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Nice breakout.
Looks like you sell mostly low-end INTC stuff, Celerons, and a better balance of AMD stuff with the notable exception of mobile parts. I see you haven't sold any significant amount of INTC mobile stuff either. Considering the time period,4+ yrs, it looks like the P4 hasn't been a big product either. No 64-bit Pentium sales? How can that be? Didn't INTC just say they had shipped 2.5m of the beasts? Are they on back-order or are you just avoiding them? If so is it because of other problems such as mobo availability? The small number of server parts, both Xeon and Opteron/MP seems funny also. Who do you guys sell to? Thanks again.
Thanks, very interesting.
I take it the first column head is supposed to be ASP not APP?
With an ASP average of $109 AMD must be selling a whole lot of low-end machines to someone else. But you did say you mix was higher than DELL's. I would love it if your sales, both units and $s, were representative of AMD's sales in general.
What's a SMB type company? Again thanks for the effort.
Yea, I had noticed that. From the article I just posted it looks like AMD is in the process of a wholesale product realignment that will take place over the next month or so. I would expect pricing will be adjusted as part of that realignment.
AMD may have been late to the 90nm party, but they seem to have all their ducks lined up now. Like you say, we'll have to see what the reality is.
AMD clearing the decks?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20050310212502.html
Yea, that's sort of my feelings too.
Namely that T&L sales for AMD have only one way to go.
As far as real vs paper release goes we'll have to see, but H1 usually means June, so if we really do see product in a couple of weeks that would mean AMD did bring in the release date. To me it seems likely that once the E0 stepping started working a lot of things started falling into place since AMD's 64bit line is really just one basic design.
Anyway, if you sold last week you should have done well, so far. It looks like the INTC news yesterday hasn't done much of anything for either AMD or INTC. I'm still thinking AMD's price will continue to play May Pole with $17 until options expire.
Well I'm glad I'm keeping someone laughing.
What's your current position with your AMD stock? Did you sell or are you still holding any?
Any thoughts on the move up in the Truion release date or how competititve they will be with the Centrinos?
Yes, and it's a good thing. AMD has had enough problems just treading water, market share wise. It's scary to think where things would be if INTC management hadn't made one mistake after another and in particular let their technology grip slip.
I guess it's a sign of the times but wherever you look it seems like the bio-diversity of the market is being challenged. It seems like were getting, as consumers, shoved into this one size fits all straitjacket of products. It doesn't matter whether your talking merchandising, where the likes of WallMart is eating up the market or other business like say groceries, where a rapid consolidation is now taking place. Anywhere you look the emphasis is on volume at the expense of product differentiators. The thinking seems to be, if it can't be made with a cookie cutter it won't sell.
Just go into any mall in America and you will see the same stores everywhere all selling the same product from coast to coast.
This whole convergence thing with home entertainment products combining with computers is going to further ensure that there will be fewer, but bigger, players when the music stops. I'm not sure whether that is progress or not, but I suppose it's inevitable that more productivity is the reason prices will continue to fall.
There's a very big problem for humanity lurking in our pell-mell race towards technophobia and a world filled with goods but without meaning. It's hard to say how this is going to work out, but I'm sure as time goes buy this subject will get a lot more attention.
That is the $100 question isn't it? It really is a terrifying thought isn't it? I mean a world of just INTC and DELL. Well sooner or later the other OEMs will wake up, I just hope they do it sooner rather than later.
Actually, if you look for it there is a lot of resistance building to both MSFT and INTC. Once governments start getting involved as in JP and Europe public opinion will follow.
Isn't it going to be a few weeks before Turions get to the consumers? I would love to see some tests from independent sources including you. So far what I've read sounds good, but AMD is coming from way, way back in the pack. It's been so long I can't really remember when AMD had a competitive T&L product, or maybe they never did?
Interesting, so INTC has Centrino shortages.
Imagine that, and with all those fabs running flat out. Now if I were a cynical person I might say that INTC was getting ready to punish those OEMs with the temerity to actually produce T&L's with Turion chips. But nah, that couldn't happen could it? INTC wouldn't try to punish recalcitrant OEMs by claiming chip shortages would it? INTC hasn't done that sort of thing before has it? After all we have no greater expert on the inner workings of INTC, than Mr. Elmer Fudd himself, saying INTC doesn't work that way. And then to back him up there's the whole host of ex-INTC scarabs claiming the same thing on SI.
