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.
I couldn't find anything more recent, but this seems to have the relevant standards data.
http://www.eetimes.com/in_focus/communications/OEG20031231S0011
For sure, security is probably the number one issue with wireless. Heck, I've got high-speed cable and I still don't buy things on the Internet out of fear of someone getting my credit card numbers. I'm probably just a little paranoid, but identity theft is a huge problem, particularly here in CA.
Well, I haven't been following it too much lately, but the big difference is as I remember it is 100mb/sec speed that required changes to the internet protocol(MAC I think) and a larger coverage area than the other 802.11 standards.
I'll go Google it. If I find out more I'll post.
This is the first time we've talked, although I've been reading your postings on Yahoo for quite awhile. Your handle seems to say it all, though I've been known to kick up a ruckus occasionally.
As to your point about Opterons, you’re singing to the choir. Few on this board thought Opteron was aimed at Itanium, at least initially. In a couple of years from now when commodity AMD64 multi processor chips start getting put into boxes in large numbers things could get interesting.
Hopefully the death of Itaium will be a very long-drawn-out and painful affair for INTC
Not me, but I bet someone can. Yes, product controll is definitely a lot harder when you don't have complete control. On the other hand, as I remember it Nvidia had a lot of problems with the Nforce chips initally, but they eventually became the gold standard.
I've been reading about 802.11n for some time. The good news is the backwards compatability, but I doubt very seriously that this will be the last standard. That backwards compatability has to be carrying some baggage with it. But 802.11a/b/g will be around for a long time. The increased speed/coverage of 802.11n should also help.
Some of the carriers are already planning/adding 802.11xx capabilities to cell phones. It never ends.
It's notable that the Centrino is one of the few things INTC can point to as a success lately. However, it's not perfect. One of the things I don't like is the integrated wireless, at least at this early date of standards definition. Integrating wireless functionality rather than putting it on a separate chip seems to risk advanced obsolescence.
There certainly are advantages and disadvantages to keeping everything in house as you listed. One of the disadvantages is that you can get into the NIH (not invented here) mode that INTC is so famous for. It's hard to say whether that sort of thinking has led to the current chipset PCI Express problems.
The reason AMD didn't go this route is that they never had the money, so they had to come up with another model. It certainly hasn't hurt AMD having Nvidia making chipsets, and now with ATI coming on board, AMD has/will have some of the best chipsets available, and the best graphics, Integrated and not, to boot. Still AMD has to rely on its' partners a lot more than INTC does. Having a processor ready and the chipset not has already caused AMD problems.
You can say that the platforms are just marketing categories, but the divisions seem very logical and certainly cover what will be separate markets. To me it sounds like a good idea, but then we'll have to see just how well it works in real life. If platforms are the direction INTC is headed for, I wonder how it will affect the structure of the company?
Otellini definitely has his work cut out for him. As far as I can tell the conditions that led to INTC's inability to come up with new profitable products since the 90's, despite spending billions, are still in place. And the product evaluation process that dismissed X80 for Itanium/EPIC hasn't changed as far as I can tell. And then there's all the proprietary nonsence to overcome.
Hard decisions need to be made at INTC, and I'm not sure an insider is going to be able to make them.
I'm not as sure INTC is all that invulnerable, but I certainly don't expect AMD to gain more than a couple of points of market share per quarter for lots of reasons already talked about over and over.
However, I'm beginning to believe that flash could be a larger part of AMD than processors in a couple of years. In particular the "Personal Communicator" market seems ready to adopt a whole range of new features that will increase the flash requirements greatly. INTC not having a quad bit option and Mirrored bit seeming to have a lot of cost advantages over Starta flash will probably preclude INTC from these markets. The real flash battle for AMD is probably going to be with Toshiba, and Samsung. To that end the recently announced ORNAND will be key to AMD's continued success. AMD seems to be splitting its limited resources with similar bets being made on flash and processors.
In any case AMD has two distinct product lines either of which could be home runs. Together, they continue to make AMD look very appealing as an investment
changing markets
LONDON — By 2008 the market for semiconductors in China will be the largest in the world at about $50 billion, according to Otto Kosgalwies, corporate vice president of infrastructure and services at STMicroelectronics.
http://www.eetimes.com/semi/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=52601590
I like the way INTC is specializing on platforms.
