It All Comes Down to the Yield...

I recently wrote an article for Custom PC Magazine entitled “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. In short; it’s an article that generalizes the various types of company attitudes that we come across in our industry.

In general there are companies who take an ass kicking and come back with a vengeance by innovating better products after listening to their customers and the people who schooled them on their mistakes. This is the sign of a strong company, especially when they realize that they need to turn it around before it’s too late.

Companies like this take their licks in stride, like a beat up warrior in the Ultimate Fighting Championship; they lose hard, and then they simply train harder to make a strong comeback. ATi is one such company who has proven that they will take all kinds of feedback and even if it’s negative publicity they will somehow internalize it and turn it around into something positive.

Another company who has surprised me by their relatively “positive” reaction to my writing is Intel. Believe it or not they are trying to make things right by constantly keeping us in the loop of what we should expect in the coming months. I do have some concerns about their roadmap (which I will discuss in the following paragraphs) and only time will tell if these concerns are indeed valid.

Let me be clear to those who read my blog on a regular basis, I like Intel and I think they make great mobility products. In the future they hope to sway our opinions to believe in their entire product line - as far as I’m concerned seeing=believing, and if Intel produces I will call them on it.

If anyone can transport themselves from the stone-age to circa 2006 it’s probably Intel. They have massive resources and their talented team of Israeli engineers has the innate desire to succeed. These engineers are relentless; they are serious ballers who may end up carrying the entire company on their backs.

So here are my concerns about the roadmap – generally speaking: It seems to me that Intel’s new processors are heavily cache dependant. That being said, it would normally take a great deal of silicon to produce a processor with 4 megabytes of cache. You would think this could limit their production output – but then there’s another issue. If they are able to produce the processors there’s the issue of yield. When you start building such a complex processor with a large amount of cache the yields will probably come down significantly. Lastly, by combining a new process with blistering new technology, and you cover it across multiple platforms/product lines it goes back to the analogy that a wise man once said to me: “You can’t make a baby in one month with nine wives”.

I cite Core Duo as an example of a product that experienced delays to get to the channel. I now see a few channel players starting to launch Core Duo notebooks with anticipation to receive new platform parts sometime near the end of May. That’s a far cry from Apple being able to launch Core Duo in January… I must say that Intel was more than eager to get us samples many weeks ago but our challenge was trying to work with the ODMs on platforms. They were lacking chipsets to produce platforms so we could test the sample processors that Intel wanted to provide - it’s like a vicious cycle.

Though this doesn’t seem to bode well if they are trying to eat up share from their competitor, it may not be their goal. Even if they win in performance they may not be able to produce enough to keep the entire market satisfied. Now I could be wrong, and I invite anyone from Intel to post on here, anonymous comments are welcome. I would like to hear your take on yields and potential production issues. Either way I think it’s probably a good strategy for Intel to drop their new procs in limited production in order to gain some “halo effect” across the entire product line.

In the meantime, it looks more and more feasible that AMD will continue to grow strong regardless of Intel’s performance comeback. The fact is the momentum is already there, and in some cases the writing is on the wall. This isn’t necessarily bad for Intel; in fact I would venture to guess it’s good for them because it will keep both companies focused on innovation.

On another crazier note I think AMD will probably announce a couple of surprise OEM deals this year. It seems like the next logical step to me based on a number of facts which I may get into later. Let’s just say I think Toshiba, Sony, and Dell are still in the running to spread their wings a little and bring some green into their lives.