I'm not going to go back and look them up, but there have been a number of articles that have spoken of AMD gaining market share. Granted the amounts haven’t been that much, but for a small company like AMD that is accustomed to living on the edge the amounts are significant. This has been amply shown in the turn-around AMD has experienced over the last three-quarters.
More importantly is the shift in direction. In particular, the change in market position as the move to the k8's has raised the percentage of total market $ coming AMD's way. As Niceguy is forever want to remind INTC's $ growth in revenues has been significantly less than AMD's for some time. Further, AMD has gone from being a non-player in the server business to owning about 8% of the market. More importantly than the share gains have been the effects of competition on ASP's for INTC in this most lucrative market. AMD has started cutting off INTC's oxygen, as the latest INTC revenue adjustments are stating to show, and this will only continue, as the server market is commodized.
Considering the more than 5 to 1 advantage in R&D spending INTC enjoys AMD can scarcely afford the sort of boondoggles (Itanium, Presscott) that INTC is so enamored with. AMD cannot afford the luxury of the sorts of mistakes INTC constantly makes. They have to execute perfectly on everything they do, and recently that has certainly been the case. It's not so much that AMD is kicking INTC's ass $ wise, but that they are gaining share in almost every market they have pushed to compete in. Laptops and the low-end consumer markets are the only areas that AMD hasn't performed all that well in. AMD owns high-end desktops, X86/64-servers and workstations, the gamer market and the NOR flash market. These are the markets where the juice is, and AMD is either taking these markets wholesale or doing a scorched earth (at INTC's cost of business). The server market, in particular, comes to mind. Here AMD has done much more damage to INTC pricing than just capture a small market share. At this point weakening INTC monetarily and causing the kind of chaos and confusion running rampant in INTC is exactly what AMD wants to do. From that point of view AMD has been very successful.
From a psychological point of view everything INTC has been doing lately has been an attempt to persuade the world that it isn't falling apart. The constant reassessment of goals, covering everything form launch dates to revenue estimates, is just another indication of the pressure being brought to bear by AMD. This quarter should provide more evidence as to whether or not the AMD plan is working.
AI
