Thursday, February 22, 2007

Hector continues to spin it

I've gotta say, as AMD moves along, Hector is beginning to sound like Intel did a few years ago. In denial that they had messed up and spinning his story like everyone else has the IQ of a pea:

http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=197007770

Here are some of the good bits:

"The one thing that's hard to do is trying to correlate the stock price to anything a company does. It is very difficult. We're disappointed that our stock isn't performing better, but I won't correlate it to anything other than it's just one of those things."

Ha ha - the slumping stock price is not related in any way to what's happening in the marketplace. Though I'm sure when the stock was 40 he was saying the market recognises the value of AMD.

CRN: You mentioned the importance of Barcelona. What will be its impact on AMD this year?

RUIZ: This is an incredibly important product transition. We don't expect the ramp [this year] to be dramatic because it's a new core, new micro architecture and platform. The biggest impact it will have is that we'll see a large number of customers and partners align themselves behind the technology.


So at last he admits Barcelona will have no impact on their financials this year.

CRN: When will Barcelona ship?

RICHARD: It's slated for introduction at the end of the second quarter and will be in the market in the third quarter.


Q3 folks...Q3! Around the same time Penryn launches.

Monday, February 12, 2007

The Doctor is shaken

The Doctor has disabled anonymous posting at his blog. This is primarily due to the fact that some clever bloke was posting anonymously on his blog and here using the Doctor's and Penix's psuedonyms.

Obviously the Doctor didn't like the fact that his cage was being rattled.

Penryn pull in?

The Inquirer is reporting a possible Penryn pull into 1H07.

http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37562

Pulling in this process by 6 months is unlikely. However, I'm predicting a 1 quarter pull in to end Q307 for the first Penryn to ship. For the people who want clarity - what this means is product will be shipped to OEM &/or channel but does not necessarily mean widespread availability. It also will not be across the board Penryn up and down the product line up. The fact that the sillicon was able to boot 5 OSes and 2 factories seem to be on schedule to ramp in 2H07 means this is quite possible. And Intel needs to continue to show Wall Street and their customers they are executing at every step.

Friday, February 09, 2007

Two things - for the AMD fanboys

Two things I wanna say to the AMD fanboys:

1. Where in heavens name did you get the impresion Penryn is going to be late to Q108??? It's coming on schedule in 2007. Read the Intel press release. Penryn was scheduled for end 2007. Intel is obviously ahead of schedule as they have booted 5 different products with multiple OSes. Which is why I'm sure they will pull it into end Q307 with such good silicon.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070128comp.htm

2. Will everyone stop jerking off on the lack of an integrated memory controller please. I'm not an engineer but I have some common sense. This lack of a controller does not seem to change the fact that Conroe kicks AMD's ass so why the hell would it be such an issue moving forward. It's obvious Intel's engineers designed an architecture that works pretty darn well in spite of this. I can understand if the discussion is around other new features on the Barcelona architecture but for goodness sakes...stop talking about the IMC. It doesn't matter.

The way I understand this simplistically, the IMC on AMD's chips is a faster link to a smaller cache which means quick access but the possibility of the instruction coming up empty handed in the cache and hence the cache needing to be refreshed more often. Whereas for Intel they have a bigger cache (which means fewer cache refreshes) but a narrower tunnel through the FSB which could limit the number of instructions travelling through at any given time. It appears to me from the simple fact that Conroe wins all the benchmarks that Intel's engineers figured out how to optimise this since Athlon/Opteron are getting their ass whooped on every benchmark.

So...get over it!!!

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Figured it out...

Ok - I figured it out. And even left a clue in my comment dated 1st Feb here:

http://sharikou180.blogspot.com/2007/01/someone-explain-this-to-me.html

"Not penix" kind of picked up on it. When you get in to post a comment, you choose the "Other" option. This allows you to leave a post name of your choice and link to any URL. Which is what I did posting under the "fake" Doctor and linking back to this blog.

But I'm still curious why/how the posting was shut down at the Doctor's?

BTW Roborat - good one -:)