is...a Libertarian
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yourbankruptcy, you make a good point on the software issue. Please clarify however what you are saying with regards to adopting IPF. Are you saying you would adopt IPF because of (i) strong arming by vendors, (ii) it offers a lower TCO, or (iii) it offers performance you can't get anywhere else? Or are you saying you would not adopt IPF given a choice(at this stage)?
wbmw, if you are a large data center customer (not HPC), why would you select an Itanium over Power, Sparc, Alpha, PA-RISC, et al (except for evaluation systems)? What compelling argument can be made today to adopt IPF technology with only minimal software availability vs. thousands of proven, tested and debugged programs available on the other platforms.
Subzero, dominance has always be driven by software support.
In the intended market for the IA64 - large Datacenters - yes.
AMD's Opteron wil be marginalized to the segment of low end tier 2 and tier 3 customers.
Why do you believe Opteron will be marginalized, by whom and in what time frame (100years?)? Sparc is inferior to IPF, yet it outsells IPF 50:1. Are you saying the traditional RISC guys will keep marginalizing both IPF and Opteron?
This device is rated 2600+ and has a 266 MHz FSB and 256 KB
cache. Hardly surprising it burns 17 W less than a 2.2 GHz
Barton, it has significantly lower performance and therefore
a lower average internal activity factor.
Big whoop. A 2.6 GHz Northwood with 400 MHz FSB has a TDP of
62.6 W, almost 20 W less than a P4/3.2, again with significantly
lower performance. Go figure.
Chipguy makes a good point.
AC stands for
Atlantic City or
Alternating Current or
... :)
If you read the next post, it corrects the previous post to say:
The Opteron is 105% faster than the Intel P4, clock for clock.
The Opteron is 70% faster than the Athlon XP, clock for clock.
wbmw, I think you are thinking about it the wrong way. You should look at through the prism of the Graphics Card market. Other than some consumers want it, why does anyone need more than an inexpensive GeForce 2 Ti200 or equivalent. No games require more. No manufacturer is including anything more powerful in the typical system. Yet, manufacturers continue to develop ever more powerful consumer graphics chips costing multiples of the CPU price. Why, because enthusiasts want it and are willing to pay for it. The general public will accept buying a faster graphics card provided they don't have to pay more for it(i.e. it is included in the system).
I think the same will be true for Athlon64. Average high-end systems may only come with 512K, but they will still have the Athlon64 chip inside provided they are not more expensive. Enthusiast systems will be decked out with 4G of memory and the latest Counter-Strike and Unreal games.
EP, I suppose the other option would be to continue to fab the chips on which ever line they are currently being produced (TSMC I think) and report the fabrication costs as COGS. This is, in fact, what National Semi was doing. If you look at the unit profitability and adjusted it by removing amortization and depreciation expenses and by lowering labor cost by 30% (65 laid off, 150 hired by AMD) would it be profitable? Again, we can't know until the quarterly conference call, but I submit that AMD is rational and therefore would not enter into a dilutive transaction -- especially if they have to raise money next year.
Only time and SEC filings will tell.
EP, by development costs I meant IP development costs, but you are correct that there will be costs to introduce the chips to the fab. You tell me how much you think that will be -- I have not previously costed an intro. Is it mostly labor? Will that labor be incremental?
I think the $87 million in annual revenue still has a lot of room in it to absorb those costs.
wbmw, I was talking simplistically, but to answer your question before I respond further, I live on the planet earth. Now I would ask you the same question if you are suggesting that you believe that AMD is going to lose additional money because of this acquisition.
Let's examine their costs versus the $87 million in revenue they acquired. Question 1, what does it cost them to produce this chip? 2. Do they have development cost to amortize? 3. What are the fixed and semi fixed costs? 4. Is this a rebranding exercise with sales increases, or can they simply keep the existing customers in place without attracting additional costs?
