The Dell - Intel Conspiracy

There is a conspiracy theory going around Wall St, saying that the adoption of AMD is an Intel-Dell plot. The move was designed to be a win-win for both Dell and Intel with AMD being the loser. The timing of the adoption says it all. First we have the suit filed by AMD, then we have the release of Core2Duo, third is Dell’s inability to increase market share faster than major OEMs and lastly, Intel’s eroding ASP.
The meeting was held around Q1 2006 between top board members and senior fellows. The plan was simple and clever. The adoption of AMD solves a lot of Intel and Dells problem.

First the lawsuit, with Dell adopting AMD publicly because of design coincides with Intel’s defence. It shows that AMD can grow if it has superior products. Secondly, the timing of the adoption months prior to the release of Core2Duo doesn’t make sense from a performance point of view. Dell knew what Conroe was like just like when Apple did. But for Intel to get rid of AMD being entrenched in the high ASP segment, it needs someone to suck out its output from the high end segment. It has accomplished this by Dell taking most of the X2s. It would be silly now for system builders to develop AMD based systems from a very unreliable supplier. It is almost guaranteed that their next systems will be close to 100% Intel. Intel will now move in to take the business away from AMD while AMD is stuck with Dell. Dell can now make cheaper PC’s thanks to the discount it gets from AMD while leaving Intel alone at the top end. Dell can now expand and compete with other OEMs while Intel’s ASP goes up. The evil plot in all this is that Dell reduces orders just at the point when the channel has lost interest in AMD resulting to a massive inventory build-up for AMD. Expect this to occur next quarter.

Also, one of the items discussed was to create a decoy. They used Rahul Sood as means to show that Dell adopted AMD to become competitive. Again, this doesn’t make sense with Core2Duo coming but they needed to divert the attention.

Clueless idiot posted this AMD die output estimate

Sharikou wrote an outrageous claim showing how little he knows about the semicon industry:

The 65nm Brisbane die size is 126mm^2, using a geometry of 11.5 x 11.5 for the wafer program, we find a 300mm wafer can produce 492 dies.At 18000 wspm at FAB36, quarterly die output is 18000*492*3 = 26.6 million.At FAB30 (90nm), the die size is 183mm^2, with a geometry of 14 x 14, a 200mm wafer produces 137 dies. At 30000wspm, quarterly die output is 12.3 million.Total AMD dual core die output 39 million per quarter.Throwing in Chartred FAB 7 at a small number of 2 million, we get 41 million dies/quarter.With a yield of 90% (that's right, pause for laughter here), we get 37 million dual core CPUs per quarter, leaving a 20 million market for Intel.Expect AMD to improve its 65nm transistor soon, and expect major clockspeed bump sometime next year.

I countered with this estimate:
Assuming your total Fab output is accurate for the first time:
41 million is the theoretical capacity - Fab true output (best case estimate) 95% (typical 90-95%) = 38950000
Subtract best case R&D, new product introduction, sample lots at 5% (usually 5-10%) = 37002500
Subtract Fab mechanical yield loss (defectivity, process missteps) best case 10% (usually 10-20%) = 33302250
Subtract Assembly mechanical yield loss (die to package) best case 10% (usually 10-15%) = 29972025
Subtract Electrical yield loss (bad die, low bin, infant mortality) best case 15% (usually 15 – 40% depending of maturity) = 25476221

25.4 million die per quarter is about 62% yield.

And this is just best case, not even Intel can achieve this consistently at mid process maturity. AMD is lucky it can even get 50% wafer-to-unit yield on a process and equipment-set they did not develop themselves. That's right, IBM owns the silicon design rules while it is Intel who gets first development on capital equipment makers such Applied Materials for equipment enabling. Most capital equipment are developed under Intel process influence since they are always ahead. AMD using similar tool sets are only refined tools to meet their process. Because of this AMD can never have better yields than Intel unless they lead in process technology.

Now, assuming at 50% yield 41 million is only down to 20.5 million. And this isn’t even taking into account AMD's Fab transition in the next few quarters. 20.5M/Qtr is more in-line with reality.

AMD's blunder culture rubbing off to ATI

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7436

Thanks to AMD, ATI is now losing market share, delayed in releasing R600 and is having problems with heat in their products.

