AMD sold 13000 quad core Opterons

Patty must hate this picture. First, his options are not worth the paper they print on, now his stock grants worth exactly zero.

AMD sold 13,000 quadcore Opterons in one shot. Previously, it sold 19,000 2.6GHZ quad core Opterons. Together, that's over $30 million profit, enough to feed 10K Intel employees for 2 weeks.

These days are getting boring, because AMD is so secretive. There is more on Rev H quad and APM on INQ. A Rev H core will be 60% faster than K8 (40% faster than Conroe) on integer and 200% faster on FP.

Pat Gelsinger's anger and hatred

"I hate AMD", Pat Gelsinger slowly typed the password into his bank account, and looked at the value of his options.

Without AMD, his stock options would worth $50 million.
Now, they worth zero.

He would be lucky if he had a job next year.

I laughed out loud when reading this.

BTW: China's second largest PC maker signed up with AMD in a big way. I told you Conroe would fatally wound Intel.

PS: The image above is a derivative work of INQ's photos, hope they don't sue this Journal for statutory damages. This is fair use.

IDF shows Intel out of steam

Can Intel avoid bankruptcy? That's the question we all want to ask.

The answer from IDF is NO.

There is nothing new shown in the IDF on the eve of AMD's K8L flood. Those teraflop floating point device is not going to save Intel-- clearspeed has such chips, IBM's Cell is equally promising.

Intel touted that Woodcrest Xeon are now 50% of their 2P volume. This means 50% of their 2P server chips are sold below $200. Furthermore, since 2P Woodcrest is faster than 4P Xeon, it will be very interesting to see what Intel's share of the 4P mainstream market is.

Judging from Intel's IDF presentations, they are still trying to gain back market share--which is 100% impossible now that DELL is flooding the market with $399 dual core AMD PCes, replacing the dying Netburst.

Intel shipped 5 million Core 2 Duos in two months. This was after Intel allegedly stock piling production since March. The most optimistic estimate we can have is Intel will ship 10 million Conroes in the next three months, with the other 40 million being legacy 32 bit or Netburst chips. AMD will simply take the 40 million market as much as it can.

The result?

In the coming quarters, Intel will suffer massive losses due to lower unit share and drastically lower ASP.

AMD failed to follow my advice

When Intel moved to strike part of AMD's claims on lack of subject matter jurisdiction, I suggested the following argument: Japanese PC makers such as SONY sell their finished PCes in the United States. Therefore, Intel's anti-competitive behaviour in Japan affects the US PC market and US consumers. When Intel excluded AMD from Japan's SONY, US consumers were no longer offered the choice of stylish SONY AMD PCes. Joe Osh could have bought a AMD SONY for $1000, instead he had to buy an Intel SONY for $2000. Intel's foreign anti-competitive behaviour thus have direct effect in both the foreign and domestic x86 markets. AMD's lawsuit in US seeks to address such effects in the US under US law, while AMD's lawsuit in Japan addresses the effects in Japan.

Judging from Judge Farnan's ruling, AMD failed to deliver the simple message above, instead, AMD's arguments were quite abstract.

While some Intelers are cheering, they have to understand this is just the original complaint. As AMD uncovers more evidence through discovery, it will leave to amend its complaint and may add these back in.

I don't have a JD. But I tell you, I can devise an argument to bring about a certain result with the rules and the facts. That's why I can be better than most lawyers -- liberal arts people who lack logic most of the time.

People have been seeing apples falling for millions of years, only Newton discovered gravity. Why? You can have all the facts, but you have to use them correctly...

Some info on the Judge, very fun reading.

Justin Rattner reminds people of his sins

Intel CTO tried his best to bash Opteron, a technology that is light years ahead of Intel's 1970s FSB based chips, in an apparent attempt to undo his damage to Intel last year.

Charlie running in bunny suit

I am surprised that Intel allowed this free advertisement for AMD and DELL in the IDF.

