AMD To Host News Conference

In before the "RIP AMD" comment.

ambidextrous?

That's one way of describing it.

I remember one of the games people would speculate about, the "crossover" stock price. Despite Intel splitting shares so many times, somehow when AMD would reach price partity, or exceed it, that would be meaningful.

The emergency conference is no doubt linked to AMD's continuing stock price crashing. The company has a market cap of $1.57B, and is rapidly closing in on all-time lows. For the curious, AMD shared did "crossover" to new territory this week, reaching 10% of INTC share price. 1:10 is notable.

I'm wondering which two "arms" the ambidextrous refers to. Server + mobile/embedded? Leaves out the high-margin workstation parts which they really need to focus on to increase ASP imo. Trinity is nearly the perfect workstation APU from an OEM cost standpoint and the newest FirePro cards have great potential if they can get the software support.

I just wonder when they will be able to announce inclusion of hardware in next gen consoles which should have some sort of an impact on the stocks. Even if they can't list specifics simply saying they are involved should boost confidence. At $2 a share it's might be worth some gambling to see what happens in the near future.

Can they even afford to host a conference these days? If they would just invite everyone they've laid off recently, they can have one that rivals E3!

Their news announcement will be "Our new CPUs are optimized for windows 8!"


Then they will mumble something about more sot cutting, and in an effort to [strikeout]sell out[/srikeout], they will now fully support ARM.

People who are quick to jump in and say AMD SUX and the usual unoriginal trolling drivel...

Just think for a moment.

Do you honestly want a market where Intel has no competition? Price gouging is the least you'd have to worry about.

Medion said:

Can they even afford to host a conference these days? If they would just invite everyone they've laid off recently, they can have one that rivals E3!

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Gotta admit, I LOL'd at this.

techrat said:

People who are quick to jump in and say AMD SUX and the usual unoriginal trolling drivel...

Just think for a moment.

Do you honestly want a market where Intel has no competition? Price gouging is the least you'd have to worry about.

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Intel - has - no - competition.

What's your next point?

AMD announcements seem to use lots and lots of words and acronyms, without really anything anything.

mastaBlasta said:

Intel - has - no - competition.

What's your next point?

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Without AMD offerings to help bring the price down, I figure you'd be all smiles paying $1300 for a currently $130 part? Or has everyone forgotten how much Intel CPUs used to cost before AMD parts started offering Intel some challenges?

techrat said:

Without AMD offerings to help bring the price down, I figure you'd be all smiles paying $1300 for a currently $130 part? Or has everyone forgotten how much Intel CPUs used to cost before AMD parts started offering Intel some challenges?

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Not true. Intel would still need to compete with older Intel chips. People wouldn't upgrade for a long loong time if a CPU was $1300, theyd sit on their old stuff for years and years, or go to ARM. At a lower price point people are more likely to upgrade and more often.

Computer parts all used to be much much more expensive, because it wasn't mainstream tech. Now everything is produced on much alrger scales, the costs have come down.

Seems like any AMD news brings its stock price down further.

This next one can't be good.

DId someone say next one?

Thankfully the new FX chip reviews are out and it's... meh. In many things, besides gaming, it's competitive with the i5-2500K released like 18 months ago. In heavily threaded apps like newer builds of x264 HD and Cinebench 8t, it actually does pretty well against LGA1155. In other things, it's still slower than the very old i7 920 and lower end IB based i3. Single threaded performance is still abysmal, despite the cranked up clock speeds. /cue Netburst comparisons

The bad:
Power consumption is high. Overclocking is bad not only in headroom, but the top bin FX AT tested reveived only a 14% boost at a cost of an additional 100W under load over the already high CPU power consumption. I guess AMD didn't really get as much out of HiK-MG as Intel did. How though? AMD was touting its superiority. lol

The new FX processor is not an APU. Despite that and the die space "efficiency" of the CPU module design, it's 2x larger than often much, much faster i7-3770 die (includes on-die graphics), yet the FX tops out at only $199. (The i5-2500K pricing is brilliant, just over 18 months too late. ) More than 2x as expensive to make, and sells for peanuts. Excellent.

techrat said:

Without AMD offerings to help bring the price down, I figure you'd be all smiles paying $1300 for a currently $130 part?

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Price elasticity of demand is knocking and wants to talk. I suggest you answer.

There is close to zero demand for $1300 processors. I'll let you figure out how Intel would hope to extract that much from consumers. However, in the large quantities that OEMs buy, there is a very high demand for $60-$90 ASP CPUs (which net Intel nearly 50% GM). Gee, I wonder how that works. Maybe some economist can look into it one of these days.

edit: close to zero demand for $1300 desktop processors.

dr.kevin said:

Seems like any AMD news brings its stock price down further.

