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AMD Reports $611 Million Loss
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Apr 20, 2007 05:45 PM
from the just-a-little-bit-of-money dept.
from the just-a-little-bit-of-money dept.
mpfife writes "Toms Hardware reports that declining microprocessor sales have pushed AMD deeply into the red. 'The company reported a net loss of $611 million on revenues of $1.233 billion, which is more than 20% below the guidance the company expected at the end of Q4 2006. The loss includes charges related to the ATI acquisition in the amount of $113 million, but is mainly a result of the increasing competition with Intel in the microprocessor market.'"
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Big AMD Fan here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Big AMD Fan here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Big AMD Fan here (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Big AMD Fan here (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Big AMD Fan here (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM have some very high volumes parts (some mobile chips, the CPU in every new console, etc), but they can't compete with Intel in terms of investment in the semiconductor market. If anything happened to AMD, then IBM would have some serious problems. The only way out would be to dramatically increase the sales of PowerPC chips. They might be able to do this using open source - sell appliance-type systems where the user doesn't need to know what OS or CPU is running - but it's a gamble.
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Re:Big AMD Fan here (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes and No. That's around the time Hector the Sector Director took over. That's what our FreeScale rep told me he was called back at Motorola :-) He was not missed. From what I saw, he seemed to focus on marketing followed by fab building at AMD. The Hammer architecture was already a work in progress when he took over, so he can't be given credit for that. Modern AMD chips are still small re
Re:Big AMD Fan here (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you mean the 32-bit Athlon? Around that time, AMD were developing x86-64 while Intel were developing Itanium/Itanic. AMD were first to market with a 64-bit CPU normal people actually wanted; Intel's 64-bit offering was a hideous beast and they sold exactly twenty-nine of them. The P4s of the time were hot and slow, the Athlon-64s and Opterons were much nicer. But Intel came back strongly, improving the P4, adopting x86-64 and getting ahead in the multi-core race. AMD just couldn't keep up.
Even when the Athlon was on top in terms of performance, they didn't sell nearly as many as Intel sold P3s and P4s.
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Let's hope they recover (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's hope they recover (Score:5, Insightful)
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Er..yes, but then they wouldn't have a monopoly.
> If they did anything illegal, the government would go after them
Yeah, the government will save us, right after they save the people who lost their money with Enron.
Re:Let's hope they recover (Score:5, Insightful)
If AMD folds, Intel could pretty much do anything they want to with prices.
It would be bad for everyone other than Intel employees and Intel share holders.
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Re:Let's hope they recover (Score:5, Insightful)
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True. However, if they were the only one producing x86 chips, since the demand for them is so high, and the cost for a new competitor to enter into the market (setting up fabs, withstanding the resources Intel would use to try and kill them) would be so great, they could drive up prices significantly and most people would just have to bend over and take it in the wallet.
If they rose prices too high, a competitor could
Re:Let's hope they recover (Score:4, Interesting)
There are only two companies that legally *can* compete with Intel in the x86 processor market: AMD and VIA. Intel has a shitload of patents on implementing x86, and it's only through sheer luck that those two companies have licenses for the patents. If AMD goes under, VIA becomes our only hope for competition - and if the C7 is any indicator, Intel would be able to set their price for high end gaming processors for a very long time before VIA even had a chance of catching up.
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Monopolies aren't inherently bad.
Actually, they are.
Monopolies means no competitors to control the retail pricing of companies who are usually legally required to maximize profits.
Unless you want government price controls. Do you want government price controls?
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
ATI is only worth $113m? (Score:2)
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Huh?
the mind boggles (Score:2)
I don't understand the business world, really I don't. It's almost as if money at that level is little more then a scorecard.
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Well there's a reason (Score:2)
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amd quad-cores will save them (Score:2)
However, stock in AMD is rising (Score:4, Informative)
That plus the breakdown of the MSFT monopoly and the Wintel dictatorship (disclosure - I have owned MSFT before, and own I think 400 shares of Intel) with the low cost push and power push for PCs and laptops using processor chips, should mean they will return to profit in short order.
The market always projects 4-6 months ahead, except in Japan and Europe where it tends to project 6-18 months ahead.
AMD: Try listening to your customers (Score:5, Interesting)
AMD successfully played the market well, offering very fast CPUs for cheaper than Intel could muster. But recently they dropped the ball. Not only have they not come up with an answer to Intel's Core Duo, but AMD have been doing some bizarre stuff like taking over ATI, then announcing they would build DRM into ATI graphics cards. http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/28/14OPcur
Maybe they (and SONY) should fire their board and create a Slashdot forum to run the company. We could hardly do a worse job!
On the bright side Intel are turning out nice stuff these days and have said they intend to get into the 3D market again. Declining PC sales will hopefully keep their prices down. Even if AMD go down the tubes, we'll be ok... I hope.
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My best friend works at Intel as an engineering manager, and he's been there for 9 years. He has told me many stories about how people at Intel t
Re:AMD: Try listening to your customers (Score:4, Funny)
Software specs could be sorted out quickly. The "What Operating System shall we use?" thread will have one post in it: "I say Linux, anyone disagree?"
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Conspiracy Theory # 90...565 (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD/Intel is about controlling the hardware future (Score:5, Insightful)
If AMD *EVER* wants to get ahead again... (Score:3, Insightful)
I see Core 2 Duos with 2 megs per fucking core.
I see Turion 64 X2's with a paltry 256K.
That's just the LAPTOP end.
Hey, AMD, wonder why you're not going any fucking where, even though you've had a superior bus?