When he wrote that DELL would not go AMD article, I told him he was wrong, I told him DELL had to go AMD, but he did not believe it. He is good at IT stuff but bad at financial analysis.

Some of my statements:

"Conroe was the last straw that pushed DELL to AMD.",
"DELL went AMD not because Conroe is not good, but because Conroe is good."
"Conroe fatally wounded Intel, Kentsfield will BK Intel".

INQ folks will never understand the above.

Hector Ruiz bullish on PC market

He reckons that 84% of the global population is not connected to the internet.

Kids equipped CM1 will be able to connecting to the net via satellites, for free.

BTW, AMD wrote a book for Intel, titled "Multicore processing for dummies". The intended readers are Intel's architects and other engineers.

How to really enable AMD cool & quiet

I installed AMD's Cool and Quiet driver and thought the PCes were running cool. But after checking the clockspeed, I noticed it was always running at full speed. What did I do wrong?

I found that you actually need to change Windows XP's Power scheme to "Minimal Power Management" for C&Q to kick in. After making that change, the CPU is now running at half the speed most of the time.

AMD should make this clear on their driver installation program -- or maybe I didn't pay attention?

With C&Q enabled, most of the noise now comes from the hard drives.

BTW, IBM and SUN will use Socket F for their next gen processors.

SUN, HP, IBM, DELL rally for AMD64

Torrenza will be a huge wave of innovation.

Hector Ruiz says Apple will use AMD64 chips. Who wants to be stuck with obsolete Intel crap? He reckons.

Intel is trying to sell its vague ideas of CSI to others. CSI is expected in 2008, when DCA2.0 will be out.

Intel will be washed away.

Hector Ruiz supports HP's effort to hunt down the leaker

Hector Ruiz is a wise man. I found I agree with Hector Ruiz on most issues.

The guy who leaked confidential information should be hunt down and exposed. My original comment was here.

China releases 64 bit Dragon Chip

64 bit, 1GHZ, 3 to 8 watts. They are doing 8 to 16 core version in two years. I bet they will take a chunk of code from the OpenSparc project.

China will ban all 32 bit Core Duo chips soon. These chips are not only tech garbage, they are also a national security threat.

AMD Global Vision Conference

This is the second conference, a lot of big names. SUN sent four guys over, including Scott McNealy. Note that DELL CTO is in the speakers list.

AMD's CTO built his own 4x4 box

It must have been fun. I bet he got all the parts for free -- except the case, maybe.

Remember the story that Intel CTO used a picture of an Opteron board during IDF?

Crap INTC analyst saying what I said long time ago

They say Intel will exit 2006 with only 25% Core 2, mix no good. But they still fail to point out the obvious consequences of that: 75% of Intel's production exiting 2006 will be total crap.

I have analysed this to you long time ago. 95% of Intel's inventory is crap, 75% production is crap, nobody wants crap, nobody wants 95% of its products to be crap, so everybody will go AMD as much as possible, so DELL will go AMD. Intel loses units and sells at lower prices, massive operating losses. Conroe ramps up, Intel folks ready to dance. But K8L comes along, frags Conroe. Intel totally dead in the water. BK.

DELL 2P Opteron servers available very soon

Probably next week. How do I know?

There is a dedicated server host which only provides DELL servers, and today, on their home page, you can pre-order Opteron servers. So, I started a chat with their sales people. I was told the DELL Opteron servers will be available ....

K8L (Rev H) server/desktop for 2Q07

Charlie at INQ get tired of speculating and asked his contacts at AMD on the K8L question. The answer is AMD will launch Rev H quadcore in 2Q07. The first version will be using HT2.0, probably at 1.2GHZ to 1.4GHZ, up from 1GHZ. In 4Q07 to 1Q08, the HT links will be upgrade to HT3.0, with all those wonderful features.

On performance of the cores, we already know, 60% increase in integer speed, and 200% increase on floating point. Dirk Meyer told us AMD will have a faster core in 2007. He was true to his promise.

Power consumption will be 68 watts to 120 watts, which is not that surprising. Turion X2 is 31 watts.

