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AMD

Athlons Sold Out 208

Posted by emmett from the uh-oh dept.
smeng58 writes: "If haven't got your Athlon yet, you may have to wait. This article found on CNNfn states AMD has sold out their production of the Athlon for the second quarter. Looks like AMD has capacity problems, or a lot of people are choosing AMD over Intel."
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Athlons Sold Out More

Athlons Sold Out

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  • I was thinking... I've never seen anything but Intel and Alpha boxes running Windows in a server environment (I might be wrong though). Does this shortage hurt more than just gamers in any quantity worth mentioning?
    B1ood
  • AMD are having supply problems for 1 month while getting Thunderbird and spitfire out the door.

    This hardly compares with the months of supply problems compounded by bad architecture decisions that Intel has been having.

    -dp

  • Shouldn't we consider this a "good" thing? (Score:5)

    by Majorachre ( 115493 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @12:50PM (#1116449)
    Though certainly market analysts and financial planners are taken aback at this kind of thing. Loss of profit due to underproduction is never a good thing. Consider that AMD's ability to make money is essentially now shut down until they are caught up with demand. This also can lead to price increase which hurts the end-user and can also lead computer companies to choose Intel over AMD as they don't suffer from these problems.
    All things considered however, this means that AMD has strongly underforecasted its ability to advertise, sell, gain market share. We should be quite pleased to see that the only true Intel competitor is even more successful than it thought it ever would be. My congratulations go out to AMD for their success - it can only help out consumers in the long run.
  • Oh Intel are keeping there tier one customers, such as Dell, happy. This is part of the reason that they can't supply the channel :)

    -p

  • I speak for myself when I say... (Score:3)

    by toofast ( 20646 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @12:51PM (#1116451)
    That a lot of people are switching from PIII's to Athlons. Our company just installed over 250 Athlon-based systems, that were supposed to be PIII's. Even all my friends, who have been Pentium fans since the beginning, are buying Athlons.

    Look, they're cheaper, they're faster, and they're cooler than PIII's. Why buy a Pentium????

  • well, I suppose it's better for the athlon to have sold out than to have it commit an error like the infamous pentium illegal opcode.
  • We're at a time where there is an increased amount of buying going on, in general. (Chicago tribune). Seeing that AMD will not have enough to meet demand, and Intel is delaying the launch of certain, chips... isn't it possible that more people are buying computers?
  • Is that even though this company (AMD) has a great product that everyone wants, and is making money, etc.. the stock price will likely still be low, and might even drop on this news, thanks to those fscking day traders who can't tell the difference between an OS and a hardware manufacturer.

    Yes, the same day traders that somehow made MS stock go up when the Findings of Fact slapped MS, but made every tech stock go down when Judge Jackson made it the Findings of Law. Sigh.
    ---
  • It's only a good thing if in the future AMD can more accurately predict demand.
  • There are comparatively few day traders in AMD. Watch the volume and size of trade, and institutional investment, if you want answers. If the stock does go down, then celebrate. It's called a "buying opportunity". I bought quite a lot when it was under twenty dollars last year, and will buy more when it goes down on this news.
  • After reading the artical I found this little tid bit

    In a related sign of supply constraints, semiconductor analysts said that Intel Corp (INTC: Research, Estimates). is delaying the launch of its 633- and 667-MHz Celeron chips by about two months because it doesn't have enough manufacturing capacity.

    I guess I was wrong, both are struggling to keep up. Maybe its Post Y2k?

  • I love to hear about such supply problems! Hell i cant freaking afford an Athlon right now anyway, but its good to hear that there is for once a lot of demand for AMD. It is a cost effective solution for anyone today! I have used a K7 system (550) with Linux on it, and its a nice system to use and man its a hell of a lot cheaper than the Intels! The cost difference is
    AMD 500 - $146
    P3 500 - $178

    AMD 750 - $311
    P3 750 - $526

    Now add to this that the cost of the mother boards is also higher... A few frames is all you get if you go with a P3 on the higher ends!! I think the argument is simple, all the games have hte support for Athlons and so you cant use the argument you could back in teh day of the K6-2/3 :)
    AMD is going hot with their German Plant and if they can freaking get swapped out of stock means that they have definately overcome the problems from back in the day!!!
    Ohh..... now i wonder what is going to happen to RAMBUS with all this happening... a lot of ppl. just cannot justify spending that much for 128 Megs, cause it is just not financially justified!!
  • I have heard a lot of good stuff about this processor, its fast, its on the cheaper side, and now there sold out =( that sucks, im stuck on a PII 233 thats a year old, and was actually thinking of upgrading to one of those things... but now it looks as if i cant... I just hope they are another fad, like Microsoft =)

  • Re:=( (Score:1)

    by Z00100 ( 41785 )
    I wouldn't be too worried about AMD's shortfall right now.

    From what I hear, they are.....

    1. Stockpiling the new Thunderbird core CPU's
    2. Developing the new Irongate Chipset (finally dual Athlon!!)
    3. Stocking up on the K6+ series of chips....

    So from what I understand, it's the classic CALM BEFORE THE STORM!!

    Brace yourselves children!!!
  • "can also lead computer companies to choose Intel over AMD as they don't suffer from these problems." Umm, check anandtech.com for news articles concerning Intel and chip shortages over the last several months. Your statement above is completely inaccurate.

  • AMD is just clearing out old stock (Score:4)

    by Strongtium90 ( 70722 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @12:58PM (#1116462)
    AMD is replacing the Athlon in one to two weeks with the Thunderbird and Spitfire chips. They didn't just run out of chips, they are changing product lines.
  • With all of the signs pointing to "Go", why didn't AMD up their production? Seems to me, everyone else was expecting AMD to do well, except for AMD...

