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Microprocessor
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| Top Stories for July 11, 2001 (details below) | |
| C/Net | Intel halts sales of defective server chip |
| Reuters | Slump Fears Deepen After AMD Profit Warning |
| Fairfax IT | Intel beefs up position as the new chip on the block |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
| The Inquirer | Intel to use "foreign" chipsets |
| The Inquirer | AMD marketing is defective |
| The Inquirer | P4 only 10% of mobo ships |
| The Register | 'Waiting for i845' syndrome lands Intel with P4 glut |
| The Inquirer | Samsung, AMD offer no hope for Alpha |
| Microprocessor
Headline News Collected By Robert R. Collins |
Week of July 8, 2001 |
Older News |
| July 11, 2001 | |
Intel halts sales of defective server chipBy Stephen Shankland July 10, 2001 |
Intel has stopped shipping its top-end server chip because of
a bug that could cause servers to crash. Intel began shipping the chip, the Pentium III Xeon with 2MB of high-speed "cache" memory, in March. But about a month later, a company that sells computers using the chip notified Intel that it found a problem while testing the chip, Intel spokesman Bill Kircos said Tuesday. Intel was able to reproduce the problem but unable to patch existing systems, Kircos said. Accordingly, the company stopped shipping the chip in mid-April. |
Slump Fears Deepen After AMD Profit WarningBy Daniel Sorid July 6, 2001 |
The profit warning from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD is
overpowering hopes that microchip makers have begun to recover
from a major slump, with semiconductor stocks on Friday
retreating further. "If there is any doubt that the industry was still deteriorating, it was dispelled this week," SG Cowen analyst Drew Peck said. By mid-day, AMD shares had lost nearly a quarter of their value, falling $6.99, or 24 percent, to $21.65, while the Philadelphia Stock Exchange semiconductor index lost about 7.9 percent to 570.72. |
Intel beefs up position as the new chip on the blockBy Graeme Philipson July 10, 2001 |
Compaq has bowed to the inevitable and announced that it is
discontinuing its Alpha chip. All its future machines will be
based around Intel processors. The announcement further reduces the number of microprocessor architectures and further consolidates Intel's stranglehold on the market. There are now only two other significant microprocessor architectures: IBM's PowerPC and Sun's SPARC. Both are way behind Intel in market share. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Intel to use "foreign" chipsetsBy Mike Magee July 10, 2001 |
CHIP CYCLOPS Intel is alerting its distribution and dealership
channel to the server boxed motherboards it will release using
"Tualatin" .13 micron Pentium III microprocessors. But, for the first time in living memory, La Intella does not appear to be using its own chipset for the Pentium IIIs which come with a useful 512K of on-die cache, according to documents we have seen. It does recommend third party chipsets for some configurations, but we believe it is the first time we have seen such parts being bundled in a boxed motherboard kit. |
AMD marketing is defectiveBy Phil Trent July 9, 2001 |
I DIDN'T want to believe it for the longest time, but AMD and
Intel are in a very nasty price war. AMD had a 27 per cent
stock hit Friday, and Intel has been hammered over the last
several months as well. This reminds me of when a broker friend of mine asked me about hard drive stocks two or three years ago. I told him that the hard drive companies were lowering prices so fast that I wouldn't recommend them at all. Today, ditto on the CPU industry. |
P4 only 10% of mobo shipsBy Mike Magee July 9, 2001 |
INFLUENTIAL TAIWANESE wire Digitimes reports today that the
Intel Pentium 4 only accounted for 10 per cent of mobo
shipments - seemingly in the last three months or so --
although the article is a little unclear about which period it
is covering. Uncertainty about the move from socket 423 to socket 478 is part of the reason, according to the piece. It also reports that RDRAM prices are now below $7 and that other mobo makers are now supporting the board, with Gigabyte increasing its shipments from 14,000 mobos a month to over 30,000. |
'Waiting for i845' syndrome lands Intel with P4 glutBy John Lettice July 9, 2001 |
Sources in Silicon Valley claim Intel is facing a nightmare
glut of P4s, as cannier buyers hold off pending the arrival of
the i845 chipset and the associated cheaper memory. The i845,
due in the middle of this quarter, will initially allow you to
use PC133 rather than RDRAM, and considering the ramifications
of that one might speculate that the canniest of canny buyers
will simply hold off some more, and wait for DDR. According to our sources, the P4 inventory could have a severe impact on Intel's Q2 figures, due on 17th July. The i845 with PC133 support may have some impact after that, but tagging geriatric PC133 SDRAM technology onto the P4 can't exactly be what the designers of Intel's 'state of the art' had in mind. |
Samsung, AMD offer no hope for AlphaBy Mike Magee July 11, 2001 |
ATTEMPTS BY A GROUP OF industry figures, engineers and others
to persuade AMD and Samsung to give the Alpha processor a
future have come to nothing, the INQUIRER has learned. An initiative which hoped to persuade Samsung and AMD that the Alpha technology could have a future and would offer real competition against Intel's Itanic platform has failed to generate any enthusiasm from the two companies. The move was spearheaded by some very unhappy Compaq Alpha engineers at the company and both AMD and Samsung were informally approached just a few days after Michael Capellas, CEO of Compaq, and Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, announced their deal on the technology. |