It should be real interesting to see just what kind of support the Turions get. I imagine the support will vary directly with the anger the OEMs feel towards the conniving and insidious manipulations of INTC as it tries to drive everyone else out of business. When you think about it there isn't much left for an OEM to distinguish its' INTC products from DELL's when INTC insists that the innards of a PC be all INTC. That's not a squeeze play that too many OEMs would relish given the way Dell is practically a subsidiary of INTC.
It's been pretty obvious INTC has been in panic mode for quite a while as it has shifted into high gear in an attempt to adopt AMD's technology. This from a company that spends more on toilet paper than AMD does on R&D(and INTC has been using a lot more lately). Now it's finally beginning to look like that last bastion of predictability, INTC marketing, is beginning to cave in. Keeping the slaves (OEMs) at the oars is going to be more difficult as the lash becomes less effective. No revolt among the slaves yet, but clearly a lot of them want to jump ship. Already we've seen Sun go totally AMD and Cray might as well have. Then there the "processor agnostic" HP that is finally figuring out that it will never be able to compete with DELL as long as HP is INTC only.
And that's just the big boys, imagine a mom and pop trying to compete with DELL when they have the same product to sell. Nope things are changing and lots of OEMs are going to see that having an INTC only relationship is the kiss of death. I'm pretty sure that the Japan fair trade thing going on is more a result of INTC wanting it all and the OEMs resisting than anything else. It kind of evens things up when INTC has to play on the JP OEM's turf.
Interesting how INTC just keeps opening doors for AMD. If INTC keeps making friends at the present rate AMD is going to be able to sell everything fab36 can produce. Things are going to be getting a lot tougher for INTC's sales force.
Forget that last
I just looked at the calendar and realized that tomorrow is the 2nd Friday, not the third. Time, days/weeks mean little when one is retired or sort of retired. Anyway, since the Turion news isn't moving things much we're probably in for more of the same low-volume stuff next week, circling around $17.
What's with AMD's price?
Just my humble opinion, but since about the 1st of March AMD has consistently gone up less on up-days and down more on down-days, all on low volume. Best guess is that this is options related and has virtually nothing to do with AMD fundamentals.
I've been following the inter-day movements and the price fluctuations seem to be caused about 1/3 by movements in the SOXX and the rest by unknown forces. Whatever the case the guys wanting to move AMD's price down have had a relatively easy time of it as the big boys that could have stopped it have been noticeably absent. As usual, the little guys have been getting beaten up.
Anyway, tomorrow may possibly be an up day since the option effects will have reached a zenith with max pain circling around $17. If the big boys do like AMD fundamentals and think the stock is going up, tomorrow may be a good time for them to be buying since there should be quite a lot of support around $17.
Hopefully, the big boys have been lurking around just waiting for this to occur. In any case if tomorrow is strong it will probably carry over into next week baring macro economic effects.
It works for me. Bias is a matter of how your bent.
Well let's see
INTC has followed AMD to AMD64, is now adopting AMD's onboard memory controller (CIS), is going dual processor after AMD, is now getting 64bit religion for X86 (something they said wasn't needed until the end of the decade), INTC is following AMD's "Cool and quite". These are just a few of the things off the top of my head. In fact INTC seems to be following where AMD leads just about everywhere. Still they won't have a Notebook that runs 64bit programs for another year or so, their proposed dual processors are Frankenstein monsters, their servers don't scale, they're a couple of equivalent speed grades behind AMD in desktops and in general, outside of 32bit notebooks, their dogs just don't hunt.
As far as fires goes INTC still seems bent on controlling markets the same way it tired to do with Rambus memory. Nothing has changed except that things aren't working out any better than they did with Rambus. Perhaps the best example of this is the Itanium, which was INTC's most blatant attempt at controlling the server markets. Unfortunately acceptance has been on the tepid side. It seems like people, for some reason, are resisting having to rewrite all their code and pay more for the privilege of using dated technology (RISC) that has seen its' day come and go.
