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Athlons Sold Out
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."
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
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
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.
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.
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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!!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
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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 or Kuro5hin 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?
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
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?
CNET has the story, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Exactly, the article pretty much says AMD is out of K6's because Intel underproduced the Cellerons.
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.
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).
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 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.. =]
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.
--
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
sigs are a waste of space
AMD currently rivals Intel in marketshare in the notebook PC market, and is currently closer to 20 percent 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.
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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.
My journal has hot
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 act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
>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
)
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.
;-) 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.
;-)
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
And yes, I agree with the post above that some people are indeed too dumb to own computers (not that I'm implying anything...
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