We can safely say Intel is finished. Just as Conroe ramps up, AMD pushes Intel back by at least three years.

Back of envelope calculation for AMD's capacity in 3Q07:

FAB36: 25000wspm, 100 % 65nm, K8L dual core die area 110mm^2, plugs this data into the wafer.exe program with a geometry of 11x11. We got 540 K8L dual core candidates off one 300mm wafer. Quarterly K8L (DC) candidates will be 540* 25000 * 3 = 40.5 million. Annual die output will be 160 million.

FAB30: 100% dual core AM2 production, 182mm^2 die size, 30,000wspm ramped down to 15K wspm, 90nm. Using a geometry of 14x13.5, each 200mm wafer makes 144 dual core AM2 dies. Annual AM2 die output is this 144 * 12 * 15000 = 25.9 million.

Chartered FAB7, let's throw in 5000wspm, at 65nm, that's 32 million K8L dies.

Total: 160+25.9 +32 = 217.9 million dual core CPU dies (K8L and AM2). So far so good?

Intel mute on DELL's use of "AMD Inside"

Look here.

It says "PURE DELL ON THE OUTSIDE. AMD ON THE INSIDE."

Intel lawyers sued almost everybody who uses the Inside word. But they dare not sue DELL, which sells 27% of Intel's CPU production.

Search "VIIV" or "vPro" on dell.com, you find zero entries. DELL is unwilling to pay $50 for those stickers.

Those who bought Woodcrest/Bensley will find their machines worth zero in just one year. With Intel and AMD drop their plans for FB-DIMM support, there will be no demand thus no supply for that type of memory.

K8L desktop chips to launch in 2Q07

See news.

"Very similar picture, all were interested(interested) a theme, already met by way of illustration the changes planned in a kernel, known under code name K8L. Thus, practically all of them (at least, that, anyhow, were sounded and mentioned) should enter already into the first generation четырехъядерных the processors planned to release (to be exact — commodity availability) in 2-nd quarter 2007! "

AMD 3Q06: battle won

Intel's BK is now inevitable. Intel's BK is a result of colossal strategic and tactical blunders by Intel management and their total inability to adapt to a changing climate. They will go extinct just like the dinosaurs. The time of AMD64 has come.

The situation today is totally different from 2002. The differences are

0) AMD now has gathered all the greatest minds on computer and system architecture. Chief architects of Opteron, Alpha, Power, UltraSparc, MIPS, Itanium and PA-RISC are all in AMD camp.

1) AMD now has the most advanced FAB process through its partnership with IBM and its APM 3.0 FAB automation technology excels.

2) AMD firmly controls the high end server with 8P 16 core Opteron technology at an affordable price.

3) 95% of Intel's inventory and 70% of Intel's production are more than 20% slower than AMD64 and Conroe and thus become totally obsolete.

4) AMD is doubling its capacity by the end of 2006. There is an oversupply of CPUs. AMD's capacity will be able to supply over 80% of the market by the end of 2008.

5) AMD's average cost per CPU is at least $40 lower than Intel's.

6) The AMD anti-trust lawsuit is tying Intel's hands. Intel found it impossible to impose exclusion agreements on OEMs.

7) The 65nm K8s will be here any time soon.

8) The next gen 65nm Rev G core with 60% integer performance increase and 200% FP performance increase is just six months away.

9) AMD+ATI will be a killer enterprise.

10) The next gen Bulldozer mobile paltform based on the same Rev G core will shatter competition.

11) The OLPC project will equip the children of the world with the $100 laptops, which will establish AMD Inside as the standard for furture generations.

12) The OEMs all see (0)-(11) above and are embracing AMD like there is no tomorrow. Former Intel strongholds such as DELL and IBM have suffered enough and are now introducing their AMD64 business and consumer offerings. Traditional AMD alliances such as HP, SUN, Lenovo and Gateway are also expanding their offerings.

The DELL-AMD alliance will expand AMD's footprint in the commercial client market and beyond. I projected that AMD will exit 2006 with 40% market share(run rate), leaving Intel at 57%.