Remember the Pentium D (Basically a hyped up pentium 3 with 2 megs of L2 cache) that smoked many higher-end Pentium 4s in gaming?
Pay attention! My 640K AMD64 3000+ could be smoking many other machines if it just had a DECENT CACHE ON-DIE!
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The issue has two potential causes: one is smaller silicon die space allows AMD to sell more chips to Dell, low-end whitebox builders and enthusiasts, which must also come with the admission that the K8 architecture was never going to hold on
Re:If AMD *EVER* wants to get ahead again... (Score:4, Insightful)
And I see Core 2 Duos with 1MB L2 cache, compared with Turions with 512K per core... You're just taking the worst-case example, and complaining about it as if it's typical.
Not to mention that Turion X2s have 128K L1 cache, while Core 2 Duos have a paltry 64K of L1. L1 is much more significant than L2.
What's more, L2 cache isn't magic, anyhow. According to benchmarks, the difference between 2MB L2 cache, and 4MB L2 cache, makes AT VERY BEST less than 10% of a performance improvement. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/07/14/intel
Actually, it isn't. Core 2 CPUs are Intel's desktop CPUs as well. AMD, OTOH, has a different line of CPUs for their desktops, with, among other things, typically 1MB of cache (in your words) "per fucking core."
No, I don't remember that at all. the Pentium D is the euphemism for a Pentium 4, that they've used just in the past few months now.
People are supposed to accept your theory, because you've shown how you know absolutely nothing about processors? I'll pass. AMD can figure out how to make fast CPUs without your "help." They've just been caught napping, and need time to catch up.
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Sun uses/will use either chips... (Score:3, Informative)
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-matthew
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I wonder if AMD will loose the competition to Intel all together.
Do we risk going back to having only one big CPU producer?
I seem to recall that Solaris is now also based on Intel chips (or was that AMD chips).
I have always been buying Intel CPU's until now, but still I am rather fond of AMD as they have forced Intel to get their act together.
Solaris is the OS, Sparc is the traditional CPU in their boxes. I forget the true name of the box, but Sun Fire can support AMD CPUs.
Re:Will this lead to Inte monopoly again? (Score:5, Funny)
They already have: They talked to the competition and said "Fly, be free!"
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Re:Will this lead to Inte monopoly again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we risk going back to having only one big CPU producer?
Not if investers are smart. Duopolies are the next best thing to having a monopoly, meaning it has fat profit margins. However, if it is truely a business that requires economies of scale, then if AMD shrinks down past a certain size, it could risk being left out in the cold. I think this is just a temporary blurp. No need to worry yet. Tech is cyclical, including chips.
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Re:Will this lead to Inte; monopoly again? (Score:3, Interesting)
We call that an oligopoly, actually. A duopoly is just a form of it. The market can exist with one monopoly, an oligopoly with competitors who do not compete (either thru blatant signals, established contracts, territorial agreements, or price fixing), an oligopoly with minor competition (what has existed for many years with Wintel and AMD since the fall of Motorola's dominance), a mixed m
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Will this lead to Intel monopoly again? (Score:2)
Re:Will this lead to Inte monopoly again? (Score:4, Interesting)
AMD has a pretty good product but Intel has been setting the stage for quite a while. You might say that people look at them as the De facto standard. Even When AMD leads in all the products that are comparable to Intel's prducts, Intel still sets the stage.
AMD took for granted that they were leading the pack when they were producing the better performing product. This led AMD to think they could charge a premium for their product and they did. But AMD's has always been a value based seller. Their primary product has been the most performance for the buck spent. This runs counter to the assumption that they were in a position to charge more for their product. It caused sales to slip and made Intel's less performing but more reasonably priced products look better.
Now there are two approaches to setting a price point. One is charging as much as the market will pay and the other is charging less but encouraging more sales to make up for it. Kind of like making $100 per sale in profit and selling two items per year($200) verses making $10 profit and selling 200 per year($2000). AMD went from the second to the first and then recently switched back. There are probably more reasons then just price but it is a key.
The problem with selling cheaper then the competition is that you are seen as second best. A substitute for the good stuff if you will. But Intel has always been the Good Stuff and AMDs reign at the top wasn't long enough in standing to switch this opinion/impression. The tech guys going though the AMD processor problems with the K6-2 and K6-3s are the managers making the buying decisions today. They will always think Intel is the top dog. Everything is rated with "Intel compatible" or "P4 compatible processor" on the sys requirements. Until this actually switches to "AMD compatible AthlonXP 2100 or better" for processor speeds, it will always remain this way.
Once AMD goes back to being the best bang for the buck and Intel needs to have a $999 processor to compete, they will be back to making money and gaining market share. But even if they get the same performance and AMD saves you $200 for the same performance, they will have sales and market shares like history has shown. AMD should be in a lot better shape this time next year. And depending on how they finance their debt this year, they might be back in the black too.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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-matthew
FPGA Based Piracy (Score:2)
Food blueprint licensing? We do that now with cookbook recipes.
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There, corrected that for you!
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Unless you know precisely what you're going to be doing with such a system (or are living happily with a comparable one right now), I'd recommend against it. You can instead go with a mobile chip - intended for laptops, so they're more efficient - and underclock it. Changing the processor's core speed is a native feature of modern mobile CPUs, so it's reasonably well supported and you can do it "on the fly" (without rebooting into the BIOS). There's a Windows program, whose name I forget, which lets you
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Re:Only made 2/3rds their costs (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe you got modded up, since its clear that you didn't even bother to take a look at their financials. Impressive though, if you can come to any kind of understanding of a business with two lines of information - profit and revenue. I just hope you're only investing your money.
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