Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"Flash was supposed to be booming in Q4."

It did. But it was mainly the older, low capacity stuff. At least part of the reason for the shortage of those lower capacity parts is that both AMD and Intel limited the volume of the chips being made because pricing for those chips is probably not quite to breakeven. Demand for higher capacity flash is rising, just a little later than the lower capacity flash. I suppose it's possible for Intel to drop the pricing on their higher capacity StrataFlash to gain marketshare, but giving the amount of money that particular division is losing, that might not be their best strategy. Intel does have an advantage over AMD with respect to their flash, they don't have dedicated flash fabs.

Yes, they guided for flat. But there should be a lot of places to cut costs. They are more than $200 million over where they have been guiding, and didn't really explain why other than vaguely waving their hands around increased costs. So either their earlier costs projections were totally out of whack or they were running some extra costs that probably could be reduced.

I guess alternatively, they shifted some costs from Q104 to Q403. Not sure how that could be done, though...