Don't worry INTC isn't going to crash and burn tomorrow, but longer term it does look like INTC's better days are in the past. I'm not just talking product here. The most challenging thing for INTC will be as keeping their customers in line as AMD increases capacity and continues to produce better products for less money. Not a pretty picture, but probably not all that bad for INTC either as market growth will probably continue to let INTC grow, just not as fast as AMD.
The point is that AMD has complete control over the rate of installation of equipment and the move to 90nm/65nm/45nm in fab35.
As I remember it, when fab30 was being built all the talk was about increased height to handle the conveyors etc. The new machines may be larger, but I'm not sure about footprints.
If INTC can convert their Arizona facility to 65nm(Chandler?)then AMD certainly should be able to convert fab 30 since the requirements of 300mm were well known when fab 30 was built. The problem was that 300 mm was just a little too cutting edge (6 months or a year) at the time or fab30 would have been 300mm.
With the 2 fabs on 300mm and 90nm/65nm/45nm, capacity problems will be a thing of the past. Having redundant capacity will probably turn out to be the biggest thing in getting more commitment from OEMs.
I'm still expecting big things from the embedded processors, but the capacity to produce those items still seems to be up in the air although it looks like AMD could be working with UMC or Chartered or both?
Yea, I agree about Dell, but that is just another symptom of the problem. Prima facie, given the all encompassing nature of the Opteron with it's unique scalability features, 32 bit to 64 bit pathway, its' X86 instruction set and ability to run 32 bit X86 programs at least as well as 32 bit machines, with its' future proofing, with its' lower electricity and floor space costs, with its' lower initial price, with its' lower licensing fees, not to mention technical things like lower latency etc. etc., it really is hard to understand how such a machine couldn't compete better with the antiquated and poorly positioned INTC offerings.
The only thing that makes sense is that the playing field isn't level. In fact I bet it's tilted at 45 degrees or more. When a company has 90% of the market it's relatively easy for that company to put the screws to its' customers to keep them in line. For a lot of companies going against INTC effectively means going AMD, a very big life threatening decision for those so bold. To my way of thinking this is the major reason AMD has to have a lot of excess capacity. OEMs thinking about switching to AMD or reducing their INTC dependence need to be assured that AMD will be able to meet their needs.
Anyway, we still have MSFT's 64bit OS to look forward to next month. I'm still thinking this will create a lot of demand, especially when INTC's offerings are put under the scrutiny of comparison.
All in all I'm quite pleased with the way things are going. I tend to look at things from 1000 feet so my view is different from the day to day view the boards tend to represent. I'm particularly pleased with the embedded initiatives, but still concerned with flash.
Yea; but could you imagine what the landscape would have been like if INTC had come out with 64 bit processors before AMD did. What if INTC instead of dumping all that money into Itanium and splitting the server market in two parts, neither of which it could serve well, had come out with a scalable X86 compatible processor with something like HT that was backwards compatible.
I doubt any of us would be holding any AMD stock, I sure wouldn't. At best AMD would be on life support. In fact I kept waiting for INTC to do just that. It was only after Yamhill proved to be a no show that I finally began to believe AMD had a fighting chance. I still can't get over the incredible stupidity of INTC putting all its' eggs in the Itanium basket. And chipguy, please don't waste you time trying to convince me otherwise. Otellini only changed his mind about producing 64 bit X86 processors when it became obvious AMD had a hit. Up to that time the plan was to keep Xeon 32 bit and have Itanium be the 64bit flag ship.
smooth20
Back then INTC wasn't as much of a monopoly as they are today. But the main difference between then and now is that they had the best product then. Today, all INTC management can do is fight fires they started and follow AMD around like some lost puppy. INTC today is not the company it was back in 1998, no where near the company of the truth telling Grove that was able to make lemonade from lemons when the memory business soured and devised the "Intel Inside" logo.
smooth20
I think you have to understand where I'm coming from. Up until 1998 I was a very big INTC stockholder and did very, very, well with the stock. It wasn't until INTC started in on deworsification and began ignoring its' core processor business that I started looking seriously at AMD. From that point I'm more distressed at what current management has done to a once great company than anything. Once INTC became a marketing machine rather than a technology innovator the handwriting was on the wall.
