Quote Originally Posted by JF-AMD View Post
Obviously, I can't get into the specifics on this because it digs deeper into the financials than we release, but here is the long and short of it.

2P makes up ~75% of the market. 4P makes up ~4% of the market (IDC server tracker numbers).

That means that roughly ~6% of the business is 4P and if you just look at 2P and 4P for now (because the 6000 series can do both).

Here is a post that I did on the subject:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...5&postcount=36

Now, the goal with shifting the pricing on 4P was the following:

1. Actually grow the market (it needs to get bigger or go away, it was on a pretty good clip to do the latter...)
2. Drive more revenue
3. Drive more absolute profit dollars
4. Drive more market share

None of that should surprise people.

The net is, yes, ASPs will be lower, but overall, the ASPs for 2P and 4P combined went up because, surprise, when the prices are lower, the 4P people buy towards the top of the stack ($1386) not the bottom).

If you sell more processors proportionally (because the 4P eats away at 2P), you shift business to higher margins.
Yes, but how in the hell can AMD survive with lower ASPs considering that they've already got lower ASPs than Intel to begin with? how do they expect to attain profitability if they can't retain high ASP?

My view is that the crux of the issue is that AMD simply cannot provide enough value to both consumers and enterprise class customers in order to validate a higher ASP. This, to me, has been the story for AMD since Intel's core 2 rolled out. Please correct me if i'm wrong.