This next one can't be good.

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Maybe this is the next news. It was posted on Bloomberg a couple of hours ago: www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/a...id-quest-for-new-markets-tech.html?cmpid=yhoo (AMD facing cash crunch)

Not getting as much attention, Apple seems to have dropped AMD graphics from the new iMac and MacBook Pro (both offer Intel and/or nvidia graphics only) models, and the refreshes of earlier products had also dropped AMD. I wonder if Tim Cook mad at AMD.

sad to see a lot of people go today

damn. didnt they just built a plant in New York?

that's a Global Foundry plant

techrat said:

People who are quick to jump in and say AMD SUX and the usual unoriginal trolling drivel...

Just think for a moment.

Do you honestly want a market where Intel has no competition? Price gouging is the least you'd have to worry about.

Click to expand...

Reading through this and other recent AMD related threads, I don't recall anyone saying AMD sucks and wish it would die soon. People are just pointing out that they are doing badly.

Reality doesn't care what you or me want. The recent news about AMD having to cut down their workforce shows that they are struggling. What the consumer want is irrelevant.

Excuse me if I butcher history, but allow me to explain.

techrat said:

Do you honestly want a market where Intel has no competition? Price gouging is the least you'd have to worry about.

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The problem is that Intel just simply never has had competition. AMD's success was not due wholly in part on AMD's actions, but rather that Intel allowed AMD to be successfull. Over a course of about 7 years from 1999 to 2006, Intel made a series of poor choices either because they were lazy or because they were arrogant.

Intel's biggest mishap was the use of Netburst technology. Intel figured that the "megahertz wars" was enough to keep people on board. But people didn't buy into it. The P4's were just too hot and it was embarrassing to have all those gigahertz and it not perform well. People wanted efficient. But it was amazing that Intel was able to sell a consumer grade CPU 8 years ago that was clocked at 3.8Ghz. Its also amazing that Intel was charging $1000 for a processor back then too.

Along the way Intel went through the RAMBUS debacle. It cost more, performed less, and surprise surprise generated more heat, something the Pentium 4 did not need.

Now AMD64 is probably the biggest contribution AMD made to the CPU history. I don't think that people really needed 64 bit software at the time (except for large media files). But the idea of having more then 4GB of memory was very exciting.

Next Intel made the mistake of rushing a "fake" dual core to market. Which again AMD did better by making a fully native.

But Intel finally pulled there head out of their ass and started putting all that cash to good use. And thats when they ditched Netbust and released the original Core. It wasn't great, it didn't support 64 bit, but it was the waves receding before the tsunami.

From there Intel pulled the stops and released Core 2 and the likes of the venerable Q6600 and at that point AMD ceased to matter. With each successive architecture Intel has raised the bar even further and AMD has fallen further and further behind.

Now AMD made some mistakes along the way as well, sure. But Intel is a huge machine and they always have been. They have the facilities, the networking and most importantly they have $money$. Tons of money. So if they are willing to spend it on the right direction, no one will be able to stop them. And thats what happened for those 7 years or so. Intel got lethargic and AMD was the company that was able to step in and fill the gap.

So I wish AMD the best and lord knows I was an AMD fanboy like everyone else back then. But as far as mid to high end performance is concerned I think their days are (and have been) numbered.

Just to look at the $$$$ side of the picture. Here is semiconductor revenue from 2011 and back in 2004 during AMD's hayday. Literally no one can touch Intel.

You have to go back all the way to 1992 before Intel isn't at the top every year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_sales_leaders_by_year

2011

1 Intel Corporation $49B
2 Samsung Electronics $29B
3 Texas Instruments $14B
4 Toshiba Semiconductor $13B
5 Renesas Electronics $11B
6 Qualcomm $10B
7 STMicroelectronics $9B
8 Hynix $8B
9 Micron Technology $7B
10 Broadcom $7B
11 AMD $6B

2004

1 Intel Corporation $31B
2 Samsung Electronics $15B
3 Texas Instruments $10B
4 Infineon Technologies $9B
5 Renesas Electronics $11B
6 STMicroelectronics $8B
7 Toshiba Semiconductor $8B
8 NEC $8B
9 Phillips Semiconductor $5B
10 Freescale $5B
11 AMD $5B

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Probably a good analogy or what happened to little AMD picking on big Intel after all those years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEqniEvNcnk

westrock2000 said:

Excuse me if I butcher history, but allow me to explain.

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Would read again.