    -- Greg
  • I'm sure some of us recall the production difficulties that nearly killed AMD when it first went up against Intel, the K5. Granted the K5 barely got out the door, and the Athlon has been shipping for some time now in various flavors. However, this could still really hurt AMD, because with Athlons not available, the sales are going to go to Intel, and if Intel takes advantage of the delay... Well intel will have yet another victory against a superior processor.

    Also, unfortunately for consumers, the shortage could cause the price of Athlon chips that are already in stock to go up. Yet the higher price will not benefit AMD, only the distributers.

    Spyky
  • I agree.

    AMD has a winning hand with the Athlon line of CPU's. Initially they had problems with shoddy performance with their Irongate chipset, but that is a thing of the past now.

  • I knew AMD would sell out! (Score:4)

    by webslacker ( 15723 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @01:05PM (#1116466)
    Stupid corporations. Once we supported AMD because they were the underdogs fighting against Intel. Now that they're doing well, they sell out on us. Bastards. They're just as bad as Metallica.
  • O.k., this article states that Intel and AMD underestimated demands. While I'm not saying that this is directly related, isn't it interesting that:

    Standalone sales of Windows grew 14 per cent. Microsoft blames - even now - Y2K concerns and a slowdown in the business PC market,
    (from This Register Article [theregister.co.uk])

    Now, either there is too much demand, or too little supply, or, alternatively, windows sales really are down.

    Perhaps, I'm making false assumptions, but it's interesting either way. Perhaps there's a little bit of everything...

  • sold out wholesale, not retail (Score:5)

    by swinge ( 176850 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @01:07PM (#1116468)
    they sold 'em all at the factory... this means they're in the pipeline and in the shops. It means there might be some spot shortages or delays, but you'll still be able to find them.
  • Please -- look at the vast majority of moderation these days. The tide is beginning to turn, however. We can win this, but we have to put all our energy into one big bang.
  • If you read the article closely, you will see that the quote citing production dificulties is in reference to Intel, not AMD. AMD implies that the reason demand has been high enough for them to sell out their inventory (of released product-- no doubt they're building inventory of their soon-to-be released chips) is that Intel can't meet its quotas.
  • Give us your tired, your poor... Except Cuban kids. We throw those back.

    Um..how would you feel if your 5 year old boy was being held hostage in a communist country by some distant "relatives"? That's exactly how the father of the boy was feeling before..and he had every right to. Our nation is as scary to communists as theirs is to us.

  • Oh shaddup (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You people are so fucking ignorant... instead of bitching about "the moderators" as if they are some omniscient party, you need to realize that ANY FUCKING PERSON on slashdot IS A MODERATOR unless they refuse to sign up for an account for some fucking riciculous reason.

    Go away. You bother me.

    posted anonymously to contradict myself, and YES, I am logged in
  • I just came from my local computer hardware store about 3 hours ago. They were having a similar problem with the copermine chips. Everything above 600 Mhz was sold out for BOTH Intel and AMD. The fact that AMD is sold out so early is a good thing really. It means that they have moved on and are probably ramping up for the Thunderbird and Spitfire chips. I can't wait to see how the new chips perform. I'm predicting that the on-die cache of the new chips is going to show Intel the tailpipes yet again. Intel should get used to being second best...

  • Not as bad as it sounds.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just to point out, this isn't as bad as it sounds - AMD generally doesn't sell direct to you, the slashdot reader. Waht has happened is that ALL their Athlon production had been reserved to be bought by resellers. This means the resellers will have Athlons systems to sell to you. Unofrtnuantely, there won't be much for people building their own systems. Most likely, the resellers anticipated continued increasing demand for Athlons, and bought as much as possible while they could.

  • A matter of interpretation? (Score:5)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @01:14PM (#1116475)
    I think what this _really_ means is that the full
    PROJECTED RUN of Athlons for Q2 is already
    spoken for - NOT that they aren't producing any
    more until Q3 (that wouldn't make any sense).

    I work for an online computer equipment retailer
    and we have no shortage, and don't foresee any
    for awhile (and trust me, we'd know better than
    CNN if an AMD chip shortage was about to hit!).

    Keep in mind what Obi-Wan told Luke about certain
    things being true, "...from a certain point of
    view." :)
  • Wrong you are, pal. Any fucking person whose opinions are generally those of the moderators can be a moderator. And if you don't notice a bias among the moderators, you're hopeless.
  • Loss of profit due to underproduction is never a good thing. Consider that AMD's ability to make money is essentially now shut down until they are caught up with demand.

    Exactly. AMD will lose money on this scenario. If they do not learn how to more accurately predict their future sales, they will continue to lose money in this fashion, and it will ultimately be their demise. AMD does not have a good track record in regards to maximizing production. Perhaps AMD needs to look into more modern production processes, like JIT manufacturing.

    My congratulations go out to AMD for their success - it can only help out consumers in the long run.

    That would be congratulations, with a strong word of caution. Production problems are the exact cause of Cyrix's troubles, and is also one of they key reasons that Texas Instruments is no longer in the business of manufacturing Intel-compatible CPUs. (Of course, those of you who know the whole TI/Cyrix saga will know what I'm talking about)

  • you lucky son of a bitch!!! I'm on a 486dx4 with 24m ram!!! I had to install my own cdrom and tatke out the 5 1/4 floppy disk drive!
  • I'm sure that they're going to keep the athlon on for a bit longer, AMD does need _some_ kind of low end chip, and dnet just got the athlon core into the beta client this week!
  • AMD is suplying Sonny with xtra chips for PS2's in the US, as Japan won't let them send the weapons grade processors here!
    Seriously, (so I don't get moded down to far) I think it's just a matter of the good press they've been egtting with the new chips, and a real effort to try to show Intel that they aren't the only game anymore by Manufacturers and the consumers in-the-know.

