Socket changes (cont’d)/Paris/Clocks

FiringSquad: What steps will AMD be taking to ease the transition to Socket 939?

Henri Richard: Every partner involved in the AMD ecosystem has a 939-pin package roadmap. It’s a natural move for everyone because the advantage is it allows us to have the right number of layers on the motherboard and the right memory subsystem. The ability for us to move to unbuffered is big in terms of cost and there will be multiple sources of DRAM. So we didn’t have to do much in order to convince the partners that it was the right way to go and so you’ll see immediate availability as we roll out the products, all the main motherboard manufacturers will have products.

FiringSquad: Do you feel the upcoming socket changes will add confusion to the marketplace?

Henri Richard: Well initially it would have been better if we didn’t have the changes, if it didn’t happen, but I believe that we’ve got enough friends in the business [inaudible], working all together that there won’t be any confusion in the transition from the current socket to the 939-pin package.

FiringSquad: We’ve been told that your follow-up to Athlon XP, codenamed “Paris” will be based on your K8 core, only it won’t offer 64-bit support. Will this officially mark the end of the Athlon XP processor or will production continue?

Henri Richard: Well the guiding principle at AMD is customer centricity. I need to understand how many customers want to buy 32-bit processors versus 64-bit processors. So if every customer I have wants 64-bit processors I’m not sure we would make 32-bit processors anymore. So that’s one way to look at the market.

On the other hand, you’ve got tremendous, tremendous potential in the emerging markets of the world, where although they may prefer 64-bit they’re cost consciousness and the necessity to try to bring technology to the bottom masses really requires a very cost effective solution. And so, for us, obviously cost effective means a smaller die so it’s possible that for the mature markets, the entire offering will be centered around Athlon 64 and you’ll see very little or no Athlon XPs anymore. But also at the same time, you know, it’s certain that in some of the emerging markets Athlon XP has a lot of life. Frankly there are…[inaudible] that would buy an Athlon XP 2000 today, and that would give them plenty of performance and they’d be very happy with it.

So there aren’t any plans to officially end of life, architecturally, the product, we plan to service our customers needs and we will continue to manufacture Athlon XPs as long as there are customers that are interested in the value proposition that that part offers. But I believe that you will see a faster move to 64-bit around the world than anybody is predicting.

FiringSquad: Looking into your crystal ball, what clock speeds are AMD shooting for by the end of 2004?

Henri Richard: In my crystal ball I see performance ratings. I don’t see clock speeds. So as far as the clock speeds, they’ll continue to go up. The one thing that is interesting is that with our SOI technology, we, you know, we had a lot of work to get the SOI technology up and running, but now we’ve got control over it and as you know, it has a lot of advantages over time in terms of the ability to get great performance out of the transistors. You know, our competitor hasn’t done that transition yet and we certainly see that recently their race towards faster processors has slowed down significantly. So, on that, you know, I know you can’t draw any final conclusions on that but I believe that certainly over the course of 2004 we’re going to be able to provide the market with top-level performance.

I don’t want to talk much about the model numbers we will hit but I believe that FX will remain the fastest product out there, period, for quite some time.