Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Grand overview
Ah, the time has come at last... Intel's long-awaited Response.
So, based on IDF comments, AMD owns the high-end desktop well into 2005. I don't think anyone can say they didn't use their one-year head start in server chips about as well as it could have been done. If you compare Opteron to Athlon-MP, there's a world of difference in mindshare, buzz, OEM acceptance, etc, etc. The position that Opteron has carved out for itself is strong enough that it will not be displaced *simply* because of the existence of an Intel clone. And that is quite an accomplishment for Ruiz in just one year.
Then there's AMDs technical advantage. Given the performance and power/heat issues with the p4 architecture, it looks like AMD will be able to compete for the forseeable future. Until Intel switches to Centrino-architecture and includes an on-chip memory controller, I see AMD having a nice advantage. The current p4 is so overwrought and unimpressive (and rare) that Elmer might call it unmanufacturable. The point is that there are very good reasons for OEMs to offer the Opteron, despite the attack of the Intel clones.
On the whole, it looks pretty good for AMD. Not as good as if Intel hadn't entered the ring, but better than any alternative I can think of.
The question is how can they maintain their superior position in the future? That will be a good fight, no doubt. I only hope, though, that AMD is being very attentive to its partners and customers in the design of k9. In particular, AMD might take advantage of Intel skittishness in regards to Itanium. E.g. enterprise-class cache coherency (which is supposed to be in K9)is something that Intel would not incorporate into Xeon, ever, so long as Itanium exists. Also, I think that there are alot of possible fruits of the AMD-IBM relationship that have yet to germinate (if I have the botany right).
Has there been an official statement that Xbox2 will be PPC based? I know IBM is fabbing it, but there weren't any details on the architecture that I saw....
Semi--
It makes no sense for AMD to pour marketing dollars into India. The "emerging" (i.e. dirt poor) markets will become important for AMD once they have the manufacturing capacity to satisfy the server and high-end desktop/mobile markets in the 1st world. Unless AMD really screws up and their products become no longer competitive, then most of these markets will exist as places to lose excess inventory--notice how the chips mentioned in the article are near the bottom of AMD's product line. Remember Ruiz's "New AMD" which is supposed to target the high-end exclusively.
Things may change when the new fab ramps up, but until then it's a waste of resources AMD doesn't have to market products in India. As far as angering distributors, maybe you have a point, but money talks. I could cite some examples from Intel, but that will start up a very boring argument with some on this board.
The mature markets are exactly where AMD should be pushing the A64. The emerging markets don't have the money for high-end chips.
(This took me <2.00 seconds to think up.)
Looks like Itanium is crashing and burning, doesn't it?
At least they were nice enough to wait until the "Year of Itanium" was over.
>>the Groo rumors say that the deal broke because of AMD's inability to guarantee sufficient supply...[/]
>Desktop or Server-Deal?
Server. Then he had another rumor that Dell was just about to offer Athlon64 when Intel gave them the P4EE.
You're both agreeing that it's a demand problem, not production, i.e. Opteron demand too small to justify costs of losing Intel incentives.
That makes the most sense to me, but the Groo rumors say that the deal broke because of AMD's inability to guarantee sufficient supply...
If the HP announcement pushes Intel to release its x86-64... or at least announce it... what exactly would that do to AMD stock? Any guesses?
The Alpha guys had the right technical approach to x86 compatibility all along
Can you refresh my memory about this?
Well, as you know I am invested in AMD, so I can't be too worried about this, at least not for the near future.
However, I think the huge price drop in the average pc over the last decade has been responsible for fighting off embedded devices, thin clients, and other would-be contenders. The question is, can prices continue to fall even as the market matures? India and China are clearly not ready to absorb very many high-end processors, and that doesn't seem likely to change soon. And of course, fixed costs grow ever higher as the technology advances...
One thing you do notice is how embedded devices have taken over certain functions which used to be "killer apps" of the pc world. PDAs, Ipod, etc.