I pointed out to Intel execs in 2005 that their share loss is inevitable due to FAB36 ramp and AMD's advantage with Direct Connect Architcture. In view of that inevitability, I suggested Intel to cut production and hike ASP to maintain constant revenue.

But, Intel miscalculated.

From the 2Q06 conference call transcript, Intel truly believed their loss of unit share in the previous quarters was due to the shortage of low end 865 chipsets. Andy Bryant actually blamed himself for making the suggestion to cut 865 chipset production. To remedy the situation, Intel actually ramped production of those chipsets and their companion CPUs, and now Intel is in a deep pile of unwanted legacy chips.

This was a tragic miscalculation -- as Intel execs refused to recognize that it was AMD64's strength that pushed AMD up.

But that's not all. Intel made the next strategic blunder which will prove fatal. It again failed to adapt to the changing situation, instead of thinking anew, they resorted the tried and old tactics. "Opereation Crush", "Operation checkmate", those old Andy Grove campaigns were recycled and reused in an AMD64 era. Intel's whole calculation was based on the assumption that C0nroe will take the high end, Pentum D will take the mainstream, while Pentium 4 takes the low end, thus pushing Athlon 64 out of the market. However, AMD has forseen this coming (even I have predicted this), and they quickly changed their battle plan: Athlon 64 X2 becomes the mainstream. The result is now Athlon 64 X2 takes the sweet spot, and Pentium D becomes totally unwanted. In the low end, Athlon 64 and Sempron frag Pentium 4 and Celerons with more performance and less power consumption. Now, if you consider that legacy Netburst and IA32 chips are still the majority of Intel's inventory and production, you know Intel is in a terrible situation.

With FAB36 and Chartered FAb7 cranking like crazy and DELL's insatiable appetite for low price and high performance desktop CPUs, AMD will rule and Intel will be pushed out.

AMD has won the decisive battle in 3Q06. History will record this as the true turning point in a war that will soon end with Intel's final capitulation.

DELL overestimated INTEL

DELL execs explain why they took so long to go AMD64.

Jeff Clarke, senior vice president (SVP) in Dell's product group said,
"We overestimated Intel's ability to deliver and catch up."

I remember one DELL VP said Intel could do 64 bits in a nanosecond...

At the same time, Dell "underestimated" AMD, admitted Brad Anderson, another Dell SVP in the products group. "We believed that AMD's ability to sustain its performance advantage was not going to continue," he said. "We missed that."

I hope these DELL execs read my blog and understand AMD has all the grand masters in computer architecture: Opteron, Alpha, Power, UltraSparc, MIPS, Itanium and PA-RISC. Intel simply lacks the brain power to compete against these grand masters.

I imaged a meeting among AMD and Intel designers. The Intel team won't even be able to understand what AMD folks are talking about.

All of Intel's stuff seem so primitive -- Pentium Pro technology is all they got.

Woodcrest is ultra low end 2P stuff.

The Register has an interesting article and stock price chart for AMD, HP, SUN, IBM, INTC, DELL and SGI. The more AMD a company had, the better its stock performed. The more Intel a company had, the worse it performed. Arguably, SGI had more Intel than Intel itself. Intel has diversified itself. SGI is pure Itanium, and SGI BKed. Intel had more AMD than DELL, because Intel borrowed AMD64 instruction set and became an AMD64 clone maker.

Michael Dell and his people loved Intel, they still do, they may even hate AMD for whipping Intel. But they love themselves more. When AMD is growing, and Intel shrinking, Dell's fragile financials will not be able to sustain its valuation. The Enron scenario and the thoughts of Feds knocking their doors forced them go AMD. That's the only way DELL can find growth and save themselves from the Enron day, if all possible.

I saw this last year, and I told AMD and Dell folks about this last year. It's called inevitablity.

Uncorruptible Justice: Computer Judge

China arguably has the fairest and tamper-proof criminal justice now. Computers decide outcome of cases, instead of biased or incompetent judges and racially divided and stupid jurors.

