UpNDown
Yes. Although i guess it will take some time to really digest the messages that came across yesterday.
FASL took the NOR-Flash market leadership already in Q3, but instead of bragging a lot about it extended the lead in the last quarter at impressive pace. (Again, without a lot of bragging about it. I will refer to that below.)
Even more important: Looking at the numbers, FASL is also cost-leader in this market: At 566M revenues, Intel would hardly had broke even given the revenues and losses for its division. (Intel well ahead of FASL in migration from Floating Gate to Strataflash/Mirrorbit has to be considered)
Taking into account what the other players (e.g STM) are doing, the picture is pretty clear:
-Floating gate is moribund.
-Strataflash is not cost-competitive (!, see above why that is)
---> Mirrorbit versus NAND will be the game in NOR-land.
Now, on the fist glance Flash is just noise for Intel. Revenue Contribution is some 5%, if there is no chance to turn the business around they always can simply write it off enjoy tax-benefits for it.
But in the context of Intels integrated manufacturing model (converting written-off capacities to Flash) the impact of bailing out of the Flash-business would be far greater than single digit percentage wrt 90nm capacities they build up.
Then, this all could be a problem in a more important dimension: I mean looking at numerous adventures of diversifying the "Intel-omnipotence theorem" has been falsified many times already. But when it comes to core business and it comes to AMD at the same time, it could be perceived differently.
K.
ps: On a side note, maybe AMD-management's expectation of analyst's intestine passage of its number could has been a consideration to push out the report as long as possible? (if so, they seem to assume chronic constipalation here, I am talking about eight days.) It would also explain why they are not bragging, let alone explaining what is going on - for the time being.
Facts are irrelevant to the emotional brain