    -Earthman

  • What does this mean for existing owners of Athlon's Will my Gigabyte motherboard be able to support a Spitfire or a Thunderbird if I decide to upgrade a year from now? Is this just a BIOS issue on the motherboard?
  • WHAT??

    Why would AMD supply Sony?? Sony has teamed with Toshiba, and they both have their FAB plants, so why should AMD intervene?
  • AMD sold out because they're not sharks like TI and Intel, but sweet inocent fawns and didn't want to go out of buisness or expect to much, or even employ slave-labor like those basterds at lucent.
  • SMP shouldn't a big concern for AMD yet. The top selling "OS"( Windows 98 ) doesn't support more than one processor, therefore most of the computers will only have one processor in them anyway.

    AMD will release their SMP chipset with the Thunderbird's release, then you can have AMD. Until then stick with Intel... AMD seems to have enough business right now anyway :-)

  • JIT is kind of difficult in semiconductor fabrication.

    It's not like the truck can pull up with a load of transistors right before you need them.

  • si77y l337t hax0rz.
  • Intel is having shortages, and M$ needs Intel chips for the X-Box.....

    Has anybody considered the possibility that Intel might be stockpiling CPU's for it's top tier OEM's and the upcoming X-Box?
  • Perhaps it is simply because Intel has been unable to supply enough chips for quite some time? The Athlon has allready become well known, and when faced with that your potential new PIII wont be available for another month, its easy to go for the Athlon instead.

    I dont blame AMD for not predicting that Intel would be unable to supply enough chips.. This is a hard game to play, and nearly impossible to win.

  • Re:A matter of interpretation? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You hit the nail on the head. This article is FUDding AMD. The consumer won't experience a shortage. Resellers won't experience a shortage. But now Athlon prices might be artifically driven up, Intel will prate about how it is ramping up production, and idiot traders whil short AMD.
  • The Spitfire *is* AMD's low end chip... it's meant to compete with the Celeries( hence the Socket-A only package )

    The Thunderbird *and* the Spitfire have Athlon cores so dnet's clients wouldn't be affected in the slightest bit.

    I really don't expect AMD to keep the old Athlon's around.. Why would they?? the Thunderbirds and Spitfires are it's replacment.
  • but why ? its not like theres a computer shortage or anything. Q1 2K was supposed to have slightly higher demand but not this much. and the growth from 99 -> 2K has been following the usual trends..no biggie increase.
  • Scandalous isn't it!!
  • The above post is apparently from someone who can't get over the fact that despite the fact they spend 20 hours a day on /., visit every banner ad, post in every story, etc., they still havn't become a moderator. Get a fucking life. There isn't some battle between "trolls and karma whores", so just shut up. If you post something that people fund funny on interesting, they moderate it up. if it's something retarded like this shit, it gets moded down. I'm a regular moderator, and I have a karma of 10. get over it; it's not a competition.
    If you hate it so much here, instead of fucking everyone else over with pointless jihads, go to anti-social.com's message boards [anti-social.com].



    Observe, reason, and experiment.

  • I have a PII 233 as my home box. It is three years old but I have no intentions of upgrading. Linux boxes just don't age like Windows boxes do.

    I gave it more memory 32MB -> 64MB, and that really increased speed. I think I might give it more to make it 128, but I expect it to last me another year at least.

  • Re:Athlon! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's NOT sold out by any normal standard - you'll still be able to buy one. AMD only sells them in units of 1000 anyway. You buy from resellers. What's happened is that resellers have already reserved all of AMD's possible production for the next quarter. In any sane world, that would be a mark of an incredible success, but intel's minions are portraying it as bad, and *dis*informing the consumer.
  • they sold out wholesale. consumers can still buy em..its not sold out retail yet and probably wont for a while. get em while they last [pricewatch.com]. im still waiting for SMP tho. 1GHz dual K7's would really rock.
  • Do you recognize me? Many of my posts get marked as "troll" or "flamebait". Yet I moderate frequently (about once per month). I even have a near-200 Karma.

    Moderation does suck, but it isn't a conspiracy.
    --
  • damn it! y cant ne1 think about te l33t hax0rz?!?!?! :P
  • Since he's currently using one of those outdated 1GHz Athlons! http://www1.amd.com/products/cpg/ath lon/quotes [amd.com] "I use an AMD Athlon processor- based system as one of my primary development systems. A 1 GHz AMD Athlon based system running Red Hat Linux offers a powerful platform for general purpose software development, games and multimedia. " --Alan Cox, Linux kernel developer, Red Hat
  • Listen twit, it's all done algorithmically based on how much time you spend on slashdot. So anyone can be a moderator provided they don't spend too much time on slashdot (like me) or too little. Secondly what is this crap about moderators pissing you off, there is all sorts of customizability to slashdot that enables people with accounts (like you) to never see scores or simply browse at -1. Why not read all the past articles on moderation?

    Moderation Ideas [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 14, @10:11AM EST 328
    Slashdot's Meta Moderation [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 07, @01:31PM EST 284
    More Moderation Madness [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Monday September 06, @05:07PM EST 321
    Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1 [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 25, @07:15AM EST 71
    Slashdot Notes [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Monday May 24, @12:25PM EST 208
    Assorted Slashdot Notes [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Wednesday April 14, @11:00AM EST 69
    Slashdot Forum Updates [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco

    And to satisfy the moderators who would love to mark this as offtopic. Here's my take on the AMD shortage. The article states that both AMD and Intel underestimated demand. This means that a possible reason for the large demand for AMD chips is less to do with price/performance as some posters have mentioned and more to do with the fact that Intel chips are rather scarce, and there won't be a large influx of them for at least two months.

    PS: To all the twits that think slashdot sucks why not move? Go to Advogato [advogato.org] or Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] or any of the dozens of other slash sites. Trying to wreck slashdot does you no good and doesn't do anyone any harm. Most people simply browse at 2 or 3 and never see your rantings and ravings anyway, and even if you did drive everyone away from slashdot, then what?