| July 9, 2001 | |
AMD: Second-quarter earnings to plungeBy Ian Fried July 5, 2001 |
Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices announced Thursday that
earnings and sales for the second quarter of 2001 will fall
far below estimates. The company said in a statement that second-quarter net income would be 3 cents to 5 cents a share. Analysts polled by earnings tracking company First Call had forecast an average of 27 cents a share for AMD's fiscal second quarter, with individual estimates ranging from 20 cents to 32 cents. Second-quarter sales will be down approximately 17 percent from first-quarter results of $1.19 billion, the company added. AMD earlier had projected that second-quarter sales would decline by as much as 10 percent. |
Warning deflates AMD; analysts see reboundBy Margaret Kane July 6, 2001 |
Shares of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices plunged almost 17
percent in early trading, a day after the company said that
second-quarter sales would miss estimates by a wide margin. Shares were off $4.79 to $23.85. AMD said Thursday that second-quarter net income would be between 3 cents and 5 cents a share, well below the 27 cents per share predicted by First Call analysts. |
Intel to set up 300-mm R&D fab in Silicon Valley, says reportJuly 5, 2001 |
Continuing its rapid expansion into 300-mm wafer-processing
technologies, Intel Corp. here is reportedly planning to set
up another 300-mm fab, this time in Silicon Valley, according
to a new report from Prudential Securities Inc. The new
development fab could represent Intel's seventh 300-mm wafer
plant to date. Intel will not comment on the report, but an e-mail newsletter from Prudential Securities said the chip giant plans to convert its 200-mm R&D fab, located near its headquarters in Santa Clara, into a 300-mm development center. The "D2" facility has primarily served as a 0.18-micron R&D fab, using 200-mm (8-inch) wafers. It is now expected to be converted to 300-mm substrates for 0.13-micron technology development by 2002, said the report issued on Thursday. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Intel to make 'significant' roadmap changes next weekBy Tony Smith July 4, 2001 |
Something "of great significance" to PC system builders is
going down at Intel - and the company is preparing to tell its
customers about it in just under two weeks' time, The Register
has learned. As yet, we don't know what said companies will be told, but an Intel email leaked to us today talks about "the changes" which, the email's author hints, will affect Intel's processor roadmap. The leaked email is a call for Intel customers to attend a meeting in two weeks' time. Intel staff themselves will be briefed about "the changes" late next week. |
Intel preps for mobile extravaganzaBy Mike Magee July 8, 2001 |
IT'S TIME we guess, to summarise our knowledge of Intel's
current mobile processor plans which barring force majeure is
set to occur on the 15th of July next, when its crafty little
copper .13 micron chips start creeping into X86 based
notebooks. It will have some top names lined up to launch machines - Toshiba and Dell, of course, but also its new friend CompaQ. |
Itanic prices emergeBy Tony Smith July 5, 2001 |
Intel has revealed at last what it charges for its Itanic
processor, and like First Class tickets on the chip's
ocean-going namesake, it's not what you'd call cheap. For example, a single 800MHz Itanium with 4MB of on-die L2 cache will set you back a whopping $4227 if you buy a thousand of the processors. The cheapest Itanium, a 733MHz with 2MB of L2, costs $1177 in batches of 1000. |
Intel-AMD in deadly X86 embraceBy Mike Magee July 7, 2001 |
PC VENDORS HAVE painted the writing on the wall for their chip
suppliers Intel and AMD for over six months now - there are
few people buying high end PCs and the introduction of higher
speed increments is having little effect on demand. But even though their PC customers have painted the words PEOPLE ARE NOT BUYING NEW PCs in letters 10 metres high and in dayglow orange, it seems that Intel and AMD are not listening. Instead, the major players in the X86 market are engaged in a deadly embrace, a little like two wasps might fight as the hive collapses at the end of summer, each attempting to sting each other to death. |
AMD updates roadmap, delays desktop Athlon 4By Tony Smith July 4, 2001 |
AMD has updated its processor roadmap, adding new chip lines
and delaying the introduction of some existing parts. The most obvious delay is the upcoming desktop Athlon based on the new Palomino core. Previously scheduled for early in the second half of 2001, it now appears to be pegged for a mid-2H launch, say late September. That aligns it with the previous roadmap's release timeframe for Morgan, the desktop Duron based on the same core as the new Athlon. |
Rambus Yellowstone in SeptemberBy Mike Magee July 8, 2001 |
RAMBUS has said it will unveil its next generation higher
bandwidth codenamed "Yellowstone" in September. At the same time it is evident that the firm has not ceded its stake to the desktop market, as it will announce further developments at a forum it is holding in the same month. Sponsors of the forum include Intel, Samsung, Toshiba and Elpida, and Rambus said it will show plans to get bandwidth of 6.4GB/sec on RDRAM, and enhancements to RIMM modules which will speed the things up to 9.6GB/sec. |
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