Already my laptop needs would be best satisfied by a scaled up PDA (having better battery life, less weight, no hard drive, etc.)--if such a thing existed. 95% of what I do on a computer can be adequately done on a new Clie PDA, and the rest will be soon (or can wait till I get home). With a nice keyboard and bigger screen, I'd buy it. I don't think I'm alone there, and that really does represent a change from just a few years ago.
The consumer trend toward laptops might be the first sign of a shift. If tablets really take off, then that would be a bigger one. Microsoft's energy seems to be more in other platforms than the traditional pc, even as it has given a dividend and become a low-growth stalwart.
The Post-PC Era--interview with new TI CEO
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2004/nf20040121_2570.htm
Could be that both Intel and AMD will miss the boat as traditional PC tasks move over to specialized devices...
BTW, AMD stated that the Geode was "immediately" successful. Anyone hear of any Geode wins?
So netburst ends with Tejas
Wont that make the internet go slower?
The better question is how much has AMD common appreciated in the last year vs. Intel? It has outperformed INTC by alot more than .04 cents a share...
So how do YOU feel, with Intel making billions of dollars, and you only getting to see .04$ a post--oops, I mean *share*--?
I'm amused that the Intel crowd thinks a miniscule dividend is great news, completely ignoring what that reveals about the future of the stock and the market. Of course, the flip side is that, in a mature market, AMD will have to steal its dinners from Intel, no small task.
I mean, look how much MSFT has skyrocketed since announcing its dividend.
Yes, some companies will try to weasel out of long-term supply contracts during the back end of the cycle, when supply is increasing and prices plummeting, as for instance in 2001. When the reverse is true, e.g. now, they will act differently.
As far as AMD suing its "customers"... that's true only if you would consider a shoplifter to be a "customer."
To make $1000, 25,000 shares ~ $800,000 !
Thanks, but no thanks.
Add this to the implicit admission that Intel's days as a growth stock are over. I hope Intel investors get their 4 cents a share before the P/E is adjusted to reflect this.
Should be the exact same as the WSJ (obviously)
Yeah, it's kind of silly to worry about copyright infringement when WSJ obviously does not own the copyright on AMD's conference call.
Thank you for posting it, rupert.
Anyway, I haven't read it all yet, but I see AMD is down a dollar, so it must have been good--everyone's "selling on the news" ;) If the old pattern holds, we'll see 20-25 soon.
There are probably legal reasons why he is so scrupulous about these matters. Think about it...
hope he´ll keep his mouth shut in public. For now and forever. It has been embarassing to watch.
I read that he was once left for dead in a trash can. I'm not sure why, but that seems to explain alot.
Jack Schwager - Market Wizards and Part II New Market Wizards
I second that recommendation. These books contain profiles and interviews of some of the most successful traders. Even apart from what you can learn about trading, these are fascinating people to read about. There's also a third book in the series which I haven't read, though I hear that it isn't as good. It was from the internet-bubble era, and the caliber of traders he interviewed is supposed to be lower than in the first two.
I think any reasonable, unbiased observer would--at the very least--find Sysmark's choices to be strange ones given its stated purpose of representing common real-world tasks and software setups. I can't *prove* it to a lawyer's satisfaction--it's a matter of judgment. Because of that, benchmarks like that are always going to be susceptible to similar accusations, even unreasonable and biased ones.
If Bapco is serious about measuring real-world performance (evidently not!), they would make all of their choices and rationale transparent. The choices would, furthermore, be based on publically-accessible empirical data on how real people actually are using their hardware (preferably culled recently and by a third-party). Short of that, they are of dubious merit.
Then I'd like to see some surveys of perceived performance vs. real performance. That would be very interesting! I suspect that they are only loosely correlated.
Oops! I was definitely thinking of the first few and forgot about the Cyrix one. How did Cyrix's technology stack up to Intel's at the time IBM backed them?
What's funny about your list of examples is that in each case, except #7 ;) , the technology that IBM supported was the inferior one, and yet it still grew to dominance. It kind of puts alot of the benchmark nitpicking in perspective.