There are three things that particularly gall me about the current INTC. They didn't finish off AMD when they had the chance. They have become an AMD technology follower, and as times have gotten harder they have resorted more and more to questionable/illegal marketing practices.
Make no mistake; what we're hearing about now is just the proverbial "tip of the iceberg". There's much more hidden below than what we've seen so far.
For most of the world INTC and MSFT are American monopolies that represent the very worst evils of large business. Both are going to be hammered and sawed at by every country outside of the U.S. until they are significantly reduced in importance. Who knows someday we may see contracts specifically excluding INTC replacing the INTC only contracts INTC marketing managed to get so many European countries to adopt. In any case the landscape has/is changing markedly and it's going to be a much different game for both INTC and AMD.
chipguy
I see you ascribe to the same Goebbels thinking that Fudd does, namely that if you say something often enough, no matter how ridiculous, eventually people will believe it. That may have worked in 1940's Germany when the Nazis controlled all the media, but is a much harder sell today with so much information readily contradicting the "INTC big lie".
INTC is a whore.
I’ve said it on this board many times in the last few years, but it’s nice to see more proof of the odious marketing practices INTC uses now coming to light. It’s been obvious to anyone with half a brain that AMD and INTC were not playing on a level field given the superior technology/product that AMD has introduced in the last few years. For AMD to only have 6% of the server market 2 years after the introduction of Opteron, with its’ many advantages, can only be the product of INTC’s money and corrosive marketing practices.
As is usually the case with these things the surfacing of INTC’s illegalities is being preceded by the reality of the market. With SUN going totally AMD and HP becoming “processor agnostic” it’s becoming much more difficult for other processor users, even DELL, to ignore AMD. What’s happening now is just a reflection of reality. INTC has, in many areas, lost the performance lead but still is charging higher prices that are now causing end customers, not OEMs, to look more closely at what AMD is offering.
INTC had its’ chance to get rid of AMD a few years ago, but due to management incompetence completely blew the opportunity. Instead INTC allowed AMD to introduce AMD64 and get a multi year product lead. Now, with its’ last bastion, marketing, under fire we may be finally seeing the crumbling of the INTC monopoly. At least we can hope so.
Doesn't look like the buying is done yet.
Look at the pattern, same as yesterday, they only raise the price after they have sucked out every share from the sellers at a particular price point. These guys buying are pros.
They set a price point and then stop buying luring in the sellers at a lower price until they get all the shares that are available in the range, then they raise the price again.
All this flash talk is beginning to sound a lot like the DELL speculations. There are a lot more parallels than one might expect for both situations. For one thing companies don't turn on a dime, it takes quite a while for a particular mindset to get changed and that period is in relation to how long a strategy has been in place. Second who would want to buy Spansion? Certainly not Toshiba or Samsung, and while the other NOR makers would love to see AMD take a big hit and get out of the business, none of them would be interested in Spansions flash business. Third, AMD's management is very far from throwing in the flash towel. Management's pronouncements seem to indicate that they still feel they can compete in flash and until that is proven false there will be little reason to give up on flash.
Getting back to yesterdays price rise. If the flash sale speculation was not the reason then we're back to guessing as to what the reason was. The only thing that has changed recently has been the new products being sold by HP. Since the really good money managers have more tentacles than a comb jelly one would suspect that they would know whether sales/orders are taking off at HP. Any way that remains my best guess until proven otherwise. Another strong up day would go a long way towards verifying those assumptions.
These are big boys moving the stock today. Best guess is that it has to do with HP sales of new AMD server offerings. It will be interesting to see who gets the credit if HP has a great quarter. Carly's biggest mistake may have been not going with AMD sooner.
Considering the cost to upgrade to a dual processor, all the Opteron sales today would seem to be excellent candidates for processor replacement startinq a few months after initial demand for the duals starts to taper off. Seems to be a locked in upgrade market for todays sales. Of course the down-side is that buyers may be buying fewer servers than they have in the past given the upgrade path(ala Yahoo). Still AMD finally getting a decent number of SKU's at HP/SUN is exactly what AMD has needed to get things going. Once started Opteron server sales could snowball quickly. Opteron sales successes can be a big thing in getting customers to switch.