Answer. 1. Very little, but if you know the chip size, we can calculate how much each chip costs -- its a variable cost as they have spare capacity (COGS will be low). 2. NO 3. The staff - 150 engineers (asuming they contribute nothing else) @250K per year fully loaded = $37.5 million. 4.Why should they rock the boat? Why not keep supplying the chips as is and make incremental improvements that might help sales and rely on their channel presence to enhance sales when opportunities present themselves.
How many companies can you identify that are in the red and make non-accretive aquistions? Can you even name one?
wmbw, like I said it depends on what they paid for unit. If they paid .25x sales, which is a reasonable comp for a distressed tech property, then they breakeven in one year. The unit has sales of $85 million annually, and applying AMDs gross margin to that (which is conservative in this case since this is variable production and they didn't pay development costs), gives a payback of less than one year.
That's without assigning any value to IP cross fertilization with Alchemy, or improvements in sales due to AMDs larger channel presence.
I am sure the acquisition was acretive or they wouldn't have done it. We will find out at the next quarterly meeting.
I am sure AMD payed less than 1x sales and probably more like .25x sales - .50x sales to buy Geode. If they have spare fab capacity, their breakeven is less than a year. If Geode adds any IP that is of value for Alchemy, or vice versa, they stand to profit from the deal for a very modest investment.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
No 2GHz announcement today (Monday)
Perhaps, as there are many places where the first Monday in August is a holiday, AMD has decided to wait until Tuesday. I guess we'll see tomorrow.
Wishful thinking, me thinks -- though I hope to be wrong.
I think he was referreing to the 64-bit world.
The next wave: 64-bit Linux
Yet another Opteron benchmark win
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30OPeditor_1.html
Sanmina execs tout Opteron, muted rise in tech spending
Interesting Story.
http://infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/HNsanmima_1.html
I would be curious to know if indeed it is only 32 bit x86 Solaris or if it is a 64 bit version. Given how easy it was for the Linux guys to port to 64 bit and given Sun's experience with 64 bit Solaris, you would think they could knock out a port fairly quickly.
Probably just wishful thinking though.
they might as well send business a "get out of California" card. What are these people thinking?
That card has been mailed out for years to basic manufacturing businesses, like the furniture business. They are thinking they want their cake and eat it too -- after all California is the home of Fantasyland.
145,000 shares for sale at $7.45. A lot of accumulation occured a couple of months ago between 6.00 and 8.50. We need to shake loose the weak holders in this range in order to move higher.
Elmer, now you are pretending not to understand.
"Wrong again. Itanium is 64 bit and it's fully compatible. It executes x86 binaries in hardware."
You know well enough the performance of Itanium on x86 code. Nobody in their right mind would by the processor for this aspect of its performance.
Amen to that!
Short convering is a good thing, but the lack of upward price movement with the short covering is a bit troubling. I would have liked to see a test of the $8 level with the buyback of 10 million shares short. The lack of price increase indicates that there are plenty of sellers in the $7-$7.50 range.
Maybe we will be able to shake all the weak holders loose in the next few weeks.
Jerry R, to answer your question, I think there are three principal reasons Microsoft will pump their 64 bit OS for AMD.
1. They don't want to be seen falling behind Macs
2. They don't want to give linux any more opportunities to expand market share
3. PROFITS, and this is the driving reason. As the computer market has matured, fewer and fewer users have upgraded their computers with each new relase of Windows. Now with XP, what is the reason to ever pay for another copy of the OS. Originally, there were stability issues (win9x), but those are gone -- why upgrade now? Microsoft has to hang its hat on some reason to encourage users to part with their hard earned dollars and that something in my opinion is going to be 64 bit ready OS.
Now I agree with all the others that posted on this board that they are not going to tout Windows Server 2003 with service pack as the end all be all upgrade -- its not. But they will sell a OEM/consumer version sometime next year that will be an entirely new product for which they will get revenue. That is the launch I am hypothesizing.