  • Yeah, actually, I was a moderator just today. One gets five points with which they can moderate a post up or down one point (one post for each post). I get it about every few months or so and my karma is only about 10 or 15.

    You would know this if your karma wasn't -(5*10^1000) from making all those grits and Portman posts.

  • Uhh, T-Bird and Spitfire aren't due out until June, late May at the absolute earliest.
  • Are any of the BIG system vendors (Gateway, Dell, Micron, etc.) selling corporate Athlon systems? I'd love to implement some, but so far all I've seen are systems aimed at consumers. Gateway has their "Select" line, but I want my systems to come with Windows 2000 on them, as well as having the management features of the Dell Optiplex line or the Gateway E-XXXX lines. The other thing preventing me from using Athlons, at this point, is the numerous gripes I've heard about getting X video card to work, or the right RAM, etc. I don't mind doing a lot of research and fiddling with my own machine, but things like that can become a nightmare when you have to support 250 of them!
    ---
  • You obviously haven't been reading Slashdot too much lately.

    Understand that trolls are not the only people that get moderated down. There are COUNTLESS examples of unfair moderation, not only small things that can be "corrected" with M2. Reread the post if you forgot already.

  • I doubt the stock will drop on the news (if it does, buy it!), since this is good news for AMD - they've sold all their (what will be) "low end" stuff, and will now launch the Spitfires and Thunderbirds made in their new Dresden fab. You should see whay their saying on the Yahoo! stock board for AMD - they're going nuts on this news, since it guarantees them another blow-out sales quarter.

    As for the stock being low, it is low in terms of P/E (it's a great value to buy right now), but bear in mind that it went up 400% over the last year! AMD has been competely kicking Intel's ass both in terms of clock speeds, performance and stock price. Athlon is just as fast as PIII (not to mention that AMD are actually shipping them in volume at 1GHz vs Intel's vapourware announcement), but Spitfire, Thunderbord, Mustang and Sledgehammer will all CRUSH the corresponding Intel processors!

    AMD's time has come!

    AMD stock chart [excite.com]

  • I think what a lot of you people fail to realize something when you say "Oh no, AMD is out of stock, Intel is going to make up for it" ...


    1.) AMD may be out of stock with old Athlon chips, but your local store isn't.

    2.) Intel isn't going to be bought instead, because Intel can't even supply their chips.

    3.) Why would you want an Athlon anymore, anyway? Spitfire (Low-end) and Thunderbirds (High-end) are on their way in a month and some, which are much better then the current Athlon. On-die cache, better tweaking of the core, etc. Athlons now are what the origional K6 was. Obsolete. Time for those power hungry people with money to upgrade to a bigger and better system.. =]

    On a side note, those Spitfire's are suppost to be pretty cheap, and perform better then the origional K7? Sounds like a winning combo to me. I currently run A k6-2 350, a K6-3 400, and K6-2 500, and will be upgrading slowly to some Spitfires, and maybe a Thunderbird for my linux server.

    Conclusion: Good for AMD. They really took the jewels on this one, and they reported one heck of a profit (Comparativly - Did I mutilate that word? :P) and now they are going to move up again. Unlike Intel, they don't do this much at the expense of the consumer.

  • This just suggests that AMD is picking up market share in a big way.
  • CNET has the story, [cnet.com] titled "Intel delays Celerons because of manufacturing crunch".

    The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker has delayed the release of 633- and 667-MHz Celeron chips by approximately two months, according to industry sources close to the company.

    The story goes on to state:

    Computer makers, tiring of Intel chip shortages that have lingered since last October, may well begin to adopt more Athlons.

    So, in fairness to "equal time", they're both short.

  • That would be congratulations, with a strong word of caution. Production problems are the exact
    cause of Cyrix's troubles, and is also one of they key reasons that Texas Instruments is no longer in
    the business of manufacturing Intel-compatible CPUs. (Of course, those of you who know the whole
    TI/Cyrix saga will know what I'm talking about)

    Well.. that, and when Cyrix did their nice attempt at the P6 chip, it was a piece of crap with tons of problems. A crapload of bad press shot them down the tubes, and although there was an effort, they never truly made a comeback....
  • If you are so brilliant, why don't you post an idea for a more fair moderation system?

    Slashdot has an imperfect moderation system, but it has a damn good one. If you REALLY have a better idea for how it should work, then present that idea. A "revolution" under the same system would accomplish nothing productive, only a superior algorithm will result in positive change.

    Consider that a challenge, but a challenge to be undertaken as an intellectual, not as a demagogue.
  • The Thunderbird will be produced in both Socket-A and Slot-A configurations, and should work on all existing Slot-A boards. Spitfire will be produced in Socket-A form factor only, b/c it is cheaper to make. Rumors say that it will not be pin-compatible with Slot-A, and thus no "slockets" will be available for it. -cwk.

  • Intel too I suspect .... (Score:3)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @02:26PM (#1116512) Homepage Journal
    the bottom seems to have dried out of the Pentium marketplace in the past few weeks - cheap PIII-550 class cpus are virtually impossible to find - either demand's really high and the Gateway/Dell's of the world are soaking them up - or Intel has production problems too ..... or they're just playing with the market to keep their margins high ... just like the oil companies .... I suspect that despite AMD's inroads Intel's still big enough that it can do that

    Now if only AMD would get it's dual processer bridge chips to market (in MBs as cheap as the cheapo pentium ones) so I can start buying tons of Athlons instead ..... then I could dump Intel

  • Althou it seems wonderful on the surface that AMD are selling like hotcakes, and profits are better than expected. this has some strong negative conotations to stock market analyst. The same nagativity that hit Intel so hard. It means they can't keep up with the demand. And when companies like gateway and e machines arent getting the processors they need, they go to the competition and get them even if it means paying more. They can't afford delays on production due to vendors. Now I don't want to give a completly negitive idea about this, things like this are cool for analysts every once in a while but if keeps happening they will dis on the stock and tell holders to sell because their customers are so dissatisfied with the constant backordering.
  • Please. Why don't you LOOK at some of the links I posted above. THEN tell me the current moderation system is fair.