I wouldn't have thought any company can merge cultures this rapidly. Ever since being taken over ATI all of a sudden behaved like AMD.

AMD is never a natural leader and will never be comfortable leading. See how fast they have fallen back and fallen back hard. I am also not quite sure that they can handle such a large organization as they are now.

I can only see this company shrinking back to its original size. AMD only have a history of being second fiddle. Sadly, this is how they perceive themselves and ATI will only absorb this culture.

Sharikou Sounds Desperate

Sharikou said:
Patty sounds desperate You have to be nuts, he said. The cruel reality is more and more Intel exclusive OEMs are switching to AMD and Intel's market is shrinking fast.
Funny, latest market numbers showed Intel actually grew.
I still don't undterstand why he thinks AMD adoption means dropping Intel.

Intel will exit 2006 with less than 25% of its products being Core 2, leaving 75% of its products total junk.
Lets assume for a moment that there is truth to this statement. What he doesn't realize is that this 25% is the high end, high ASP segment that AMD has been driven out of. That high-volume low ASP 75% garbage of the market is where AMD is swimming in.

That's why you don't see AMD in a hurry to bump up clockspeed or release K8L.
Again, very funny as we can see AMD's poor attempt for a clock increase with its X2 70 series. It has become obvious now that K8 has hit a wall. So much for SOI!

K8 is more than enough to frag Intel.
In his world "frag" means "barely keep up" while destroying the environment.

The $140 Athlon 64 x2 3800+ is faster than 75% of Intel CPUs.
Meanwhile Intel's $300 6400 is faster than 100% of AMD's CPUs

The $50 Sempron is faster than 50% of Intel's CPUs.
AMD has started designing a 8 core chip. However, the solution for heavy computing needs will be solved using Torrenza and specialized co-processors. I can forsee an Azul Vega2 chip with Java capability plugging into a Torrenza socket, or a PERL6 chip that is 100x faster in doing RegEx. As AMD64 becomes more and more powerful, and Torrenza able to meet any specialized need. The RISC architectures such as Power are pretty much goners.

Too bad AMD will be bankcrupt by 2008. What AMD go back into the red next CC.

BUY1 TAKE ONE FREE!

We saw the review. The much awaited AMD response; the Quad FX platform didn’t quite live up to the hype. I think it would be fair to summarize all the reviews from all hardware sites to be the following:
1. AMD’s Quad FX failed to beat Intel’s quad core.
2. AMD’s Quad FX draws a significant amount of power at similar performance to Intel’s quad core.

A lot of AMD cheerleaders still do come out and dispute the benchmark results, which at this point appears to be consistent from one review site to another. And if anything, their complaints would have only amounted to, at best, some insignificant performance gains. No matter how you look at the results, statement 1 and 2 will always remain true.

One other tragedy that seemed to be oblivious to most is how much of an impact Intel’s aggressive product releases are to AMD. At this moment, the FX74 is priced at $499 ($999/2) while FX62 is approximately at $700. This kind of pricing simply destroys the attractiveness of FX62 and I only expect it to significantly drop in price sometime soon. People argue about performance and power efficiency but one thing that’s obvious and indisputable is the fact that AMD sells 2 top bin processors for the price of one just to compete with Intel single CPU solution. Never in the life of the Athlon brand name did this every happen.

QuadFX benchmarked but one man remains delusional

Ars Technica:
Today, AMD officially launched their much-anticipated 4x4 enthusiast platform under the name QuadFX. The results of the rash of QuadFX reviews that just came out are uniformly disappointing; Intel's quad-core offering, the QX6800, outperforms AMD's much hotter, more power-hungry offering in almost every benchmark.

Anandtech:
When only running one or two CPU intensive threads, Quad FX ends up being slower than an identically clocked dual core system, and when running more threads it's no faster than Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700. But it's more expensive than the alternatives and consumes as much power as both, combined... Until then, there's always Quad FX but you're better off with Kentsfield.



But here's what Sharikou said:
Retarded dudes like Anand (who proudly discovered negative scaling on MySQL--adding CPU leads to lower performance) would reach retarded conclusions. But true multitasking benchmarks would show Quad FX fragging anything Intel has in stock.


...hmmm compelling argument considering all benchmarks from review sites are consistent with the results: QuadFX is a failure.
But what really is the point of arguing with a person who hasn't been right about Intel for as long as one can remember?