Can the Paranoid Resurge ?

David Whelan at Forbe wrote "Only the Paranoid Resurge", it was masterfully written, I couldn't help laughing at the part about Henri Richard's Ferrari and Sean Maloney's Toyota.

However, the article missed some crucial points:

0) Intel's manufacturing capacity looks impressive, but its efficiency is very much in doubt. Intel has five 300mm FABs and seven 200mm FABs, its theoretical capacity is at least 15 times of AMD's. However, AMD took 21.4% market shares as of 4Q05, Intel can't produce enough chipsets to match its CPUs. In fact, Intel has to outsource work to TSMC and has to build new FABs. My estimate is that Intel's yield is only 1/3 of AMD's yield, assuming Intel's FAB utilization is at the same level as AMD's. As I estimated, with FAB36 ramping up, AMD will take 40% of the market exiting 2006.

1) Intel Israel did not design a new archictecture, it was basically Bob Colwell's Pentium III, an Andy Grove era chip. I can only guess when the Pentium 4 folks took the throne, the Pentium III designer had to exit. When the Israelis brought Pentium III back, the Pentium 4 folks left.

2) The 31 watt Sossaman chip is just Core Duo (Yonah) dressed up as a server chip, it's 32 bit only, HP doesn't want to look at it. Running 4 Sossaman cores with only 4GB memory is a waste of power - computational and electrical.

3) Intel's price cut seems to be localized to the China market. AMD did a 3 months true-Duel Core compaign in China, Intel refused to respond to a duel there, but cut prices whereever AMD roadshow propaganda machine went. AMD prices seem to be on the rise.

4) The article did not mention the AMD anti-trust lawsuit and the almost instantaneous effect on AMD's sales: right after AMD's lawsuit, Opteron sales jumped 89% in one quarter. The lawsuit and worldwide raids on Intel offices partially cleared AMD's road to fair market access.

5) No mentioning of Intel's dramatic change in branding and strategy, even the logo has changed.

Some comments:

Intel is a sad, aging empire in fast decline. An angry Grove protégé of the 386/486 age won't do any miracles. The time of Grove has gone forever. The torch of technological leadership is firmly in AMD's hands, which is five generations ahead. We are talking about a fairly newbie Israeli regiment armed with 1995 weapons against AMD's battle hardened legions, led by grand masters such as the DEC Alpha folks, the IBM Power folks, the SUN UltraSparc folks. It's not an even match at all. There is a massive technology gap and brain power differential over there.

The NGMA will be just another dead end. It's a hack that may bump up Intel's 1P performance to a level closer to AMD, but it will lead Intel further down the wrong direction.

I think the recent news about ccHT based co-processors are of great significance. AMD is setting industry standards again. Intel ruled the PC world with the x86, now AMD64 has become the standard, and AMD fully intends to add more instructions utilizing ccHT. Once a whole new ecosystem and industry food chain is established around those AMD standards, you can imagine what will happen to those being out-innovated.

AMD is like the United States, and Intel is like the British Empire -- this analogy to the American revolution is the best I can find, given AMD's history as a second source x86 vendor. I would equate SUN to the French and Dell to the Hessian mercenaries. The breakfree was last year. The old empire still has large presence in the 3rd world.

It's just the beginning.