Wbmw, point taken, but I think that if Microsoft gets behind a new tech, they will give it the muscle required to be adopted. They are ruthless competitors and AMD64 is an opportunity for them to create the perception of an upgrade cycle requirement.
Remember when Windows95 appeared. Well, I believe Microsoft will push Win64 with equal enthusiasm. They don't care if AMD or Intel or just about anyone else makes money on the hardware side, what they care about is being able to deliver a message that will cause consumers to purchase the new OS. Other than a perceived "need" for a 64 bit OS, I would not upgrade my XP system and in the process pay $100 to Microsoft. I expect most people are like me. What will make me pay is the opportunity to get something I don't have.
Just my opinion.
wbmw, porting drivers will occur in the same manner as any new technology uptake occurs. The manufacturer, in this case microsoft, will offer a basic set of drivers. This will be followed shortly by drivers offered by companies who cater to the enthusiast crowd (i.e. creative labs, nvidia, ati, etc.) as they compete for the high end dollars (e.g. $500 graphics cards, $200 sound cards). Slowly but surely other manufacturers will want to play in the rich sand box and within a year or two the driver set will be essentially complete.
Now I am not saying that every device will have drivers, in fact, most older devices probably will not. However, I think that all new devices will offer drivers, in the same way as they are offered for Macs or Linux PCs.
Sgolds, the only clarification I would make to your reasoning is that IBM's production would be restricted if Athlon64/Opteron included pentium class technologies (i.e. SSE2 et. al.). IBM's license does not give them rights to those technologies and AMD's license may have fabrication outsourcing limits.
Actually, IBM gave up there license with the 486. They exchanged the right to produce unlimited chips for a termination of the license with that design (they may still have the right to produce unlimited 486 chips). They were betting on National Semi's design as they were the contract fab and licensee of the Cyrix design. However, National Semi's design failed and IBM was left without a chip.
Chipguy, SGI, Compaq/HP initially announced they were going to 100% conversion of their servers to IPF. However, as you well know, they have all backtracked and have announced dual product line strategies with a possible "eventual" conversion. Translation if the market accepts it we will convert to IPF.
Dell also initially supported IPF and then dropped it and now has annonced support again. Wonder if they will drop t again?
Planned on...
As long as the company believes what they are saying, they are probably safe. But yes, in this environment, if a company deliberately lied someone would go to jail. Shareholders would sue, the SEC would investigate and someone would hang.
You can prove anything you want using statistics. It all depends on what you choose to present. Measuring performance based on a specific program or an specific optimized (or not optimized) benchmark is not meaningful. Yes, SETI Linux code is slower on AMD64, but what does that really mean?
Elmer - I agree with you. They will be evasive, perhaps even misleading in "the hand is quicker than the eye" sort of way, but they will not lie. So, is SOI working? I don't know, as I may not be interpreting the answer that Hector provided, correctly.
AMD would not overtly lie, because in this environment, whichever employee lied would be headed for jail. After Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, Imclone, et. al. do you really think a managment team would take a chance and lie? They may refuse to answer or to give guidance, but lie?
Very true indeed. However, they do have a no questions asked return department and I suppose if the machines could not be made to work easily they would be coming back in droves.
Unless they restate previous quarters (like Microsoft is doing with their equity comp plan changes), you will have to do it yourself or rely on the Wall street guys to do it for you. I doubt AMD will spend the money to have their accountants do this.
Actually it will balloon there income statement and balance sheet a bit. As a majority owner they will have to report all the revenue / expenses and assets / liabilities on their financial statements. On the P&L there will be a line item for "minority interests" that will reflect the profit / (loss) that is attributable to Fujitsu.
I hope this answers your question.
I prefer Mandrake Linux for ease of use. Though I have not yet tried the newest release of Suse. Question: Why does Wal-Mart sell PCs with several brands of Linux on board (Lindows, Mandrake and now SUSE)? Doesn't it just complicate tech support?