To a jury, you can argue that a 99% probability match in DNA is not beyond reasonable doubt proof. A computer computes like this: nothing is 100%, beyond reasonable doubt is 90%, 99% is more than that. Guilty!

I wonder what sentence the computer judge would give for O.J.

Read the comments by the people, some brits and yankees are craving for such a system, despite the report's usual bashing of China. But I can assure them that they won't get it. The US and UK laws are enacted by the rich, and US/UK legal systems are designed to be very expensive for a purpose.

If you are rich, then U.S. is a much better place. Computer judge doesn't care how much money you got.

I am sure that China will enact a law to forbid judges from using Intel's Centrino notebooks. Anyone can hack into any centrino notebook in five minutes.

More trouble for DELL

Securities lawsuit filed against DELL for inflating its financial statements.

Remember my Week X articles?

Unless DELL quickly switches to AMD on notebooks and servers and get some meaningful growth, its Enron days won't be far away.

When will Apple switch to AMD?

That's the next question we should ask. Steve Jobs is smart. He will make the right move at the right time. My guess is that Apple will make the switch when Bulldozer is ready.

I suggest Hector to give him a signup bonus. AMD's cost is lower any way. The x86 market is a battlefield, you are either quicker or dead. One more AMD chip sold is one less Intel chip sold.

Dual core DELL X2 3800+ PC with 17inch LCD for $569

See here. Looks like a good deal. You got Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Windows XP, 512MB, 160GB, 17 inch LCD, Nvidia 6150 LE integrated graphics (Doom3 capable).

This is much better than similar offers with Intel chips at the same price range.

Many analysts and news men are still in shock, as if DELL-AMD alliance is a bad dream. They still got boat loads of INTC to dump.

DELL starts to sell AMD machines tomorrow

Michael Dell anounces C521 and E521, starts selling tomorrow (Setpember 13, 2006).

Michael Dell cleared the question about AMD quota in DELL's product line. Sensitive on anti-trust issues, Mr. Dell indicated that there was no quota. DELL will sell as much as 99.99% of its PCes with AMD processors.

I think DELL's AMD product line will make the majority of DELL's sales soon. The AMD machines are all equipped with DOOM3 capable Nvidia graphics, unlike those crap Intel graphics game developer hate to death. Overall, DELL's AMD's configuratios are far more feature rich and sexy than its Intel setup.

DELL also said "no" to Intel's vPro. DELL doesn't want to pay $50 for the vPro sticker.

Intel's BK is pretty much ensured.

Media pumped the renewal of DELL-EMC reseller contract like crazy but keep total radio silence on DELL-AMD alliance. A lot of folks got a lot of INTC to dump...

AMD is so innovative

You got to see this.

BTW, some of my old articles on DELL: Week X, hide & seek, casual look at balance sheet, real story on growth... (thanks for Chicagrafo for digging out these links).

K8 crushes Conroe/Woodcrest on floating point performance

It's old news. But now SPEC.org published the SPECFp scores for Socket F and Socket AM2 Opterons. The 2P 4 core 2.6GHZ Sun Fire x2200 M2 got a SpecFp_rate2000 score of 117. A 3GHZ dual Woodcrest 5160 got 80. That's a 46% lead by AMD.

In other news, Dell delayed its 10Q filings as SEC probes its past reporting. I repeatedly told Michael Dell to be careful there since sometime last year. When your company keeps winning and growing, everyone sings praises. When your company starts downhill slide, everyone will step over you. Enron folks went to jail because Enron crashed, not because what they did was particularly worse than others.

The only way for DELL to avoid Enron scenario is to find massive growth in AMD market.

In futher news, EU has started investigating Intel. As I estimated, Intel owes AMD $15 billion minium in damages. At the end, I think those Intel FABs belong to AMD.

