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AMD claims Intel giving away chips for X-Box

To see the world in a grain of truth...

The head of AMD's investor relations made a statement yesterday about Microsoft not using its technology in its sort of up-and-coming X-Box. Thanks to AMD Zone and Ace's Hardware for pointing us to this post on Silicon Investor and to some other useful information. Toni Beckham, from AMD Investor Relations, said: "Microsoft will NOT use AMD processors for its XBox product. Although we are always looking for opportunities for a closer relationship with Microsoft, AMD was not prepared to give the processors away to gain the XBox business. "Although it might have been desirable incremental business, participating in that market is contrary to our strategic goal of gaining market share in the high-end of the PC market where we can achieve higher margins with the industry's complete line of high-performance PC processors. This development does not change AMD's expectation of reaching $1 billion revenue in each quarter of this year, nor does it change our goal of reaching 30% unit market share by the end of 2001." This, of course, implies that, as we suggested yesterday, there were some frantic negotiations earlier in the week which left AMD and its Athlon out in the cold. And, for sure, once Intel gets its yields right, it will certainly have plenty of spare Coppermines lying around doing not very much. Others are suggesting that the earlier spat between Intel and Corel this week was part of some quid pro quo between Chipzilla and the Great Satan of Software. Ah, the geopolitics of IT. Ace's Hardware, meanwhile, is suggesting that Intel is sacrificing some of its yields in order to get higher grade processors out of the door. The Web site suggests that Intel may have sacrified some of their .18 micron fabrication facilities to produce higher performing 1GHz chips, in the process sacrificing output of the lower grades. Getting confirmation of that type of information from Intel is, we suggest, as close to impossible as you can get. The same site now suggests that Intel's 866MHz and 850MHz Pentium IIIs have now been put on some kind of back burner until the 20th of March, delayed from the 27th of February last, as reported here at the time. If Intel is really playing some kind of weird 1GHz yield game, it is going to make a whole heap of its customers even more unhappy than they already are. ® See also Intel snatches X-Box business, eats AMD's lunch X-Box unleashed: MS snubs PC OEMs, dumps AMD Athlon Analysis: Intel Europe "centralised puppet on a string"

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