It's not a matter of "kindness" at all, unless you would also say that Intel depends on the "kindness" of the engineers it has on salary. We're talking about mutually beneficial economic relationships. Certainly is AMD is a riskier play (and this is priced in) because it does not have total control over these partnerships, particularly with juggernauts like IBM. But, that is *exactly* what makes AMD attractive to companies like IBM, SUN, and MS, who want to maintain control over where the market is going (or at least not have it dictated to them by another company).
This same little-guy status does end up being a liability when it comes to the more consumer and desktop oriented OEMs, though. Dell is not as interested in shaping the market as it is in following it and subsequently undercutting everyone else. For that they need quantities, prices, and order terms that AMD has apparently not yet been able to provide. But this has been done to death on these boards...
My point is that there are real strategic advantages to being a smaller player, provided you have competitive technology which AMD clearly does.
I can't take people seriously either who waste bandwidth here about gaming benchmarks.
I seem to have forgotten. At which segment of the market was the P4EE aimed?
Was anandtech testing with the 64bit version?
Problem is, without a patent there is no ip. Anyone who reverse engineers a sample can cash in on all your R&D and there'd be nothing you could do about it. Trade secrets make more sense in production techniques than the actual product, and even there, you'd have little protection from disgruntled employees, leaks, etc.
blau, I figure it's healthy for *someone* to defend rationalism in an age of religious superstition. (eom)
I can't tell you how pathetic this sounds appearing on an AMD stock board.
Over and over again.
Just keep at it, Doug. You'll convince someone, eventually...
The "Year of Itanium" reminds me of the "Summer of George" from Seinfeld.
Buffet invests based on fundamentals.
Yeah I know, but he doesn't do it in a way that can be wholly reduced to a set of rules--not without losing much of its effectiveness. The same is true of other very successful speculators, traders, and investors, whether they use TA-type methods, fundamentals, whatever.
The slide is talking about RAMP comparisons. That strongly implies that time also increases as you move from left to right, since any decrease in volume indicates the end of the ramp, so data from that point on is probably not shown.
I'll buy that. I was hoping AMD might have inadvertantly released evidence of demand-constraint. *sigh*
Though as I think Alan pointed out, the use of volume instead of time makes the 130nm SOI line much steeper and shorter than it would otherwise be. All in all, yield improvements probably have occurred on par with the other processes, which is good news I'd say. Now, I don't know a damn thing about it, but I wouldn't think that huge volumes would make it any easier to get better yields, whereas lots of time should.
The first warning sign of Charlatanism - the practioner's
claim that his method is too complex or "artistic" to be
objectively analyzed using the scientific method.
My point is, that for all that Warren Buffett has written and for all the books that claim to teach you how to invest like him, no one has been able to match him at his game. Whatever he's done right is just not fully reduceable to a limited set of rules. Now, it is certainly possible to infer rules from what he does, but they aren't the whole story--they won't make you him.
And as far as investing goes, the proof is in the pudding. If you beat the market consistently (and legally), you are not a Charlatan. If you don't, you are. It has nothing to do with ancillary claims you make or that are made about you.
About the graph
Because the X unit is volume, it might be a mistake to read the higher volume points as having occured later in time than the lower. Not so much for Hammer* because it is in the middle of an aggressive ramp, but for the older lines. That could be true if AMD were demand constrained and thus cutting down on production during some of the "times" represented in the graph.
And the other thing is that if "mature yield" were a defined term, then AMD would not reveal it. Not necessarily because they would be embarassed but for competitive reasons.
But the Y axis is clearly labeled "yield" and not "% of mature yield," so if you read the graph literally you must conlude that SOI yields are now better than bulk. If you don't read the graph literally, then you believe AMD is lying or at least deliberately misleading.
But there is one definite conclusion everyone can draw here: AMD wants investors to believe yields are good. :)
*I wonder if they threw in data from the aborted SOI-Barton
For a good debunking have a look at "A Random Walk
Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel.