Intel double cheeseburger quad is a dog

Read Tomshardware benchmark of the Kentsfield double conroe. Look at the multithreaded games (Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, Oblivion). In Quake 4, a Kentsfield overclocked to 3.33GHZ is only 14% faster than Athlon 64 X2 FX62 (2.8GHZ). For some reason, Toms didn't produce a Call of Duty 2 result. If you look at non-overclocked result, the 2.66GHZ Kentsfield is only 9% faster than FX62.

In iTunes test, the FX62 took 106 seconds, the quad core 2.66GHZ Kentsfield took 109 seconds. The Intel quad is 3% slower than AMD dual.

HP board member's betrayal and disgrace

A male board member leaked confidential information about ousting HP CEO Carly Fiorina months before the decision was final. This is mean and disgraceful. It's like Brutus stabbing Caeser in the back. I think the HP board chairman has done the right thing to hunt down the guy who did it. Such a person should be condemned and never be trusted by anyone.

Sometimes, ethics is more important than law. The private investigators obtained some phone records. So what? No damages were done. The intention was to do good. The outcome was good, a despicable guy got caught and exposed. You can sue the private investigators, and they will laugh at you. The state may charge the private investigators -- but they did it with full knowledge that their acts were petty offenses and the pay outweighed the liability.

This was not spying on board members. HP board chairman was only trying to find out who did one specific treacherous act. She had to find it out, only because the guy did it and concealed the fact he did it.

I respect HP board chairman's decision and determination. The person who leaked the information is a disgrace and should be removed.

Dual core computing for $159

Frys has a very good combo deal. Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (socket 939) and ECS RS482-M motherboard for a total of $159. I bought one to upgrade one of my PCes. Why not AM2? I still got a few DDR1 memory sticks, so I can reuse them. AMD should keep making socket 939 X2s, and sell them as CPU upgrades.

Michael Dell is still young and kicking

I once criticized AMD for their small vision, 30% of the market by 2008 seemed so insignificant, and at the same time I praised Dell for their attitude -- DELL folks always talk in up beat tones.

Now, we know DELL signed up with AMD when AMD made sure it could supply 10 million CPUs. While I question Michael Dell's PC mentality, I have to say he does have the ability to push volumes. Making millions of $399 PCes is a major supply chain management problem, and DELL knows how to do it.

AMD will exit 2006 with 40% market share (run rate), mark my word.

AMD readies 65nm and 45nm

INQ reports that AMD's 65nm processors will be out next month. Furthermore, 45nm chips are being tested now. We know this already, because IBM+Chartered said a few days ago that they will have 45 chips in 2007 and AMD spends millions in co-development with IBM.

On the architectural front, K8L will be out in 2Q07. But I bet it will be slightly earlier than that.

Also, in the next three months, AMD will use another transistor, which will be much faster and lower power.

Do I need to repeat my projections for Intel again? No. I suppose.

Opteron + Cell = 1.6 Peta flops

Sorry, Cray, IBM won the bid for the fastest supercomputer with Opteron and Cell. A massive 16,000 Opteron cores ( 2000 x3755 4P servers) and 16,000 Cell CPUs deliver the awesome computing power no FSB based IA32 technology can match. This is AMD64 and Torrenza in action.

Clearly, IBM and AMD have been working with each other for quite a while to interface Cell to the AMD Torrenza de facto industry standard with cache coherent HyperTransport.

AMD sold 8,000 Opteron 28xx CPUs in this deal. At $15,00 CPUs each, that's $12 million, enough to feed 10K workers for four days.

HP cheers DELL's AMD move

On DELL's AMD move, Mark Hurd, CEO of HP, commented that "It's a good thing for AMD to get critical mass," speaking Wednesday at Citigroup's 13th Annual Global Technology Conference in New York.

Translation: A weaker bully is good for everyone. As Intel loses more market share, it will have to lower prices for HP.

My translation: Intel will post operating losses for the next 7 quarters -- massive unit loss on top of market share loss. Do I need to reiterate my Intel BK projection?