    Do you really need to be shown how quickly moderators will silence minority voices?

  • There is a difference (Score:5)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @02:38PM (#1116515)
    AMD is short because it is just sold out.
    Intel is sold out because it can't produce
    what it has promised.

    Think about it.
    Intel releases a 1GHz PIII a few days after
    the release of the 1GHz Athlon
    Yet, AMD releases the 900 and 950 MHz at the same
    time, because the 1GHz is no abnormal stretch for them.
    Intel on the other hand, only releases the 1GHz PIII, with a gap from 800MHz to 1000MHz..
    Why? Obviously, they really can't provide a 1GHz CPU.. they only "pretend" to, by taking incredibly
    good production CPUs (1 in a thousand), to market
    as 1GHz to keep up with AMD. They can't really
    provide them in mass production, and so they
    just now release the 833 and 866 MHz cpu's.
    Who is better off? AMD who has underestimated their sales, or Intel who just isn't able to provide what the market is asking, even if they try their best?

  • Re:A matter of interpretation? (Score:3)

    by legoboy ( 39651 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @02:46PM (#1116516)

    Yes. It's rather comical.

    People seem to be failing to understand that this is good news, and that AMD's stock price is more likely to go up than down on this news. Because the person who submitted the news misinterpreted it, so are the people who read that discription of it.

    What does the article say? It says that AMD managed to sell all of their chips to other people, and therefore won't have tens of thousands just sitting in their warehouses doing nothing but depreciating in value.

    ------

  • Since Intel reported that they couldn't supply all the market due to production contrainsts, I'm sure AMD's orders increased significantly in the past two weeks.

    Can you really blame AMD for not predicting that Intel would miss the ball by such a large amount?? After all, they are still less than 10% of the overall market.

    -rt-
  • Bullshit. There are tons of posts that are moderated down that DO have content, and content which is the truth. Often pointing out that Linux may not be the best solution for a problem, or criticizing a flaw in the OS. These are moderated down a lot as flamebait.

    There are also those people who the moderators don't forget. Who say something "wrong" once and are punished when making a completely unrelated comment.

    Also go back to the link in my first post. I'd be interested to hear your justification of some of those "undocumented" features.

  • Of course... that would be true if Intel could keep up with supply, but they can't either! it's quite likely that Intels part shortage caused AMD's... so analysts should be okay. I'm holding onto my stock! =)

    -rt-
  • I dont' quite know if they are out of the chips, but I work at Gateway and know that there is a delay of them. And yes, a lot of people are choosing Athlon's over Intel, reason why you ask, well because they're probably just as good if not better than the PIII and also is a whole lot cheaper.
  • What caused a lot of the tech stocks to go down was two things: 1. Hundred's of companies costs are kept low by having to develop for one platform, Windows. The threat that they may no longer be able to do this warrents a reduction in their equity value. 2. Capital Gains taxes. A lot of people had to pay 20% of their "paper" gains to the government. This necessitated a sellof of the stocks these people were mostly holding.


    Soldier(R)

  • AMD has been using Intel's fab for much of their production for the Athlons. So, if Intel is having a hard time producing even their own chips in volume, don't expect them to devote more resources to making more Athlons for AMD.

    Hopefully, when Fab30 (AMD's Dresden plant) is "fully operational" (in the "Death Star" sense of the term), this kind of thing won't matter so much.

    -NooM

  • Re:Shouldn't we consider this a "good" thing? (Score:3)

    by reflector ( 62643 ) on Saturday April 22, 2000 @03:18PM (#1116526)
    That would be congratulations, with a strong word of caution. Production problems are the exact cause of Cyrix's troubles, and is also one of they key reasons that Texas Instruments is no longer in the business of manufacturing Intel-compatible CPUs.

    You seem to be speaking out of ignorance. AMD is *NOT* having production problems. They are currently AHEAD of schedule ramping their Fab 30 plant in Dresden. Intel is having production problems; this, combined with the unexpected popularity of Athlons is why AMD is sold out.

    Currently, AMD is producing more processors than they ever have before, with 1.8 million processors estimated to be produced this quarter.
  • Althou it seems wonderful on the surface that AMD are selling like hotcakes, and profits are better than expected. this has some strong negative conotations to stock market analyst. The same nagativity that hit Intel so hard.

    While some analysts are clueless and shortsighted (e.g., Ashok Kumar of Piper Jaffrey, who covers AMD and never has anything positive to say about AMD but has been forced to eat his hat time and time again over the past year due to AMD's tremendous success despite his naysaying), there are no "negative connotations" if AMD meets its sales projections by selling all available stock this early in the quarter, which it has done. Also, your comparison to Intel is wildly amiss. Intel's stock price has been dropping because:
    1)They've spent tons of cash trying to push faulty technologies that no one is buying (i820 chipset, Rambus RDRAM)
    2)They've had plenty of production problems, and can't even produce what they forecasted they could (AMD, by contrast, is ahead of production schedule).
    3)Intel has been playing fast and loose with their bookkeeping. The only reason they came out $.02/share ahead of Q1 estimates last week is that they sold a bunch of stock in other companies that they owned and had bought for a lower price, thus beefing up their bottom line to not appear to be failing in their core business. Their sales due to microprocessors, however, was far BELOW expectations. People are beginning to wake up to Intel's shenannigans.

  • Intel isn't going to be bought instead, because Intel can't even supply their chips.

    Exactly, the article pretty much says AMD is out of K6's because Intel underproduced the Cellerons.

