It doesn't look good for AMD

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I dunno but some people may not realize this, but losing money for a quarter, or even for years, doesn't mean the company is dead or will go bankrupt right away. What is important is that they constantly take in revenue becausethat way they will still be able to get loans to cover losses. creditors will see that they are still taking in a lot of money, and they will likely determine that AMD will eventaully beable to pay debts (or any other compnay that suffers losses). many airlines have been operating at a loss of late (even before the crashes on sept 11). Sorry if i am stating the obvious, but it seems like some people are lead to believe that AMD is going down just becuase they lost money for a few quarters, but that isn't really true.

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You can not compare manufacturing to a service industry. When a manufacturer is loosing money, you look at inventory on hand and contracts pending. AMD has inventory, but CPU’s are like perishable goods. The value drops rapidly. Also, with no major OEM’s, they can’t have a lot of pending contracts. So it falls to the sales force to go out and sell units. AMD is in no danger of going under, but they would be at the mercy of a larger company who decided to buy its way into the chip business.

In the airline business, the profits are made at the leasing level. Just like the retail clothing business makes its profits at the wholesale level. One of my best performing investments is a fund that owns parking lots and airplanes. The planes are all leased to major airlines.


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Originally posted by jdm40:
Yeah, I think that Intel is using it's muscle to force companies not to list or carry competing products (AMD chips).

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Thats a nieve and silly statement. More and more major manufacturers are trimming their product lines, and dropping AMD seems like a reasonable business decision. There just aren't that many left around to advertise. For the budget systems, Intel competes at only a slightly higher price, dwarfed by the costs of Windows etc.

You should be prepared to back up such statements with facts before throwing accusations around.

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Originally posted by gaffo:

You may ahve something there. Just look at the new Duron - which is Al. It does not go over 1.2 ghz. Hope your not right though - for AMD's sake

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IIRC the 1.2 GHz Durons use the Morgan core, and may not be coming from AMD’s Austin fab at all. I think the fastest Al Athlons may top out at 1.1 GHz, but I could be mistaken about this.

BTW, I have no doubt that Intel is using similar tricks to get the PIII over 1 GHz. The difference here would be they do not have the luxury of .13 lithography equipment to work with, so they are restricted in the techniques they can use. Any technique they do use could also be used to extend their .13 process once that has matured.


AMD does still have a few tricks up their sleeve. SOI should help a lot in .13, no doubt that is why AMD has been so interested in the technology. But IIRC that isn’t going to happen until late next year about the same time Hammer is released. Still, next summer could be a bad one for AMD.

All AMD really has to do is stay within striking distance until Hammer is ready. At this point it is a whole new ball game. AMD’s future really depends on how good Hammer is. If hammer is a hit then AMD is still in the ball game. If it is a home run then they should continue to gain ground. If it strikes out then AMD is in big trouble.

On of the problems in making conclusions right now is that AMD has told us almost nothing about the details of hammers micro architecture and making predictions about its performance isn’t possible until they do. I think we may start to get some details the next two or three months, this should give us a much better feel for the whole issue.


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