Intel's cash insufficient to layoff 80% of its workers

Intel cut its number of workers by 10%, or 10,500. I noted that Intel incurred $0.2 billion severance costs, averaging $20K per worker. Those who spent their youthful years at Intel got a $20K check. Sigh!

To layoff 80% of its workforce as a preventive measure to avoid BK, Intel needs $1.6 billion dollars pure expense. Looking at Intel's balance sheet, Intel doesn't have enough money for that.

Conclusion: Intel's BK is inevitable.

PS: Check X2 3800 stock level, it's on back order again, though relief is coming.

DELL to use 20 million AMD CPUs in 2007

As I projected, AMD will exit 2006 with 40% market share (run rate), leaving Intel at roughly 55%. We will see AMD surpass Intel by 3Q07 in market share.

It's just the beginning. Also, there is a shortage of Turion chips in the channel right now. DELL is sucking a lot of AMD production. I projected by 3Q08, DELL will be close to 100% AMD. By then, even K8L will be low end. AMD's 45nm chips with the next-next gen killer technology will rule the world.

Intel? It will be BKed by then, unless it quickly layoff 80% of its workforce to conserve cash.

I was reading a recent edition of the Linux Journal. Large Opteron ads were everywhere, all those companies are touting their 8P 16 core servers and workstations. There are a couple of Intel Xeon ads, limited to low end 2P.

Intel is so outdated.

Lack of IQ is a problem in the hardware review profession

You can't write code, you can't design circuit boards, you can't write good prose..., you can't do anything mildly creative, you don't have any in depth understanding of anything, such as an operating system, but you can install and run benchmark programs, what do you do? You become a PC hardware reviewer.

Hexus.net wrote this piece of report, they got really excited seeing an AMD dual core machine streaming two videos.

Retards!

My socket 754 Sempron can stream 100 videos simultaneously, and CPU usage is below 20%. Why? Because Direct Connect Arhictecture offers plenty of bandwidth for I/O and memory access. As long as my network card and hard drive are fast enough. Sending off data over network is a piece of cake.

A dual core AMD Live box is as powerful as a 2P single core Opteron 252 server in CPU cycles, and has 8GB/s I/O bandwidth and 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth. Intel has only a fraction of that.

AM2 X2 3800+ out of stock

It had a stock of over 12K units a day ago, now, it's back ordered.

Update on September 2: now it has 3000 units in stock.

Former And Current Empolyees of Intel support AMD

See FACE Intel. In just a couple days, the membership of that organization will grow by up to 20,000, more than the strength of an infantry division.

This article talks about Intel's way of control.

Intel needs to layoff 80% of its workforce to avoid BK

Back in 2005, I told Intel execs that they will have to layoff large number of employees once AMD FAB36 ramps up. Back then, I suggested to Intel that it should cut production and raise ASP to maintain constant revenue, as losing unit share is inevitable. Intel took the exact opposite approach. As a result, I projected operating losses for Intel from 3Q06 onward, leading to eventual BK around 4Q07 to 2Q08 timeframe.

It is reported that Intel will layoff as much as 20,000 people. Imagine 20,000 Intel engineers and marketeers become jobless and on welfare overnight. Furthermore, you can expect most of these people have spent their youthful years at Intel and will face a tough situation in the job market. They will have nowhere to go, but join FACE Intel. The result is tragic. and the impact on local economies will be huge.

Intel only needs to sell 20 Conroes to feed one worker for a month. For 20,000 workers, Intel only needs to sell 400,000 Conroes. But the reality is, Intel can't sell so many Conroes for whatever reason.

The fact Intel has to layoff so many people leads us to conclude that Conroe is not saving Intel, on the contrary, Conroe is killing 95% of Intel's sales. I have predicted this long time ago. We concluded previously that Conroe was the final straw that pushed DELL to AMD.

Laying off 20,000 workers will delay Intel's BK time by 1 quarter. If the layoff is confirmed, we should adjust Intel's BK time to 1Q08 to 3Q08.

To avoid the BK scenario, Intel needs to layoff 80,000 workers. AMD has only 10K people, Intel should have no more than 20K.