Increasingly, all of our design activities are aimed what I call platforms, that are focused on what I think are the major growth opportunities for semiconductors, or at least our flavor of semiconductors. There are four of them. One is in mobile computing. We're doing similar designs for the digital home where we want the PC to be the centerpiece of the home for consumption, archiving, and display of information and entertainment.
A similar one in enterprise is to improve the economics of being a chief information officer. We can embed better features for security or manageability or productivity in terms of down-the-wire upgrades into our platforms. The fourth is in handhelds. This one is a bit farther away than the other ones. It requires some discontinuities in technology to happen.
Me...
This sounds like a very rational way of looking at things. These platforms are all very different from each other and need to be looked at individually. Maybe INTC is finally getting its act together again? This sort of thinking is fundamental to everything else.
I still think he's wrong about the Itanium and "big Iron", that's a dying market that will just soak up resources while it lingers on.
In the previous post I meant chaff not chafe which is what INTC does to me.
Jules you’re not alone. Probably most of the people that read this board are investors and not techs. Personally, I could care less about things like over clocking; I'm here to make money.
That doesn't mean we can't be informed. When I'm ill I go to the doctor and if I'm really ill I get more than one opinion. Then I make up my own mind what to do. It's the same with this board and others except that the advice costs a lot less and you know the value of free advice. Where you and I and others add value is in our ability to separate the wheat from the chafe, and there's a lot of chafe on these boards.
Like you I'm a generalist. That means I don't want to get bogged down in details. In fact I find paying too much attention to details is counter productive and often sends one off in the wrong direction when the correct answer is staring you in the face. For me the way INTC now recognizes AMD says more about how the relationship has changed than volumes of tech manuals. After all it wasn't that long ago that INTC would never mention AMD, nose stuck in the air preferring to disdain the fray, and the analysts went along with the show. Well lately AMD has been rubbing INTC's nose in the mud and INTC now, along with the analysts, are talking about AMD as if it is more of an equal/threat. Little things like that speak volumes.
Not that details aren't important, but frankly it's been 6+ years since I started switching out of INTC into AMD and AMD is only now becoming the company I thought it could become. Things just don't happen at light speed. We've had plenty of warning that things were changing over the last couple of years. The only thing in doubt was the timing and when the market would wake up to the changes going on. AMD still has a ways to go, but things have never looked better.
That is a big problem. Well if it's any consolation the stuff you guys sell us is starting to cost more, so in a way it's a 2 way street.
It looks like I'll be going on another bicycle ride through northern Italy and Germany in May. The last time I was in Italy the rate was very favorable. I expect sticker shock this time.
Are we getting greedy? It wasn't that long ago we were worried that AMD would fall below $10. Even with the weak $ you should have done very well.
I certainly hope so.
Your guess is as good as mine. Right now AMD capacity seems to be increasing, but then capacity is rather a nebulous issue.
When we talk about capacity most of us think of the 50M figure that has surfaced lately. But just what does that figure mean? It surely doesn't mean 50M dual processors. While AMD may be capable of 50M units at some point, I suspect that point is a ways down the road.
In talking about capacity first there are the obvious things like bin splits and yields, but once you get past those hurdles there are other things like figuring out which chips to produce this quarter that will be sold in the next quarter.
Then there's the matter of covering all your bases so that INTC doesn't have a market all to itself like it has had with the T&l's currently. And what about the desire to expand into new markets such as AMD's push into the laptop and T&L markets and what that means to the availability of other chips?
66% more units sounds like a lot from 90nm, but the reality is something else. Still, if AMD is able to produce and sell anywhere near that extra 5M chips per q in late 05 it's going to do wonders for margins/profitability and EPS.
In INTC's case the capacity thing is kind of a red herring. Exactly what benefit is INTC going to get from going to 65nm when they can already suply the worlds demand a couple of times over at 90nm? To me 65nm just means that more INTC fabs are going to have more idle time.
I would tend to agree that Itanium will be around longer than most think, but as far as lifetimes go AMD64 will be around long after the last Itanic has hit its' berg. It's just my opinion, but I've stated a number of times that FSB's and big iron are going the way of the dodo replaced by PTP connects of multi processors chips with very fast switches connecting large arrays together. Unfortunately, for the sake of this discussion that's something that can only be confirmed with the passage of time.
