Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

HailMary, I took wbmw's explanation to exclude initial developement through Merced as money not being recovered. He believes that current costs are being funded by sales of Itanium 2.

I have to be from Missouri on that one (show me!). We know nothing about the yields and total costs of Itanium, so this is guessing. I can believe that engineering R&D is covered by existing sales, but one has to consider manufacturing R&D also. How about production costs? Corporate overhead to support all these people?

He also discounted marketing that is combined with other Intel marketing. This is not how companies typically account for these expenses - they partition it between the products being marketed, and internally calculate the profit/loss on these products separately.

Itanium 2 still seems to be in startup mode (that means operationally losing money) and the jury is still out about whether it will become self-sustaining.