    Why would you want an Athlon anymore, anyway? Spitfire (Low-end) and Thunderbirds (High-end) are on their way in a month and some, which are much better then the current Athlon.

    Anyone who can't/won't wait another month and change for their new machine. I bought a new machine three months agoish because my old one picked the wrong time to kick the bucket. A friend just got a new (non-K7) machine because they were tired of his three year old machine.

    Athlons now are what the origional K6 was. Obsolete.

    No. The K6's successer is allready on hte market. The K7's isn't. What's selling now is allways worse then what's selling in two months (in CPUs at least). Just because there is an extra large discontunity coming up doesn't mean you can point to the future product and say the current one is history.

    The off-chip cache K7 will be obsolete when the on-chip cache ones come to maket. Not before. Otherwise everything is obsolte. Why buy a K7 when a K8 is surely going to come out? Why buy a obsolete P-III when the 1.5Ghz Willmette is "only a year away"? Why would anyone buy a 21264 when the 21364 will be avilable in december? Why would anyone buy a 2000 VW bug when the 2001 VW will surely be out any month now?

    Granted this is a bad time to buy if you can wait 2 to 3 months, but if you can't, well, progress allways marches on. In two years your obsolete K7 will not look noticably more quaint then a Spitfire/Thunderbird. On a side note, those Spitfire's are suppost to be pretty cheap, and perform better then the origional K7?

    Well they have less but faster cache, much like the Intel CuMine vs. the um, Kamtai. Let's see, the 550B vs the 550E is that what they are called now?

    The Intel part has a half sized twice as large cache with a 4 times wider cache bus (256bit vs. 64bit) , and 8-way associatave vs. 4-way associtave. There are still things that are faster on the "big cache" versions, but they are not common I think.

    The only thing we know for sure about the Spitfire is it has half the cache of the current K7. It's a good guess that it has a wider (cache) bus, but that's not a given. There have been no hints that the Spitfire's cache has changed to a more associatave structure, and since that isn't a no-brainer to do, it may well not have. Oh, and we know the Spitfire's cache should run full speed rather then one half to 2/5ths of CPU speed. The larger L1 cache sizes on the K7 also make a direct comparisin with the P-III non-trivial.

    So we don't know for sure that the Spitfire will outperform the existing K7. We have an existance proof in the P-III E vs B that it could. But the changes arn't identical. The results could differ by quite a bit.

    That said, I think the Spitfire will be a really good CPU. If it gets priced similar to the K6's or the Celerons, then it's going to be a great bargin.

    Also since the Spitfire is intended to replace the current K7, I expect it will do at least as well. That may mean it has to have a large on-die cache. Or maybe it will have a higher associtavity, or some novel approch, but it's design goal is to replace the current K7, so it will be at least as good. The design goal of the Spitfire is to replace Intel's Celeron, it may "accidentally" be better thn the current K7, but that wasn't a direct design goal.

    P.S. my appologies if I swapped the Tbird and Spitfire's roles. I cna never quite remember which code name is what in this bisness.

  • The reason AMD has sold all of its Athlon processors is not because they don't have the capacity to produce more, it's because the last 2.2 million Athlons produced (and sold this quarter) will very likely be the last of the current generation of Athlons ever produced. The Thunderbird (Athlon w/ 256KB on-die L2 at full speed) and Spitfire (Athlon w/ 64-128KB on-die L2 at full speed) cores are replacing the Athlon and (eventually) the K6-2. AMD didn't think that Intel would be quite this far behind on processor shipments, so demand really was much higher than expected. This is way too early for AMD to have sold all the CPUs it will produce this quarter, so it just means that they've sold all the old Athlon processors they will produce this quarter. In other words, AMD is going to be shipping a whole lot of new processors this quarter that will beat the snot out of the P3 (even when it has super-expensive RDRAM).
  • Less than 10%? I CHALLENGE you to back this

    From Hoovers: Microsoft investor [msn.com] and CNBC [cnbc.com]: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is advancing on archrival Intel. The company ranks #2 in the microprocessor market (after Intel) with about 10% of sales. However, it has grabbed about 60% of the market for sub-$1,000 PCs.

    It's not proof but it's close enough for me for now. I know I have heard they have about a 7% market share in the domestic US, and about a 15% market share outside the US, but I can't find a link just now. Spitfire will likely change that for Q3, and I think that the 30% target is doable once Dresden starts pumping 'em out.

    -rt-
  • AMD opened new fabs in both Texas (USA) and Dresden (Germany) last year. They are getting bigger and better everyday.

    This is forcing Intel to get their stuff out sooner and cheaper than they every have before, which gives AMD an incentive to work even better.

    And look at what it had given us all. The push for better and faster has brought us closer to a 64 bit consumer systems much sooner than many people expected. And with the competition quality is also becoming a thing to focus on. No longer will Sun, Alpha, IBM, and HP dominate the high end server markets. AMD and Intel have 64 bit chips on the horizon that will bring the cost of reliable, scalable servers down much lower than they have been with the previously named server makers able to overcharge like crazy because of demand.

    And now AMD is having trouble keeping up with demand, just as their mighty rival Intel has been.

    Using this as a guage of technological progress, what a WONDERFUL world we live in.

    Imagine if there had been competition like this in the OS market over the last few years. God only knows where Microsoft could have gone against a strong competitor. And now with AMD and Intel pushing Linux as the next big OS, we can finally see every geeks dream of great processors, great operating systems, and most of all-

    GREAT CHOICES!
  • No. The K6's successer is allready on hte market. The K7's isn't. What's selling now is allways worse then what's selling in two months (in CPUs at least). Just because there is an extra large discontunity coming up doesn't mean you can point to the future product and say the current one is history.

