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Why AMD Is Still In The Race
Steve Kerrison writes "Despite a woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock, and a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance (and who would I be not to mention the diminishing AMD fanboy numbers?), AMD's still got enough tricks up its sleeve to retaliate against Intel in due course. HEXUS.net has an opinion piece on why AMD isn't up the creek. From the article: AMD has been showing off its 65nm wafers for a few months now, which means the Rev G core is on its way. Even if the DDR2 memory controller which arrived with the Rev F only had a small performance benefit, Rev G has a few more improvements than just the die shrink. The latter will enable higher clock speeds and a lower price, plus allow AMD to compete on an equal playing field to Intel, which has been manufacturing 65nm processors since the Pentium XE 955 at the end of 2005."
AMD is in the race to stay alive as a company but they are not in the race to have the top CPU of 2006/2007, which is what really matters.
With their aquisition of ATI, I am much more worried about chipset instability. Anyone else remember the bad old days with the horrible via chipsets and mystery conflicts with nvidia hardware?
Then the finger pointing starts, and we're stuck in the middle. I'm upgrading for the first time in 3 years, hopefully I can wait all this mess out. It'll be an AMD chip though. If I had to pick, I'd go with whatever platform Nvidia supports in the future. Their commitment to driver quality deserves to be rewarded and won my loyalty - and interestingly enough, I have never purchased another ATI product after their little opengl driver fiasco.
Why doesn't AMD have a chipset, anyway?
..don't panic
AMD is only behind this one generation, a company doesn't just throw in the towel after their competitor comes up with a better product... AMD is working right now to come up with their own response. Plus I don't think the stock holders would be happy if AMD came out with a press release "Good Game Intel, you win, we are dissolving the company"
"A woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock" can only mean that demand for AMD chips still exceeds supply. Otherwise, they would be happy to deliver.
Yes but buyers can only wait so long, and if enough buyers are forced to go elsewhere then the demand will vanish too.
Having something in demand is desirable but in the long term you have to eventually meet demand for a majority of customers or perish.
I don't think AMD is anywhere near perishing of course, but the supply of these chips seems tight enough that it's not a healthy level of demand at the moment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Indirectly Intel helped create this AMD shortage.
Here are the causes
1. By hyping Core 2 so early, it eroded confidence in Netburst, now no one wants a P4. (so the choice is Core 2 or Athlon x2)
2. Intel cannot produce enough Conroe's. So those who cannot get Core 2 look at Athlons.
3. AMD had to cut prices in half to match Core 2 (because Intel actually priced Core 2 a little too cheap*) it created more demand than AMD could handle until 65nm and all the Chartered product comes into the channel.
4. Intel started kissing up to Apple instead of Dell, forcing Dell into the AMD camp.
Yes, maybe AMD should have turned Dell away, but the real truth is that there is a shortage of everything but the netburst chips! Because Intel made/makes so many P4's the market will be this way for a few more months.
* if Intel had priced Core 2 duo's 25% higher, it would have helped them clear out the netburst chips. It seems they were more interesed in stopping AMD than they were in making a profit.