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.
Tiger
Lol. Guess longterm hope is what Trancemeta folks really have enough.
What they need is money. Now.
K.
i_banker
TMTA offers licences for its technologies. Why buy a cow if you are fancy for a glass of milk?
K.
Greg
I was not aware MSI is fabbing mainboards in the U.S. currently and therefore did the comparison to Taiwan wages of 2,1 USD/h according to your source.
K.
Keith
I don't think brazilian labour costs are particularly attractive for MSI. Rather import duties or restrictions suggesting such a step?
K.
Keith
Here's excerpts from Tad's commentary of today
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
• We are raising our rating on shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) from Hold to
Buy and establishing our price target of $27, which implies more than a 30%
potential gain.
• Concerns about the prospects for the semiconductor industry have combined with
concerns about the outlook for capital markets to create a pullback in the valuation
for AMD.
• We believe that the company is capable of continuing to impress customers and
investors with its technology and execution. New product efforts in the processor
effort and the initial stages of the shift to 64-bit computing should bolster results in
that segment. The flash memory market is subject to the pressures of any
commodity-oriented business, but AMD appears in better shape than in the past to
remain a viable competitor in the NOR segment as the MirrorBit technology
increases its share of revenues.
• Even with the stock's excellent performance in 2004, the current market
capitalization represents 1.2x our 2005 revenue estimate.
• In addition to the risks associated with the served markets, the substantial
competition, and the dynamic nature of the utilized technology, investors should
also remain cognizant of the euro-denominated costs associated with AMD's
processor production as it competes in a dollar-denominated market.
K.
Q4 CC at 18th
It is on AMDs IR site now.
K.
chipdesigner
I have seen a version saying there will be a formal statement tomorrow. Which was announced yesterday from AMD Taiwan for today already.
Some confusion at AMD, obviously. Happens. While I would wish folks to take time to sort this out first, then get vocal about it and at the same time issue a date for the quarterly numbers, I do recognize people tend to be intimidated from any deviation of a historical pattern. So CC better will be announced for next week within the next couple days.
K.
chipdesigner
Err. Yes, u r right. Thanks for setting it straight.
See my edited post you answered to.
K.
chipdesigner [edit]
While I can confirm you use the same calendar as I do , last quarter Intel reported on 8th. This quarter on 12th.
So anytime this week would be fine for a wednesday 13th announcement. If they want to report the day before Intel again, they should announce Thursday.
I should add I could not care less whether its monday or wednesday or a week later.
What Cathy said today in an interview about the asian campaign is not enough. I believe the two topics are connected. Schedule of the latter topic is rightly prioritized over the Conference call date imo.
K.
Keith
Could well be. Have a look at w:o board on the topic from another angle.
K.
Keith
Last quarters update was just three days before the announcement.
Anyway, they should get vocal this week. On remarked CPUs and quarterly results announcement date.
K.
OT mmoy - Acrobat
As far as I can tell (after couple of days) 7 is what it takes.
Even faster than 5 (let alone 6), standalone and firefox-embedded, no hickups. Distiller works better now.
K.
Tiger
It does. In a container. Performance penalty is below 10 percent.
The extension is monikered Janus, and it works pretty flawlessly
from what I heard.
At one point it crossed my mind that these two billion dollars Microsoft paid to Sund were really for not deploying another Janus-Head running X86 apps in a container as well. )
K.
Chris
I knock on wood Win64 is there and OEM systems, particularly high end gaming systems and notebooks of its flavour are available in quantities for back to school.
K.
chipguy
Sigh. Yes. I completely share your view on this topic. Actually, taking inertia from armies of arm and mips developers into account, it's even looking worse for a migration timeframe - even if X86 would be competitive in power/performance anytime. Which I doubt as much as you do.
K.
Chris
The Alchemy thing has nothing to do with announcements expected for last week.
I sure hope it would not be necessary to drop Q4 results onto this sugar cube.
K.
Durl
Feel free to vote as long and as often as you like, if it is doing any good for you.
While we are at it, isn't the outcome of the poll for Hector most telling about the mental structure of the voters (which I could only speculate which position they typically have)? -:))
Happy New Year.
K.
