|
 |
|
|
|
Athlon stalled by quake, Rambus may rise
|
Tuesday, September 28, 1999
Last week's Taiwan earthquake could shape the next round in the battle of microprocessors between Advanced Micro Devices and Intel and may speed the rollout of Rambus memories in some quarters, according to PC makers still groping with the disruption of their major supply lines in the island nation.
With the spike in prices of SDRAMs made in Taiwan, design engineers are rethinking the mix of SDRAM vs. Direct Rambus designs they may put into production this fall. "We've been told to go back and look at Rambus designs," said a senior engineer at NEC's PC group, who asked not to be identified.
"Instead of a 95/5 mix of SDRAM and Rambus, we may move to a 90/10 percent mix. But that would require a whole new mix of chip sets and other components and a whole new test program. It's not a simple change," the engineer said.
Last week's events also threw a roadblock in the ramp of the Athlon processor, AMD's latest and fastest contender to Intel's Pentium. Two of the three motherboard makers that AMD has qualified for its Athlon chip have stopped shipping boards since the quake. A third, First International Computer, is running at about 60 percent capacity at a Taipei plant-the only one currently making the boards-said Tom Chang, director of marketing for FIC (Fremont, Calif.).
The other two board makers, GVC and Microstar, say they are two or three weeks away from shipping again, said Doug Massa, a channel marketing manager for AMD in Sunnyvale, Calif. "This is definitely a speed bump for us."
The delay comes at a crucial time for AMD, which hopes to challenge Intel's Pentium III for high-end sockets. Before the quake, AMD sent engineers to Taiwan to help other motherboard makers, including Acer and Asustek, ramp for Athlon. But the complex scheme has slowed the design pace, said the NEC engineer.
"Athlon is definitely a challenge that has a lot of people burning the midnight oil right now, in part because it uses a fast 200-MHz front side bus, " the engineer said.
Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said reports from the Intel office in Taipei suggest that only five of the roughly 30 motherboard makers in Taiwan were operating normally as of Thursday, with the rest reporting power outages and a few reporting tool damage. No significant structural damage to the motherboard plants has been reported.
The NEC engineer said the quake has enormous potential for disrupting PC design plans because NEC, like many companies, sources motherboards, displays, keyboards, power supplies and cable harnesses from Taiwan.
A senior engineer at Acer Inc. said his company continues to produce notebooks at a plant in Hsinchu, but power is still sporadic.
A spokesman for Dell Computer (Austin, Texas) said virtually all the company's laptops are made in Taiwan, and while officials were confident that the lights would go back on soon across the island, they were making contingency plans to expand a tiny U.S. manufacturing operation in Texas to alleviate the crunch.
By: CST Staff
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved
|
|
|
|
