Originally posted by: White Widow
mech - you are quite right that *you* are not married to your hardware, but this is not the case for 90% of the people buying computers these days. I didn't mean to imply that only harwdare enthusiasts were the folks faced with upgrade dilemas here. In fact, as you yourself attest, the hardware enthusiasts are most likely to be the folks to buy the S939 stuff now and sell off or retire their old systems. Still, I'm not convinced that you are a representative individual. Clearly you have the means to shell out hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a new system after having already adopted a S754. As I read through the forums, I do not get the impression that most people - even hardware enthusiasts - are in that kind of financial position.
Even so, the vast majority of PC buyers (mom, dad, Uncle Harvey) are going to walk into Best Buy or CompUSA and have a very hard time understanding why they should plunk down so much extra cash for a system of only marginal performance improvement. It's these people, not you and me, who represent the possibility for financial success or failure for AMD. These are the people who AMD needs to convince with low prices. AMD just can't stand toe-to-toe with Intel on prices because their name recognition among the general public is so low. Furthermore, AMD needs to get S939 out there as fast as possible. Intel is havnig all kinds of problems with their new sockets and chipsets, which has afforded AMD a chance to gobble up some marketshare. Keeping prices high on their new platform just means keeping it from gaining ground in the market. Even if AMD drops the S939 chips to comparable levels with S754 they are missing the boat. Finally, I think it is almost disingenuous to market S754 chips as mid-range to high-end now, and then pull a bait and switch on people later. To the extent the public has any consciousness about AMD's products, it's that Athlon64 is high-end, AthlonXP is mid-range and low-end. To sell people S754's under that belief and then have them find out later that they cannot upgrade because, oops, noe S754 is low-end, is dangerously misleading.
The quicker AMD puts A32's on S754, A64's on S939, and Opteron's on S940 the better we all will be. That represents a stable and long(er)-term platform structure than what we have now. The sands are shifting as AMD tries to juice their stock for all they can. This behaivour is just so blatantly short-sighted. Mark my words: S939 will not take off until the prices come down to the $200-$300 range for the chips. This is the price level (at it's highest) that consumers have been historically willing to pay for top AMD CPU's en masse. Sure, AMD will sell some between now and then at $500+ prices. But for the kind of volume AMD needs to sell to have even a hope of sustained profitability, theu have to put the price at $200-$300 (ideally 10% lower). They have the capacity to do that now, and they would sure make a lot more money selling $200 A64's than $90 AXP's (which, by the way, constitue about 90% of their sales right now). I just don't understand why they are dragging their feet on this. It makes no sense.
Price Data on S939 CPU's -
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=28&page=5