Keith
Easy to verify the poll:
Current result at 8:05 is
55 Yes
6 No
Pls vote and post if it is counted correctly.
K.
Chipguy
Yes. For now. Not a question if but when these markets migrate to X86.
But I am inclined to agree in what I read between your lines. It is not obviously necessary to serve these markets with mips to lead them to X86 over time. Migration will happen anyway - at a pace AMD is really not able to accelerate significantly - also not by means of Geode. Insofar, I am leaning towards understanding Alchemy more historically than strategically.
K.
Keith
these things have been going on for so long
Exactly. It is remarking. (nothing to do with "stolen parts") Being adressed by means of packaging (multiplier-lock) a while ago. Then, when I learned about Sempron, I thought this is an invitation for remarking folks. Pretty easy to make a Sempron 2600+ out of an XP 1700+: No need to touch the multiplier. An easy bios-mod prevents from any suspicion - unless you open the case and know what to look for. Very, very few are able to discover what the chip really is.
When I read about the raid, I just thought along the line "Cui bono?"
I think its AMD. For good. 'nuff said.
K.
chipdesigner
Naah. Nothing is shipping yet. Its more like shipping date will be closer to announcement date.
K.
ChrisC
It was not the strained silicon announcement, but products to come.
Yes, still waiting.
K.
chipdesigner
Yes I did. He said he was informed it is business considerations holding back the announcements and has been released for a week.
K.
Keith
I could hardly think of anything more positive for AMD than a situation it is finally able to blow up its low-bin dumpster channels.
Happy New Year everybody.
K.
bobs
What is that 24% improvement?
12 for AMD and 12 fo IBM.
Merry Christmas everybody. Hope to see you folks in JJs Contest.
K.
Tiger
It's a packaging plant in China. I know it has been reported for K7. However I suppose it is for K8 indeed. By the time this plant will be fully operational (by end of 05) most of K7 should be worked off.
K.
Joe
In Serverspace adoption could be faster, as A64 delivers instant benefit and driver issues are less relevant. OTOH, these folks are known to be reluctant in adopting new code. 50% within a year sounds very optimistic for my ears.
K.
mmoy
Thanks - eom K.
bobs
As for Win64 - hope you are right and I am wrong. I'd be even happy to become proven utterly wrong in this case.
Btw, did you check if there is 64-bit drivers available for your printer, scanner and whatever periphery you have?
And yes, for the finished goods inventory, afaik AMD counts a lot of these already delivered not as sold. Not sure how this is accounted for. Deferred income, iirc, maybe somebody can clarify.
K.
mmoy
Yeah. No lack of low-bin chips at all. On neither side )
Btw, what do people say about Acrobat7 for the embedded version in firefox?
After going back to Acrobat5 I still have issues with flash-plugin, Quicktime-plugin in FF, but it's minor things I can live with.
K.
bobs
It would be insane to hold more than just what it takes to react quickly to market demand - so this part of inventory does not tell anything about AMDs ability to deliver in 2005.
There is two ways of looking at capacity. The first way is looking at manufacturing capacity, which Marc Lipacis did. The second one is looking at ability to deliver CPUs. This is the way I look at it for next year and maybe the first half of 2006 as well. Because there is Fab capacity coming online in the course of 2006 from Chartered and Fab36, AMD is in the position to sell off its inventorized dies. Which could increase AMDs "capacity" in 2005 by as much as a third.
One more consideration: AMD will need packaging capacities as well to account for two 300mm fabs waferouts. They built one plant in China next year and must increase capacity in Penang and Singapore as well. For a smooth transition/utilization of growing capacities inventorized dies are ideal to work with.
In a nutshell: I do not see a lack of capacity anytime soon. Two slower quarters to come, plenty of room for grabbing some marketshare and fill the channels which I see ebbtiding as we speak. Not drying out though.
Btw, I do not expect Win64 to do any miracle to the market. It's an OEM-OS with limited impact. Unuseable for Corporate market and majority of consumerspace. I look at it as an extended public beta. Impact of Longhorn will be huge though.
K.
bobs
t's going to be difficult for AMD to shift too much production to AMD64 products without doing damage to to the other markets it has fought to create
I really don't think there is any difficulty anytime soon. Look at diesize inventories, which are work in process valued at manufacturing-costs of the last batch of these dies. Talking about K7, it should be in the ballpark of 15 Dollars for a fully tested workable die.