    That was bad wording on my part, I apolgize. I should have said, maybe: Marketwise , the K7 is obsolete. As in, it's time for them to market the poo out of the Spitfires and Thunderbirds. In the sense I wrote it there, I didn't mean obsolete, pertaining to old hardware (Like writing this post on my Atari 800 (Not literally)). Very bad choice of words on my part. Also, if you are interetested, check out this [hardocp.com] link to HardOCP, where they have some benchmarks of a 750mhz Thunderbird.

    As many quality hardware sites speculate, the Spitfire will still outperform the current Athlon in many applications, mostly games. Unfortantly, a good site I frequent (Ace's hardware) had an article/link/write up on why the Spitfire and T-bird CPUs are better CPUs then current Athlons (As in, what they changed, how the on-die cache will help/hurt, etc) but they don't keep a backlog of articles that I can see. If you want to check them out and see if you can find anything, the address is www.aceshardware.com . They have pretty technical info, which makes the place pretty good.. =]
  • 99%??

    Where did you come up with this number?? I will admit that the first chipset the 750 (i think), did have it's share of problems, but if you think that is bad, then look at any chipset intel has made after the BX chipset. The i8xx series of chipsets are a load of garbage. The MTH is a farce, and RIMMS are well......

    I can see it already......on the hour every hour the P/A system comes on at INTEL's headquarters and chimes D'OH!! (homer style!!).

  • AMD is short because it is just sold out. Intel is sold out because it can't produce what it has promised.

    These two things are the EXACT same thing. Also keep in mind that Intel has 84% of the CPU market share and AMD has 10%. Supplying 84% of the industry with CPU's is quite a bit more difficult than supplying 10% of the industry. The shortages will be more noticeable and more people will complain.

    Think about it. Intel releases a 1GHz PIII a few days after the release of the 1GHz Athlon Yet, AMD releases the 900 and 950 MHz at the same time, because the 1GHz is no abnormal stretch for them. Intel on the other hand, only releases the 1GHz PIII, with a gap from 800MHz to 1000MHz..

    Ahh, yes, the fashionable "They went from 800 MHz to 1000 MHz, therefore the must be lying about the 1000 MHz parts" cliche. You will note that the difference between these is 20%. In the old days, bins were never this tight. The next generation after the 4.77 MHz 8088 was the 8 MHz model, nearly a 50% increase. The 486 went from 25-33-50-66-100, all at least 33% increases. All of these increases absolutely dwarf the 800-1000 MHz increase. So why do you keep harping on it? Too little technical knowledge to poke holes in the Intel plan?

  • > I hate to say it but how can anyone be surprised about AMD and capacity problems?

    It's real easy. When the A came out, AMD was still playing second fiddle to Intel. Over the past few months they have become almost everyone's processor of choice. This was not predictable.

    Additionally, since they have been second fiddle for so long, they aren't quite so loaded with loot as Intel is. Thus when they spent $1,000,000,000 [iirc] on the new German fab plant, it actually hurt. Perhaps they could have coughed up $2,000,000,000 or even $20,000,000,000 if they had known that the A would instantly catapult them into their current position, but without certain knowledge that Intel was going to drop the ball in the MHz race, that would have been an incredibly bad business decision.

    --
    "Damn! And just when Piranha was starting to turn the tide of negative PR!"
  • Athlon is being phased out in favor of Spitfire and Thunderbird. "Sold out" annoucement was for K6 and Athlon only, not Spitfire and Thunderbird (Athlon with on-chip L2) which are produced in both Austin and Dresden. Dresden has been churning out 600 wafer starts per week of copper (i.e FAST!) Thunderbird all Q1.. but AMD hasn't sold any yet becuase they want to have volume to co-launch with Spitfire. Announcement may be on 4/27 at the annual meeting.
  • Intel themselves has said they will be releasing chips at speeds between 800MHz and 1000MHz next quarter.

    That being said, both sides basically overclocked there chips to get to where they are, it just was
    easier for AMD.

    While supplying 84% of the CPU maket vs. 10% does make a difference, keep in mind that Intel's manufacturing capabilities exceed AMD's on a far larger scale. So, in theory, if they have similar yields Intel should have an easier time filling the supply chain.
  • >Look, they're cheaper, they're faster, and >they're cooler than PIII's. Why buy a >Pentium????

    The Pentium3 enhances my internet experience!

    -
    Ekapshi.
  • Actually, thanks to the insanities of the ia32 ISA, Intel and AMD have about equal odds of being 100% compatible. Intel engineers don't KNOW their new chips are 100% compatible: they just run a lot of tests on them. Indeed, from what I understand, compiling and running a Linux kernel is one of the tests they run.

    Think about it this way: P6-cores translate x86 instructions into uOP's, which is in many ways a new instruction set, and they execute the uOP's in the core. Athlon chips do a very similar thing. Do you think EITHER of these cores behave a lot like a 386, given they aren't even running the same ISA internally?

    AMD systems have had problems in the past, and most of them have been chipset related (particularly with regards to AGP). Oddly enough, Intel systems have had problems as well. Rest assured, the current crop of VIA chipset based motherboards out there SERIOUSLY kick butt and are very reliable.

    Microsoft vouches for Windows on AMD chips, and that's good enough for me. If anybody would have tons of bizarre ia32 instruction paths it'd be Microsoft.
  • Last I heard, AMD supplied a full 40% of the CPU market.

    AMD currently rivals Intel [cnet.com] in marketshare in the notebook PC market, and is currently closer to 20 percent [cnet.com] industry-wide, nearly double what you claim they're at and nearly quadruple what they were a short two years ago.

    Please get your facts, and then get them straight, before posting.

    -A.P.

    p.s. - what intel plan? the concept of a "plan" seems to be novel there right now.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • That was bad wording on my part, I apolgize. I should have said, maybe: Marketwise , the K7 is obsolete. As in, it's time for them to market the poo out of the Spitfires and Thunderbirds.

