AMD's "Frantic Price Cuts" May Pressure Intel

kog777 writes in with news of a Needham analyst report alerting their clients to a possible price war between AMD and Intel. Analyst Y. Edwin Mok notes that AMD has cut its prices three times in three weeks. He says that Dell has been playing off the two chipmakers against one another to drive costs down. He suggests that bargain-hunting clients avoid both AMD and Intel stock for now. As an aside, Mok notes that so far Vista is not causing a spike in demand for chips. This story hasn't been picked up very widely; other coverage is at Seeking Alpha.

Re:It seems the author is still using his P1

[modemboy]

Yeah WTF? Shares of AMD are at $14.80. I thing they cut and pasted wrong...

ATI and Vista graphics in general

[Lonewolf666]

ATI has not released its upcoming DX10 graphics card yet, so the only available DX10 card is the Nvidia 8800 with lousy drivers.
Vista drivers for older (DX9) cards also suck, both for Nvidia and ATI. But for DX9 you can stay with XP anyway ;-)

Re:Good.

[Chicken04GTO]

Ummm, no. Only the very TOP of the line chips cost that much. You can still buy "slightly less than uber" processors for a great bargain. Your essentially bitching because their product offerings are more varied then they used to be. Cry some more, your tears cool my CPU down.

Re:I'll care when AMD catches up to the Core 2 Duo

[LehiNephi]

Careful with the "power usage" statement. While Intel certainly has lower power consumption in their Core2Duo processors, that's only in relation to the power-hungry Prescott-based processors. Intel's PR department has made a lot of hay out of their decreased power consumption. The fact of the matter, however, is that Core 2 Duo processors at 65nm now have about the same power consumption as their Athlon 64 X2 counterparts at 90nm--about 65W.

I highly recommend taking a look at processor electrical specifications [erols.com]. And keep in mind that Intel's power figures are more optimistic ("typical") than AMD's ("max").

ITs great!

[Lumpy]

Us gutter IT guys can grab up Sempron 64 3000+ chips for absolute dirt right now. I built my daughter a computer to play Quake4 on for less than $150.00 and she can play it at high detail settings with that low end Geforce 6800GT on that cheap motherboard and really slow processor like that.

Hell that setup has the power to record 4 NTSC tv channels and 1 HD channel at the same time. Makes a great cheap MythTV backend recorder.

Re:Vista

[BlackSnake112]

2) if you can run w2k or xp on a system you'll almost certainly be able to run Vista on it with no changes.

in a word... no.

vista likes dual core (or 64 bit capable) cpus. It can run on single core but you will not like how it runs. I think vista was supposed to be only 64 bit. During the testing on beta all the 64 bit capable machine ran it a lot better. And the 1 GB of RAM. I think ms has a deal with the RAM people, putting in 2 GB makes xp, 2k, and vista much happier.

remember that 2k runs fine on a PIII 800. Even with 2 GB of RAM the PIII 800 has a hard time with vista, so our tests showed.
I have installed 2k and XP on a PII 350 machine with 512 MB RAM. It ran, i wouldn't want to do anything demanding on the machine but it does work.

Nowadays just working it not enough. It has to work, and owrk well, and work in a reasonable amount of time (the faster the batter)

How was Vista's expected role calculated?

[tinkertim]

Both articles linked mentioned that Vista just wasn't pushing PC sales as anticpated, but neither article shed much light on what set of numbers were used to determine what this push should be.

Is this a forecast that MS puts out for each release, or is it determined by historical data? Since there's nothing really historical about Vista's CPU demands for the average user (well, not much really), how the heck did they come up with any kind of number?

This would (I guess) have to be MS saying "This is what we expect people to do with it, this is what we expect businesses to do with it, and this is what we expect CPU demands will be in both cases, hence here's the data to forecast what you'll be selling, we expect to push xxxx copies per day .." (well maybe not that simple, but you get the point).

Another way of looking at this would then be (speaking as Intel or AMD):

"Microsoft sold us a load of fud, we need to keep focused on attacking the virtualization and server market, and the other guy already has a strong foot hold there." (as either could say that about the other).

So in short, it looks like both AMD and Intel learned nothing from Enron's "virtual asset" mindset, which was counting on money that wasn't in the bank yet, but you were *pretty* sure would be there. Typical, I'd say unless I'm way off on how these predictions come into play?

I also saw no data in either article about growth either company made which they now need to find another way of paying for, but I guess that's not going to be availble to sift through for a while.

If I were either company, I'd be treating Vista like Bob [wikipedia.org] until some longer range (real) predictions could be made. But hey, cheap servers .. I'm not a stock holder of either, or complaining :)

Shutdown Condition

[Kadin2048]

Just to expand on the point I think you're making, companies generally go out of business when the profit they generate is less than the amount of money that a similar amount of capital could make, if invested elsewhere.

I.e., if your semiconductor business, which has physical and cash assets of $1B USD, is generating less than $1B invested directly in the stock market, then it probably doesn't make sense to keep going, unless you expect that you can turn the company around and get it more profitable.

In real life, many companies shut down (or get shut down by their investors) when the price per share * shares outstanding is less than the net real assets of the corporation. That's basically saying that the stock value, which is sort of a prediction of the company's future performance and overall "market value," is worth less than the assets that it's using. Thus, it's liquidated. (However, there were some exceptions to this; there were companies in the 1980s that were basically ravaged by "raider" investors and sold off piecemeal, who probably could have been turned around under better management.)