As far as introducing new products goes, AMD seems to be running circles around INTC which seems to be panting very hard just trying to keep from falling further back. And this with an R&D budget some 5 times greater than AMD's.
Undoubtedly INTC still has a lot of advantages, but I have a very difficult time seeing INTC recovering market share/revenue momentum any time soon.
Not surprisinfly, I'll amen that also.
There's been a continuous discussion about this on both the SI and IHUB boards for some time. At times it has seemed like AMD was demand constrained, but the sales figures last q seem to belie that. One thing to remember is that 90nm is just now coming online and if the figures being batted around about production increasing from 30M to 50M units a year is true then AMD has some room to lower prices temporarily.
Personally, I'm still of the opinion that by q3 of next year the extra capacity will have been allocated and AMD will be up against the wall. With APM not being installed in Chartered until q4 of this year I don't see how they can help before H205 at the earliest, and more likely h106 even if there is a big push. H205 still looks like crunch time to me.
Last I read the estimate was for 5% processor growth next year. Hector did say 10% and that AMD would exceed that next year. Also Hector mentioned in the analysts CC that he was expecting a big jump in business sales based on 64 bit and hardware virus protection.
Right now I don't have a clue, but I expect AMD to do better than INTC. INTC could do well also depending on market strength. The stronger the demand the better INTC will do.
I used to keep a weekly spread sheet on pricewatch prices. From that I tried to estimate q sales and ASP's. It turned out to be an exercise in futility, that I finally stopped.
Thanks, really lays it out clearly.
You obviously misunderstood what I posted. I tend to agree that 50% of the market in a couple of years isn't reasonable, mainly because I doubt that the INTC/DELL relationship will have broken down, in a meaningful way by then. But it's worth considering that most of the growth in PC demand for the next few years will occur in the developing world where the DELLs and HPs hold much less sway and where AMD is making lots of inroads with the local suppliers. Further, whether you like it or not the AMD64 world is going to continue to expand. All in all 2 or 3% market share gain per quarter for awhile doesn't seem impossible, and that's not even talking about Spansion where growth should be even better.
As far as Rollins goes, you should go back and review what has been said. The latest statement was just the last in what has clearly been a softening of Dells attitude towards AMD over the last couple of years. Personally, despite denials, I think DELL is hearing from a lot of customers asking for AMD64 products, in particular Opterons, and Rollin's comments are just a confirmation of a growing concern at DELL.
Your comments about AMD capacity issues being the biggest roadblock to AMD's gaining market share are probably right on, but it seems like Hector has a plan to eliminate those objections.
Anyway, for at least the next year INTC has pretty much given AMD carte blanche to do what it wants with the limited capacity it has. Still going from 30M processors to 50M a year would dramatically alter the landscape, and that's just the output from fab30. AMD has a golden opportunity. The question is whether they can drive the truck through the marketing chasm INTC has provided.
Polarization, or how I learned to love my bipolar analyst.
Things are really getting ancy. It's been quite a while since I saw a stock with such differing views. Since April 19th there have been 3 upgrades followed by 3 downgrades followed by 2 upgrades and an initial buy, this according to Yahoo. Currently there are 4 strong buys, 7 buys, 12 holds, 4 sells and 3 strong sells. Talk about a confused bunch of analysts. On top of this as of 8/8/04 there were about 65M shares shorted and volume has been going balistic.
Not too surprising to most of us who have been following AMD, but clearly Wall Street is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that things aren't what they used to be.
Apparently INTC has finally gone a mistake too far. Further it looks like Hector has been listening to Jerry and is getting ready to go for INTC's jugular. Still, I find it hard to believe that INTC could fall so far and as fast as to let AMD have 50% of the market in a couple of years. Further, doing so without DELL signing on in a big way would seem impossible, but who knows?
Speaking of DELL, we've been seeing an almost constant stream of articles from the pres of DELL saying nice things about AMD. Hard to imagine why he would be doing so without some sort of agreement already worked out. After all no one says good things about their enemies unless the enemy is about to become a friend. Maybe all this posturing is an attempt at keeping customers that have threatened to bolt because they can't get their Opterons from Dell?