In any case there should be a lot more 4 way Opteron servers sold now that there is a viable/scalable path to greater performance. TCO has to be a bigger part of the consideration as the processors themselves continue to get cheeper. Floor space, and electricity not cheap. Not to mention reduced/easier maintenance on a bigger machine.
PathScale compilers
http://www.pathscale.com/pr_021505.html
Sun tested 2-way Sun Fire V20z and 4-way Sun Fire V40z servers using multiple SPEC benchmarks, including the SPEC® ompM2001 suite of OpenMP® benchmarks. The PathScale EKOPath Compiler Suite helped Sun's AMD® Opteron® processor-based servers set world records for SPEC ompM2001 on two-processor and four-processor systems. The Sun/PathScale two-processor results were 29 percent faster (footnote 1) than previous-best Linux ompM2001 benchmarks using non-PathScale Fortran and C compilers. This 29 percent advantage, enabled in large part by PathScale compilers, far exceeds the eight percent faster clock rate of the newer Sun systems. The Sun/PathScale four-processor SPEC ompM2001 result surpasses the best four-processor benchmarks on Intel Itanium 2, Power5 and Alpha processors as well as previous SPEC results on four-processor Opteron systems.
In addition, using the SPEC® CPU2000 benchmark, the Sun Fire V40z server equipped with the PathScale EKOPath Compiler Suite achieved two new world records for 4-way x86 systems on integer and floating point performance (footnote 2). The V20z server achieved a new x86 world record score on floating point intensive SPECfp2000 performance, as well as the best 2-way x86 result on floating point performance. The PathScale-optimized Sun servers showed improved scalability and higher performance for both floating point and integer performance, with up to 25 percent improvement when compared with previous benchmarks.
http://press.arrivenet.com/tec/article.php/589723.html
Thanks to Saxman
Has anything changed besides Turion announcement? This is a here and now thing. What I haven't been to figure out is why AMD hasn't been able to get a step into the mobile market. It doesn't seem like the Athlons and Semprons are that far from the Centrinos. Is it just a marketing thing or are Centrinos that much better? Considering the Centrino premium you would expect a market for AMD's mobile chips.
Ornand from Yahoo
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=4687810&tid=amd&sid=4687...
ME...
AMD and M-system were very tight a few years ago. I don't know how this would affect M-Systems relationship with Toshiba(2nd top flash producer). MDOC would seem an ideal candidate for ORNAND. This report seems to jive pretty well with what I've read.
Mobile roadmap
http://www.behardware.com/news/7209/AMD-Turion-64.html
from the horn blower
Me... I can't believe 1 guy can find so many things. Kind of like one stop shopping.
with two 1.6 GHz cores and a TDP of 30W
Is that a misprint? Pretty amazing if it's true.
OT
They're a couple of new posters on SI, blind-geezer and Jane jane jane. Jane in particular, sounds like is a hoot, kind of a throw back to my 60's hippie days. Both of them bring a fresh breeze to what is generally a stodgy board. Talk about fish out of water, they're trying to compete with a bunch of left-brained engineers whose concept of fun is taking a PC apart. It's almost as if the board doesn't quite know how to react to the new faces. It's not so much that the usual SI/Hub posters don't know laugh, as it never occurs to them to do so.
I find in general the people that post on this board and SI are more like Southern Baptist ministers where you either believe in the old testament as written or your a heretic. I would say lighten up, but in reality it's all in the genes compounded by a social system that gives boys erector sets/Lego’s as their first toys.
Mind you I'm not pointing fingers, just commenting on what I see. People are for the most part, what they are and nothing will change them once the mold has set. These boards provide what a social club would have in the past, namely a meeting place where people with similar interests can congregate.
You may be right, but why would INTC want to take a hit they didn't have to? You're talking funny money, arbitrary decisions. Why not let the acquisition costs ride indefinitely? Why take them now?
INTC earnings
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=580&e=1&u=/nm/20050111/bs_nm/tech_intel_...
Earnings in the fourth quarter that ended Dec. 25 fell to $2.1 billion, or 33 cents a share, compared to a year-earlier profit of $2.2 billion, or 33 cents a share. Sales rose to $9.6 billion from a previous record of $8.74 billion.
Me...
