Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Dan3]

Re: late or not, E8870 now seems to be widely available

Close to 2 years after shipping a chip that was close to 3 years late, itself, and after paying close to $1 billion to Corrollary and HP for chipset design teams, on top of whatever $Billions they'd already blown on internal attempts to develop a chipset for it, Intel shipped a chipset.

It appears to have cost Intel about as much to ship that chipset as AMD received in gross revenue last year. Had it not been so late, it might have been able to slow the momentum that's been building for Opteron.

But yes, they did eventually ship it - I'm the one that posted the link to indicate that it shipped last month.

Why does it always seem to cost 10 times to 50 times as much for Intel to do anything as it does AMD? Monopoly profits or not, Intel resources aren't infinite - they've been dropping at $3 Billion per year for the past couple of years. Sooner or later they'll have to ease up selling below their cost to deny AMD access to markets. In the same period, AMD's assets have stayed roughly flat - at about the same $6 Billion that Intel has shrunk. We've gone from $49 Billion Intel vs. $6 Billion AMD to $43 Billion Intel vs. $6 Billion AMD. Curiously, during that period, Intel accounting claimed huge profits while AMD reported losses and gains, but mostly losses. In the same period AMD's stockholder equity dropped about 1/2 Billion, while Intel's dropped about 2 1/2 Billion.

How did Intel keep reporting all those profits while the company was shriinking?