Of course, the efficient market hypothesis propounded in this book is as much a superstition as TA is. Real markets are always oscillating above and below equilibrium--without ever quite reaching it. If that weren't so, then people like George Soros and Warren Buffett would never be able to make the returns they do consistently (too much so for luck). Malkiel would just say they increase their risk, but can anyone be that lucky? To see the shifting relation between fundamentals and valuation, I'd suggest Soros' books.
Fundamentals do not give their values. Markets are always changing their mind about what they are worth, and sometimes disregard them altogether. Efficient market hypothesis does not take this into account.
That is not to say that TA gives you any insight into this. I've seen enough people, though, that are too "lucky" for me to dismiss TA altogether. I think it takes a talent for creative synthesis of lots of simultaneous factors, just following the rules will fail. Just like you couldn't reduce the style and performance of a great athlete or artists into a few simple rules.
Doug--
You think TA is a superstition. Other people don't. Get over it.
Don't drag the board into a Coke vs. Pepsi match, just accept that there are people less intelligent than you and move on.
I do not trade on TA myself; however, many people do, including almost all professional traders, hedge funds, etc. Its many practitioners make some of the basic and common TA tenets a self-fulfilling prophecy--resistance levels, trends, etc. How significant and regular that effect is can be argued (in a different forum!). Therefore, I do find a certain value in TA posts and would like to see them continue without heckling. Thanks.
From Forbes.com: Craig Barrett, is heavily promoting its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition microprocessor, though in such a way that some commentators have dubbed it "Pentium 4: Emergency Edition."
Congratulations, Keith! Your nickname has caught on.
And I have to tell you there were many days I felt foolish holding on when the stock was around $3, but I believed AMD would make a good recovery in line with the next semiconductor upturn.
I hear you there. Not so much with AMD but an electronic component stock I bought at the height of its last cycle. Still waiting for the upcycle there, though the semi upturn bodes well for it. It taught me alot about cyclical patterns. Had I not suffered through that, I probably would not have gone as strongly into AMD as I did.
I think a good strategy is buy, buy, buy when there is lots of doom and gloom on the boards as long as you believe in a recovery, and sell, sell, sell when the biggest bears give in and go bullish. So the bears do serve some purpose here. :)
There's alot of truth to this. The key is to be sure that a recovery will happen. As long as you are confident the company will still be around offering competitive products when the next cylical upswing happens, then you can safely buy cheap from the short-termers.
Blauboad, looks like you failed to buy any at $3, and you'd like to have me to thank.
Thanks for the consoling words. Actually, I did end up buying in around $7. What was your recommendation then?
RE: Centrino
Let me put it this way. Yes, the Centrino strategy has been great for Intel and I've never said otherwise. Furthermore, Intel is not a charity and has no obligation to provide choices or value to customers when those do not maximize profits.
However, would you agree that that the value proposition to the OEMs and customers would have been better had Intel marketed its components individually rather than under the all-or-nothing Centrino rubric?
If you answer yes, and I can't imagine how anyone could answer otherwise, then Intel leveraging demand for one product (P-M) to force other products that the OEMs have traditionally able to choose. Pentium-M has no advertisement and a lousy name (sounds like the chip that came after the 486) so that only tech-savvy buyers would understand that it is the best of "Centrino," a good and well-advertised name. In other words, Intel is capitalizing on consumer ignorance more than Quantispeed ever did, and it is taking choice away from the marketplace in the only segment where it has the monopoly power to do so.
By the time AMD will have a competing product, maybe 90nm k8, Intel will already have g, however, Centrino buyers will still get stuck with Intel integrated graphics. Unless Intel manages to stay on top in all technologies that comprise Centrino, then there will be an opening for AMD to compete.
How about an ultra-low power 64bit thin+light with the latest wireless protocol, nVidia graphics, bluetooth, etc.? That could be done, and would be a compelling product... and AMD would have alot of natural allies in the effort. Admittedly hypothetical at this time, but meant only to show that Intel's Centrino all-in-one strategy can be vulnerable if either AMD or Transmeta produce something comparable to P-M.