very, very simple. At the time of the FDIV bug, x86 was for
> >"peecees," and no one cared if Intel made mistakes that IBM (or DEC or
> >Sun) never would. Now they do.
>
> Actually, I think the real difference between the two is that nobody
> saw it was a mistake Intel couldn't recover from. However for AMD,
> this would look like a killing blow on top of the underwhelming
> performance against competition for a new product generation. While I
> vaguely remember outcry against Intel for that bug, I don't remember
> anybody saying that it's going to sink Intel. There just wasn't
> sufficient competition capacity to takeover a company with over 90% of
> the market share. Thus the difference in perceived impact.
>
There's an interesting argument that fixing the FDIV bug cost Intel
about what a major advertising campaign would cost. In other words,
the FDIV bug may have paid for itself in terms of public awareness of
what was then still very much a "peecee" processor. No similar fairy
dust is going to settle on AMD over Barcelona, which has gone from
being AMD's next big threat to Intel dominance to synonym for screw-up
and late delivery. The more fair comparison might be to Itanium,
except that Intel could afford its Itanium mistakes.
Maybe AMD will dance away from this one the way they've danced away
from so many disasters in the past. If they do, the secret is in
balance sheets and cor****ate deals; for example
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7149704.stm
Despite what the article says about Intel being about just one
product, almost no one in the business wants to see Intel with
essentially a monopoly on the technology at the end of the yellow
brick road.
Robert.
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