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AMD MAY WELL be falling behind with its ambitious plans to displace its 32-bit Athlon XP family with 64-bit chips, and Microsoft dragging its feet on OS software is likely one reason why sales of the high end chips have not yet taken off.
At last year's Computex in September, the INQUIRER saw a table AMD was showing its motherboard customers which gave the splits between Athlon 64s and Athlon FXs during the first half of this year.
But at last week's conference call, as reported here, AMD told analysts that margins are still higher on 32-bit chips than on the Athlon 64s.
AMD has said publicly that by the end of this year, sales of its 64-bit processors will displace its Athlon XP processors, but executives at AMD, including CEO Hector Ruiz, repeatedly refused to say how many Athlon 64s had shipped.
Sales of Opteron server processors do seem to have done better than AMD expected, but the firm may well be profiting much more from these sales than for its "cinematic" desktop chip.
Some observers suggest that sales of the Athlon 64s will only pick up when Windows 64-bit software is available for it. But that could well have slipped into Q4 of this year. In the meantime, AMD may well be able to slash prices of its Athlon 64 chips when it moves them to the smaller 90 nanometre process.
Overclockers, here, guesstimates that AMD may have sold only 350,000 Hammers, and that high prices and the lack of a Windows OS are to blame.
Rather than an elaborate conspiracy theory that Intel and Microsoft are in an unholy alliance here, we believe that the problem is that the Vole just has too many important projects on the boil and listening to AMD about Windows 64 isn't top of its priorities. It's under pressure on a number of development fronts.
Last week we revealed that HP thinks that while 64-bit X86 chips may well become successful, building the "ecosystem" is likely to take some time.
Source:
The INQ!
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