    Not if anyone at AMD remembers the failure of Osborne Computers. Don't market your new product when you rely on your old one for income. AMD does not make more money off the Thunderbird or Spitfire then the current K7s, so they have no intrest in selling you a Thunderbird in three months by not selling a K7 now.

    By waiting to sell a product they lose money in at least two diffrent ways. They don't get the time value of the money (intrest, or the ability to spend it on infastructure, etc.). They also run the risk that the consumer will lose intrest in the product and buy something else (an Intel CPU, or a nice coffee table).

    The fact that wholesale they are sold out of K7s doesn't change this too much. If they market the crap out of non-existant products they could damage the OEMs ability to sell the K7, which could cause cancled orders (making them no longer sold out, and AMDs problem), and will cause hard feelings between AMD and the OEMs. AMD doesn't need any bad blood there.

    As many quality hardware sites speculate, the Spitfire will still outperform the current Athlon in many applications, mostly games. Unfortantly, a good site I frequent (Ace's hardware) had an article/link/write up on why the Spitfire and T-bird CPUs are better CPUs then current Athlons (As in, what they changed, how the on-die cache will help/hurt, etc) but they don't keep a backlog of articles that I can see.

    I havn't seen Ace's Spitfire review. I have seen some reviews that look faked. So be careful. I'll beleve the next round of benchmarks when I see them on AMD's site (or SPECs). Before that I'll be intrested to see them, but I won't base any important choices off of them. Ace's is moderatly technical, not intensley so like, say comp.arch (anyone remember Usenet?), but it ain't bad.

    I also note that the Spitfire could out do the existing K7. In fact I totally expect it will on things that don't need more then 256K cache. But I'm not sure what those applications will be. It won't (er, may not) be the same as are happy on Intel's 256K cache because of the many noted diffrences between the two cache systems, and CPUs.

  • You seem to be speaking out of ignorance. AMD is *NOT* having production problems. They are currently AHEAD of schedule ramping their Fab 30 plant in Dresden. Intel is having production problems; this, combined with the unexpected popularity of Athlons is why AMD is sold out.

    If they are unable to keep up with demand then they are having production problems. Take some business classes before you go spouting off.

    AMD's track record with production is not spotless. You don't seem to remember the production problems AMD had with their K5 and early K6 processors. Particularly with the K5's, where they were having significant yield problems.

  • You don't know what you are talking about. JIT (JustInTime) is not possible when it takes $1bln and at least a year or about that, to build a new fab to product chips. There is no way around it.

    People have said the same thing about a LOT of industries, but JIT manufacturing has revolutionized these industries.

  • Second largest? Blah. You have no idea what you are talking about. Intel is the largest, with Motorola a close second.

    Don't need my suggestions? Who said I was offering suggestions? I was merely speculating about what AMD might do to improve its process in the future.

    Audits by Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc. are of course going to offer praise to plants that do well in traditional manufacturing processes. If these processes work, then fine. Great. But if AMD is unable to meet production, they may need to look to alternatives.

    I'm not saying JIT manufacturing is the be-all-end-all of processes. I'm not saying that it works for microprocessors right now but I'm sure that the R&D arms of companies like Intel and Motorola are looking into ways of making microprocessors using JIT manufacturing. Bet on it.

  • None of my friends buy Athlons because AMD has a poor reputation. One of my friends bought a K6-2 and it was a POS. We had to underclock it around 100 mhz just to use it at all, and it crashed frequently for no reason.

    One datapoint does not a trend make.

    All of my computer literate friends have K6-2s or K6-3s and I haven't heard a single complaint.

  • >The next generation after the 4.77 MHz 8088 was the 8 MHz model, nearly as
    >50% increase.

    Excuse me? This is utter nonsense. At release, the 8086 was available as
    an 8mhz part, including the 8-bit bus version, the 8088. IBM chose to
    run it at 4.77, which was slower than the rated speed for the version
    they were using (6mhz? It's been a while . . .

    hawk
    )
  • >If they are unable to keep up with demand then they are having
    >production problems. Take some business classes before you go spouting off.

    You might want to take your own advice . . .

    You plan your business and your capacity based on your resources and
    what you think you can sell.

    Finding that demand is higher than your most optimistic scenario is *not*
    a problem--it also means that price is higher, and you are more
    profitable than your best-case estimate.

    Yes, an even larger capacity than you have would be nice, but a better
    market than you dreamed of is not a problem.

    But then again, I ran a succesful business before becoming a professor
    of economics. . . .

    hawk, j.d.., ph.d,, esq.
  • I just want to add to the commets that have already been posted on this subject my personal experience. I have 2 machines now, AMD 486dx4-100 and AMD K6/2-300. Both work flawlessly. The 486 box is almost 5 years old now and it still works perfectly. I use it for a firewall and mail/ftp/samba server. The K6/2 is my workstation, about 2 years old. No problems there either. Next year I'm planning to buy a new machine and it will be (you guessed it) K7.

    Perhaps your friend had a remarked overclocked CPU or a crappy board or a defective memory or bad video card. Or (*gasp*) perhaps he was running Windows 95 on it ;-) You can't just assume it's the CPU's fault. In fact I am sure that had he replaced the AMD CPU with an Intel one, he'd still experience the same behaviour.

    And yes, I agree with the post above that some people are indeed too dumb to own computers (not that I'm implying anything... ;-)

    ___
  • The key words here are three months. If the new chips are going to be out next month (as some AMD luvers here are saying), we would be hearing all about them right now.

    Well, it's less then a week later, and we are hearing about them. So I guess they could be out next month. Or a bit after.

    So soone I guess we will know how the perform. I didn't see any AMD talk about the Thunderbird, so maybe the Spitfire isn't faster then the existing K7. Or maybe they decided it won't be embarasing if it is. Or maybe the Tbird will make a "suppise release".

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