Right now things seem so confused that the only thing I would bet on is lots of volatility. AMD may have a beta of 4 by the time this is finally decided. For those nimble enough there should be some good eats out there.
capacity issues; this makes more sense:
From your post:
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2004/11/15/1115automarketscan05.html?partner=yahoo&referrer=
AMD plans to increase its capacity by about 50% from 35 million processor units to 50 million in 2005 by shrinking to 90nm, enough to grow industry unit share from 18% in 2004 to 25% in 2005," it said. "In 2006, we project AMD’s 300mm capacity ramp of 13,000 300mm wafers plus about 5,000 300mm wafers from Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (nasdaq: CHRT - news - people ) will easily give it enough capacity to produce about 120 million units, over 50% of the industry's processor capacity."
Me...
It sounds like what Hector really said was that AMD would be increasing capacity to 50M units per year just from fab30 at 90nm. This makes a lot more sense that wbmw's claim that the 50M unit figure included fab36 output. Lordy, can you imagine what INTC's capacity must be? Looks like Hector plans to take AMD to the moon Alice.
This is non-technical bob, but for those of us not technically inclined isn't the Pathscale announcement of last week an indication that cheap fast switches are going to be commodities? ASICS (Application specific integrated chips) such as Cray's seem to be first cut solutions. More general answers to the problems of hooking together large arrays of processors are undoubtedly going to appear sooner rather than later.
Nice, lots of sharks out there.
Well, the specialist is responsible for making a market for the stock he/she is handling. Now that can cover a lot of ground. The big boys are also out there trying to get/sell shares at the best price. There are a number of situations that could work, but say there is a buyer that wants a lot of shares lower than the current price and the market is currently rather slow. Also assume there are a significant amount of shares at various prices out there waiting to be sold through stop losses. Without a lot of buyers the specialist can offer his shares driving the price lower and take out the stop losses rather quickly at which time he then starts buying for the large account and recovers his own shares. The sudden drop also seems to bring out more sellers (day traders?).
The effect is that the stops get taken out, the buyer gets some or all of his shares, the specialist recovers his shares at a lower price and the price returns to where it was before.
I don't know how legal/ethical such actions are, but they seem to fall under the purview of the specialist’s job to create a market. Having watched the market for many years I've seen what appears to be the above scenario happen many, many times. If you’re following the market Monday you may see it happen again.
Thanks, that's pretty much the impression I've gotten over the years reading these tests. Namely, that these tests can be concocted to show whatever the tester wants.
I wonder how much testing most corporations do, before purchasing, so that they know how beneficial a machine will be for their particular applications. As a corollary, I wonder how many just call up Dell/Hp and say I need something faster?
As I've said many times I'm about as non-technical as anyone, but in lay-man terms if you have a cache large enough to hold a complete data base then that would seem to preclude having to do I/O which is the big bottleneck in FSB's.
Of course one has to wonder just how many applications fit exactly into the Itanium cache. It doesn't sound like a very general solution, but then we've seen lots of tests fabricated that can show about any result wanted.
It seems like low-latency data access would be a better and more general solution, especially for databases that exceed Itaniums cache size. Aren't mega databases supposed to be Itanium's forte?
Your not alone, I've got the same problems. Personally, I'm looking for a sell-off at the open followed by more buying interest than selling as the day progresses.
What's really got me worried is that while AMD is probably going to have a good quarter I'm not sure, with this run-up, that all the new holders of AMD will be satisfied with the EPS. As I've said a couple of times recently, EPS is a trailing indicator, both up and down. When AMD's EPS finally takes off it will just be verification that all the prerequisites have been checked off.
In the meantime "Promise less deliver more" is still in place. It could make for some interesting trading situations.
It's not just the big boy playing the "wipe out the stops" game, the specialist is playing the game too. You dangle that big cherry in front of those guys and they're going to take a byte out of it.
Hey we get miss-quotes and misunderstandings all the time from the authors of articles. Prima facie this doesn't make sense. Even if Hector was talking about phase 1 that still doesn't make sense. Let's give it some time for the dust to settle. I'm sure the Register/Inquirer will have something about capacity at some point. Mike is probably sniffing around right now.
Going to 300mm and 65nm and getting only 20M more processors just doesn't make any sense even with larger dies. They're not going to be making that many dual processors, at least at first. Even then, dual processors at 65nm should only occupy about the same space as single processors at 90nm and then there are the wafer space saving issues due to better usage of the wafer space (less proportionate loss around the edges). If the production problems are related to 65nm, then AMD should come up under 90nm and keep working on the process at Fishkill.
