Some sources, official and unofficial ones, revealed some very interesting details, which can be easily combined into a single news story, as they are all about AMD CPUs.
The president of the Taiwanese AMD division, Mr. K.J. Chou, announced that the overall supplies of AMD processors will make 30 million pieces this year and will exceed the last year’s value by 40%! Some couple of years ago this info could seem a real fantasy…
Unfortunately, the increase in the supplies volumes doesn’t at all mean the increase in the revenues, which we have already seem several times this year. The cause mentioned by Mr. Chou is evident: the constant falling of the ASP (Average Selling Price).
Also Mr. Chou confirmed that Athlon XP 2000+ CPU (1.67GHz core clock) will be launched in January. More exact date hasn’t been mentioned, but the other two sources claim that it will be January 7.
However, the Taiwanese III (Institute for Information Industry) told some even more interesting things. According to them, AMD managed to win 27% of the processor market this year!!! Bearing in mind that they used to own only 20% of the CPU market for the last 3 quarters, it is really cool. Though it is quite hard to believe it, but not impossible, especially remembering that all more or less large PC makers complained about the Pentium 4 CPU shortages this quarter. It is quite possible that AMD will lose these 7% as easily as they have gained them known.
One more very interesting though very easily predictable thing is the following. According to some unofficial sources, AMD will terminate the production of its Athlon processors on Thunderbird core within Q1 2002. instead they will offer the customers Athlon XP built on a 0.18micron Palomino core and a bit later – on a 0.13micron Thoroughbred core.