Sales were up but profits down. Any ideas? INTC margins are dropping. Wonder how much AMD high-end sales had to do with this? This with just 10% or less of the server market. It's hard to draw any conclusions, but the margins went somewhere and I don't think INTC ASP's dropped that much. I'm really wondering how bad flash was for AMD?
Pathscale ships compilers
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=4687810&tid=amd&sid=4687...
Da Saxman
it's hard to say how good/bad the CPG group did withoug knowing how badly the memory group did. Your right flash is going to be less important to earnings going forward. It could help a lot, but the downside is probably more limited. How much more can INTC lower prices? I guess that's the question.
yeah, I haven't been too thrilled at the soporific way AMD has move to 90nm. I'm just guessing, but it does seem like AMD got into a period where process changes were coming fast and furious. Perhaps they didn't want to commit to a stepping process until they felt they had employed most of the process advantages. Anyway, it seems until recently that the shortage of mobos was the problem, maybe we'll hear more about that in the CC?
I was hoping the memory group would break even, so much for wishes.
I'm glad you made money. Yes, AMD was a little late in its' warning. If I had sold every time AMD got ridiculously expensive and bought every time it got ridiculously cheap I would own the company.
I don't know how familiar you are with my views, but I think AMD will do very well in 05, not withstanding flash. Flash is obviously the problem. If the flash loss is due to competitive pricing alone then either INTC is able to sell flash for less than AMD or something else is going. Right now I'm in the something else is going on group, but I'm hoping for a glimmer of information out of the CC.
Mani sold all his shares at just below $25. I sold some the next day but bought them back way too soon.
Yamhill seemed liked a halfhearted response with no real INTC backing. INTC seemed committed to Itanium and that was going to be their 64 bit answer. It looked like the intro of AMD64 really caught INTC flat footed with no response because INTC didn’t expect 64 bit to go mainstream as fast as it did.
Given the pathetic disarray AMD was in with the pony manufacturing problems and the success of the P4 it seems likely that had INTC come out with a 64bit X86 before the k8 these discussions wouldn't be taking place. I kept waiting for INTC to deliver the coup de gras. For awhile I thought Yamhill was going to be the answer. But as time went on though it became apparent INTC really didn't have a fall back position having committed irrevocably to Itanium in the name of a proprietary architecture. Strange that all INTC had to do was come out with a decent X86-64 product and they would have gotten rid of the runt for good, but that's life.
Only with the intro of AMD64 did INTC finally start to scramble and devote resources to creating a competitor to a product that was way too good to ignore.
Well this a first, AMD trading more shares than INTC, also a new high in trading volume. The stock seems to have significant support below $16, hope it holds. I wonder how much of the selling is due to a feeling of misplaced trust rather than the actual flash situitation?
Thanks for the reference. This is the document I remember reading. I've got it book-marked now. I was sure I had read that mirrored-bit had the same number of erase cycles as floating gate, 100k initially. I seem to remember AMD saying they had gotten to the 1M level talked about, but I'm not sure?
One thing I did notice is that the testing was done at the 230nm level so I guess the document is somewhat dated. It's possible that problems were encountered as the die shrank but I don't remember hearing anything about that. As far as I know mirrored bit is now being produced at 110nm, but I'll check.
Anyway, if there really aren't any mirrored bit problems, is the slow uptake due to a long design cycle? More importantly, how much of the flash problems are related to INTC pricing?
I would feel much better if the problems were pricing related rather than product related. If mirrored bit does have a 20 to 30% cost advantage over strata flash then a long term scorched earth pricing policy doesn't seem to make much sense. Boy would I like to know how INTC accounts for flash.
While I do some trading I'm basically a long. I pick companies and stay with them until I find something better. Believe it or not I'm still way ahead of say the S&P despite AMD's up and downs. Your right though there should be something of a panic sell off at the open. Considering the action in the stock the last couple of weeks it looks like someone had an idea about the problems we're hearing about now.
This stock is/has been so volatile that one could have made many a fortune in it by betting either with or against it at the appropriate times.
Right now we don't know how severe the damage is, but going forward flash is going to represent much less of AMD's business which kind of limits the down side effects. I'm going to wait for more information before going off half-cocked. Trouble is that these sort of problems don't age well.
Thanks for the information.