AMD's Athlon And The 'Taiwanese Business Model'

What do you think is the biggest problem with AMD's new X86-CPU Athlon?

Is it slower than its competitors from Intel?
No, it's actually a whole lot faster. Is AMD not able to supply product?
No, AMD's production of Athlon runs just fine. Do the people out there not care about the Athlon processor?
No, the people would love to buy it instead of an Intel CPU. So what is it?
Well, a CPU without a platform isn't any good, is it? Why is that?
Because the Taiwanese motherboard makers would rather have China invade Taiwan than getting in trouble with almighty Intel.

As of today, it's a ridiculous pain in your rear end if you try and get a motherboard for an Athlon processor. The few Taiwanese motherboard makers who had the semi-courage to actually produce an Athlon-board do not market it. This means that you won't find any information about those boards on the web or anywhere else. Asus seems to be chicken No.1, which made me lose all respect for Asus. There is a motherboard called K7M. This board is Asus' long awaited Athlon-platform. Would you get it through Asus? No, Asus does not officially sell it; you can only get it through some strange OEM-channels. The board doesn't have any brand-markings of Asus on it and if you ask Asus point blank, they will deny that this board even exists. Now what kind of philosophy is this? Asus doesn't want to come to bad terms with Intel, but they'd still like taking the money of people who want to buy Athlon. Thus they set everything up to neither hurt the relationship to Intel nor their own pockets and produce the K7M as a kind of no-name OEM-motherboard. Other motherboard-makers aren't much better, they sell Athlon-motherboards but neither inform you nor support you. At least they are honest about the brand name though.

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