The trouble with these articles is that they invariably contain some truths, like AMD producing 7.5M chips per q in fab30 now. That tends to lend credence to the statement that AMD will only get to 12.5M per q with fab36, but if you think about it that part doesn't even begin to pass the reasonableness test.
Yes, those were the “Perils of Pauline” days when the possibly that AMD might not survive look very real. AMD has certainly come a long ways in a relatively short period of time.
Sorry, but I couldn't understand what your getting at.
PIC is one of those deals that clearly differentiates one management with vision from another with blinders. There's a reason INTC wouldn't never consider such a thing, until pushed. This mainly has to do with it not fitting in with INTC's master plan nor reaching INTC's margin requirements. Such short sightedness is the result of a rigid structure that fails to see any possiblities outside of the obvious.
The nice thing about PIC is that it costs almost nothing to do and has the possibility of a huge payback in a number of areas. Besides the obvious attraction of gaining new customers that will likely look favorably towards AMD products in the future, it also creates a market for extremely low powered processors.
To me this is one area that AMD needs to be placing more emphasis on. Alchemy was a first attempt in this area that seems to have largely failed. But with "X86 everywhere" and the emphasis on sub 5 watt processors AMD has shown that it is now getting more committed to the market.
It's not too difficult to envision where this could lead, everywhere from personal communicator processors to black boxes, to HDTV chips etc., etc. All in all a very low risk proposition that encourages relationships with other producers and has a possible enormous payback. Just the goodwill AMD gets from doing a 50X15 alone would make the project worthwhile.
Well there's two parts to the economy as I see it, the U.S. economy and AMD's economy. While I think the U.S. economy is going to have to go through a period of adjustment as foreign goods rise in price due to a falling $, I expect AMD's world wide growth to accelerate as North America becomes less of a factor in its sales.
The good news for the U.S. economy is that U.S. products are going to be more price competitive with the falling $ and that eventually should help employment. The bad news is that inflation is going to be more of a problem, something the Fed is preemptively dealing with now. Also oil is going to continue to get more expensive which is going to force structural changes on the economy that are largely unappreciated now. Those required changes will be good investment opportunities.
For AMD and even INTC, to a lesser extent, the push to a global internet society isn't going to slow down any and the push for greater productivity will ensure growing demand for non-human smarts which means even more use of ever more effective processors.
The tendency of a lot of tech investors to bemoan the lack of killer aps in the PC area seems misplaced. Every where I look I see killer aps evolving and the market for "smarts" growing by leaps and bounds. AMD's push of EMMA and the growth of personal communicators, as well as the evolving home Media center are just a few of the things that are going to create enormous demand for "smarts".
To me the bucket looks much more than half full, particularly for AMD sitting astride two product lines, both of which are bound to experience enormous growth. This hell-bent race for technology isn't going to slow down any.
More from todays meeting and from the Q&A we wern't privy to.
"Quadbit is moving out of research and into development," Cambou said. Intel has stated in the past that it does not plan to make a four-bit flash chip.
http://news.com.com/AMD+sketches+out+new+high-end%2C+low-end+chips+-+page+2/2100-1006_3-5450745-2.ht...
This and the previous post were from the Saxman on Yahoo.
AMD's low power offerings and more from todays meeting.
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=52601471
What Hector may have meant is that it's not worthwhile for AMD to sell to Dell at the prices Mikey wants to pay when they can sell their limited capacity of fully differentiated server products for more to the other tier1s and into the channels.
Yes, I know AMD can supply the complete X86 server market with their present capacity, but that would mean cutting back their efforts in other markets and I doubt that's something they want to do given the efforts they've expended to get into those markets. For instance, we've been hearing about T&L's for at least 2 years and to date AMD hasn't dented that market. Now that they may finally have competitive product I don't see AMD giving that market up to sate what may be a short-term appetite by Mikey for Opterons.
Mikey will have to wait until fab36 comes online, and maybe longer. Dell seems to be doing just fine without AMD, so far, so why bother. We'll have to see if INTC can come up with products that can staunch the AMD64 server bleeding. If not then maybe AMD and Dell will find more in common.