AMD reports its WIP inventories quarterly. It would need estimates on the portion of dies in FAB30, Fab25, JV1, JV2 and JV3 plus Flash-die inventories thereof to come to an approximation how much AMDs CPG-die-inventories value is.
A wag of 150M in this respect would give you 10M dies to work with for a year after the last K7 waferout. AMD is known to built huge piles of inventories before phasing out a process. (Remember how long Fab25s Duron was around?)
The crucial point is how many of inventorized dies will be worth to be packaged to a product, respectively whether you can make 30 Dollars or more on the packaged chip or not. This would depend on the stucture of these dies in terms of characteristics (bins e.g). in comparison to the expected sweetspot in future quarters determined by competition. I see AMD able to sell virtually all of these dies in the current competitive environment which is unlikely to change much next year - beyond that it is not at all impossible that AMD would be able to work with dies as well which are currently considered to be not saleable and consequently have an inventory value of zero. This happened in Q4/03 and Q1/04 for a million of CPUs in each quarter.
Bottomline: Marc Lipacis pointing to manufacturing constraints in 2005 without even mentioning inventories is missing something. I don't know whether he does not know about it or he does not want to write about it.
K.
highlandpark
In addition to Keith reply, NOR spot prices have been significantly higher than contract prices for quite a while. So it is no surprise they fall faster, since nobody is expecting any shortages anytime soon.
K.
Keith
Needless to say, this doesn´t bode well for Spansion
Not necessarily. Micronix current quartermicron products compete against JV2-Spansion products in the same node - but these have cost advantage and characteristics the market pays a premium for by means of Mirrorbit-Technology.
Micronix' rumoured move to 150nm Mirrorbit would fit into this picture.
But then, while I expect Spansion to look much better than Micronix, I do not expect it to make a buck this quarter.
K.
Mike
Thanks again. Lotta CPU's moving out.
Yes. Going into the last week of seasons business, it looks more like thorough channel inventory management than capacity issues.
K.
Keith
Not just a sourcing thing imo, rather like Micronix next year selling FASL-products (under its own branding or not) while migrating its capacities to Mirrorbit for volume in 2006.
Anywhere near along this line, it is a win-win situation imo.
K.
chipdesigner
The project he is working on is still on go. His part is perfectly on schedule. I understand its actually ahead of schedule.
K.
fpg
Title has been edited in the meantime.
K.
InternetPlay
I haven't seen it before. However, I am not sure if Channel guys would tell a journalist if they saw a threat from Lenovo.
Beyond that, they expect the same guy to run the same business just under another name. Short term, I would expect this as well. Medium and longer term, I am not sure.
I think any current assessment of the deal is premature per se. After looking at what Lenovo really does with the business for a year the picture will be shaping up for visibility.
K.
Sidebet
Deadline has passed. No participant from ihub. Probably only a question of time the first "duck-hub" references occur But well, Team Lurker has demonstrated silent thinking can be a successful strategy in the regular eps-contest.
Anyway, here is final entries fyi:
04Q4 29 ¢ Petz SI
04Q4 31 ¢ pipin WO
04Q4 33 ¢ Bavarian Realist WO
04Q4 37 ¢ niceguy767 SI
05Q1 28 ¢ knykny WO
05Q1 30 ¢ Godfather Jerryll WO
05Q1 40 ¢ hurricanechicken SI
05Q2 31 ¢ Amdyou WO
05Q2 31 ¢ tgptndr SI
05Q3 27 ¢ Linux4me WO
05Q3 29 ¢ lake01 WO
05Q3 33 ¢ Dresdenboy WO
05Q3 34 ¢ wörns WO
05Q3 37 ¢ mc005 WO
05Q3 39 ¢ buggi WO
05Q4 41 ¢ kpf WO
05Q4 43 ¢ Hrundi WO
05Q4 45 ¢ MartinA. WO
05Q4 52 ¢ DieGmbH WO
06Q1 54 ¢ Alphabeat WO
06Q2 63 ¢ nasdaqtiger WO
wo consensus is Q3/05 @ 33 cents, SI sees Q1/05 @ 34 cents.
K.