It could also be that MSFT or APPLE purchase AMD. When this environment stumbles then more efficient SW has a slight opening to make show the benefits of efficient design. It was always possible to hide bloated intentially contrived complexity under the forgiving umbrella of increasing HW speeds and falling prices. Cheap HW has benefited MSFT at the expense of one of the big selling points of products like Linux or BeOS. MSFT has always enjoyed the position of watching others struggle to cut prices while they keep their margins untouched. Higher prices and dampened demand will mean even MSFT will have pressure to lower their prices to keep demand up. PCs will get a little more expensive on the HW side and this will tend to dampen demand even a bit more. This will really help some companies and hurt other who will suffer from loss of marginal HW producers retreating from the market. Less competition in the HW business will generally cascade as higher margins and prices. They will have less pressure on their margins (means more money available) at a time they are also diversifying beyond the CPU world (even more than in the past). This will happen over time as others have noted but it will happen and it will have an effect. This is an interesting exercise to imagine how this change will cascasde through the industry. But their users will probably be upset for a while. And the desktop version of Opteron, the Athlon64, which has lots of stuff “cut” in it (less cache etc) won’t be able to compete with the HyperThreaded desktop P4 CPU of that time.īecause of these facts, I see absolutely no bad reasoning in AMD’s decision to focus shift. When Opteron will come out next April (fingers crossed that it won’t slip again), their CPU will be among the best performers in that CPU range, but possibly not the best. When AMD were saying that “our new CPU will kick a$$” they were saying that with the mindset that it will come out in time, at a time that the P4 and Xeons were not running at these high speeds they run today. This is why they have invested in the Opteron technology, which while it is promising and easily marketable because of its 64-bit core, it has hit AMD’s own limitation of finishing up the CPU, as they are already more than a year behind schedule. I hope people realize that AMD has reached the end of the Athlon/XP technology, the latest 2800+ model (running at 2.25 GHz) was only shipped to very “good” customers (like Dell) and it was manufactured in limited numbers, as their CPUs that they could go that high in the MHz range had to be almost hand-picked.ĪMD knew of the K7 MHz/heat limits for a while. > AMD won’t have much luck competing straight head to head with them For zealots, this kind of thinking is like “I don’t believe it, AMD will never leave us”, but people who have “burned” from such focus shifts this should be a no brainer that it is going to happen, and moreover, it even makes sense to happen. If market conditions does not help something to fly as much as the company needs it to fly, the company will have to find other sources of income. This already is a burden for AMD, and I see their focus shift as a sensible decision. And if that was not enough, Microsoft has made NO commitement to support and release Windows64 for the Opteron/Athlon64 (there are betas though) and they haven’t include any such version of Windows on their roadmap. By that time, Intel will be selling desktop CPUs as powerful as Opteron itself. Not even with the Opteron technology, which while it is _great_ technology, it does not add up: It will be expensive-ish, it will be already 1.5 years late when it will come out, and the Athlon64 version of the Opteron chipset for the desktops won’t be as powerful as the Opteron one. Same with AMD, I expect them to try to find another market to dominate, as Intel has made very clear with their roadmap and some samples they had running over 4 GHz, that AMD won’t have much luck competing straight head to head with them. Their main focus at that time was BeIA but they were supporting BeOS for quite some time after that to some of their contractor clients. When Be shifted focus away from BeOS, they didn’t “kill” it overnight. The article said that they will shift the main focus away from the PC to other industries. I don’t believe that they will go out of the PC market completely.
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