AMD soars high

[Provost Harrison]

Well I am a bit more mercenary than that. When I bought my previous system in 1999 I opted for the Athlon 700...at the time it was by far the better chip to the P3 for the same clockspeed, and the P3 didn't reach the same clockspeed Then I bought my present computer, only a month or two ago, the tables were turned...AMD were employing this PR system again which stinks of trying to make up for a deficit, and the simple fact of the matter was, for all round performance, the P4 was a lot better, even if pricier, but I had budgetted for that.

[Provost Harrison]

NeOmega, a company you 'believe' in isn't really a sound reason for investment is it? Admirable, but not going to make you rich Again demonstration of why capitalism is inherently evil without anyone actually being evil

[NeOmega]

I chose the chip sector because I believe the gaming industry is ready to put some real pressure on old PCs soon. I chose AMD for alot of reasons, which I have listed. I cannot be the only one who owns AMD stock for these reasons... (except perhaps the Israeli connection, that may be unique). Alot of people buy stock for a host of reasons, and the concept was introduced to me about a dozen years ago when the Pro-life movement was urging people not to buy Johnson and Johnson stock, and pull out of mutual funds that support it. I know that I will buy an AMD chip, and that more people who are obtuse and die-hards with their AMD shares, the more value to the shares outstanding. I had to buy a company like AMD because I need something that I can hold on to, and not try risky day-trading with. I have months of pay invested in the market. I already rode out a small tough time, I am ready to ride out more.

Claimin' AMD till I die!

Oh, and I have nearly doubled my money, so yes, it has made me rich, for now.

[Q Classic]

i like amd.
i like intel.
i dislike motorola.

[Wraith]

--"AMD, as a company, totally blows"

No, AMD marketing blows. But marketing is only one part of a company.

You seem to be quite confused about how company valuations and such go. The kind of losses AMD had this quarter are the kind they can operate literally forever on (well, until all their equipment fully depricates anyway). They've got the cash-flow and they're (IIRC) building up their cash, so the losses are mostly from the accounting.

I do love how you claim AMD sucks and then say they have trouble meeting demand, which would indicate that their products are selling so well they're having trouble ramping production (which is where the IBM Fishkill deal will come in).

As far as Intel goes, for a stock purchase they're probably overvalued (as opposed to AMD, which may be somewhat undervalued). They can only go on this way for so long; one truly bad quarter is going to kill the stock price.

--"and they still lack any big OEM support."

IBM isn't big enough for you?

You're right about laptops, at least for now. PM is a good processor (the rest of the Centrino package sucks; another Intel marketing marvel), but AMD has a A64-M on the way. We'll see what happens.

--"Flash memory, other trivial things..."

Flash isn't really trivial. There's quite a bit of money in that stuff.

--"Palomino and Thoroughbred were all thoroughly disappointing."

For the most part they bested (and then kept pace with) the Intel chips, so I can hardly agree with you here. Espeically since they did it with a much lower cooling requirement... you do know how much power Intel's next chips need, right? ^_^

--"Everyone else wants to ditch the 20-year old x86 which,"

Define "everyone". No business wants to ditch their entire installed software base and buy new software with no record. The main reasons people wanted to ditch the x86 ISA have been largely engineered around; that's why it's doing so well compared to the various RISC architectures around.
It's amazing what a huge volume can do.

--"Everyone but AMD has agreed to lay to rest x86 and transition to far more modern ISAs"

You are so completely misrepresenting things here it isn't funny.

IBM et all have always have other architectures involved, except Intel. You'll note that their ISA has done little to gain traction so far. It's not an improvement on x86 by any means. I don't think we're going to be switching to an ISA that's flat out too complicated for hand-coded assembly any time soon. It's going to be stuck in a niche.

--"How many consumer OEMs do you see actively producing and advertising Athlon-based PCs these days?"

Well, Dell is unlikely to ever do so. None of the others really matter much, although the boutique OEMs that specialize in game machines are.

Dell, btw, won't do it for reasons that have nothing to do with technology. Intel is giving them some good deals to stay Intel-only, and AMD needs at least one more Dresden-level fab before they can make the kind of guarantees Dell's business model requires.

--" it always has excess capacity even."

Not necessarily a good thing, since you've got to pay leases and maintenance and the like anyway.

--"You also forget that Intel is going to beat AMD to the 90nm punch, along with the new Prescott core."

Intel has been seriously messing up their 90nm transition. They're actually planning, now, to release the Celeron versions of Prescott before the full versions (probably because of various process and/or design issues that are causing problems on 90nm). These processors are still going to be running over 100w. Intel is literally reaching the limits of heat/sq mm that can be handled by air-cooling. They've got problems of their own.

300mm wafer cost advantages only apply to bulk silicon, btw. Intel's moving to strained silicon.

--"The mobile Athlon 64 competes with the Pentium 4-M, not Centrino."

Why can't it do both? Artifical market segmentation doesn't matter to the end users.

BTW, I'm just loving the problems the "gigahertz is king" argument Intel has been pushing is causing their laptop sales.

--"The reason for this is this is the first time Intel used a state of the art computer program to lay out components of the CPU to maximize efficiency."

No, no that's not it. No one outside Intel knows for sure, but check Ace's message board. There's been some interesting discussion there.

--"AMD will have to deal with the same thing when they move to 90nm next year."

AMD is using a different process, partially depleted silicon. They've already transitioned to it and, unlike Intel, haven't tuned their process for speed over all. They've got their power problems under control.

--"and Intel will launch a 3.4GHz Northwood to compete with the Athlon 64 3400+."

Is this anything like their P4 Emergency Edition launch? At best, this will be a few cherry-picked parts, not a mass production binsplit. Intel's releases have drastically slowed lately. Compare the ramp of the P3 and early P4 to the last year.

--"they'll be last to market with it "

You do realize that this means absolutely nothing, right? How many people buying PCs are going to even know what 90nm means?
And don't expect AMD to have as much trouble as Intel. AMD is just doing a process shrink. Intel was trying to do several things at once, including the transition to strained silicon. This is a lot more difficult than what AMD will be doing.

--"The vast majority of people who buy PCs do so from major OEMS "

Local shops or OEMs. Dell being the biggest, of course, but places like Best Buy and Comp USA sell a fair bit too.

Wraith
"Okay, confining my conclusions to the planet earth..."
-- Albert ("Twin Peaks")