Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

tek_prophet - 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?

Now that Jerry's out of the picture, an outright lie is less likely. However it's just as easy to be misleading to the clueless analysts. I remember a while back when someone asked about AMD's yields and the answer came back that AMD's "line yields" were in the high 90%s. That's probably correct but it's an answer to a different question and it was intended purely to mislead. It worked just a well as a lie. AMD's current statements about SOI are just as meaningless and give us no more insight into AMD's manufacturing than a claim about good "line yields".

For those who don't know what line yield is, it's basically the number of wafers that get broken or are otherwise unuseable during processing. It has nothing to do with what we would normally think of as "yield".