AMD in danger of running out of cash

[PrntRhd]

Chipmaker AMD has had a horrible quarter, losing market share to Intel due to the Intel Core2Duo onslaught. They are in danger of running out of cash, have reserves for 2 quarters at current rates, says analysts:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199200204

[Budfred]

That would be very sad... Even if some people don't like AMD, there is little doubt that the competition is what keeps both of them innovating at a rapid pace...

[PrntRhd]

I agree with Budfred, that AMD has challenged Intel to improve its products.

I have never felt the move to buy ATI made any sense since AMD had to keep development of new chips at full speed to keep ahead of Intel and the purchase may have caused a loss of focus and resources at a critical time.

I believe alternatives and competition are good for everyone and the effects of a collapse would be bad for everyone. When there is only one supplier, there is no reason why that supplier will discount their pricing or spend resources on development.

[Variable]

Wonder what happened over there at AMD? I have always bought AMD's since my wonderful PackBell Pentium 75 "smoker". I didn't even realize they bought ATI. I remember going to a tech show a couple years ago and they were talking about how good the AMD cpu's were in Compaq blades heat and electricity wise. The guy was saying in just a year or two AMD would have 8 and 16 core processors. Quads were supposed to be just around the corner...

In any case, the stock looks like a buy to me. I don't see them going away anytime soon. R600's will boost sales, and they are due for some good proc's to come out. I am still holding off on a new machine for awhile but I will be getting an AMD and ATI card now.

[kiosk]

I just hope that AMD and ATI merger won't end up like Cyrix and NatSemi disaster.

[pwcorgi2]

I wasn't too thrilled about the AMD-ATI merger, but I hope it doesn't kill AMD!
AMD needs to keep Intel on it's toes and vice-versa.

[saphalline]

Very disconcerting. I'd hate to see the hardware market turn into the mess that is the software market. We've got it good now compared to 7 years ago with our cheap hardware. The same cannot be said for software right now! :p

I'm not happy about these fiascoes surrounding AMD/ATI.

[alternate]

Neither am I!

[rond36]

Wonder what happened over there at AMD? I have always bought AMD's since my wonderful PackBell Pentium 75 "smoker". I didn't even realize they bought ATI. I remember going to a tech show a couple years ago and they were talking about how good the AMD cpu's were in Compaq blades heat and electricity wise. The guy was saying in just a year or two AMD would have 8 and 16 core processors. Quads were supposed to be just around the corner...

In any case, the stock looks like a buy to me. I don't see them going away anytime soon. R600's will boost sales, and they are due for some good proc's to come out. I am still holding off on a new machine for awhile but I will be getting an AMD and ATI card now.

Wonder what happened over there at AMD?
When AMD purchased ATI (with 75% borrowed funds) AMD CPUs and ATI VPUs were the fastest. Not long after the purchase Intel released the Core 2 Duo 5100 (Woodcrest) series of processors in the workstation/server market and then 6000 (Conroe) series in the desktop market. That put AMD a distant number two in the processor market. Soon after that nVidia introduced the 8000 line of video cards and that put ATI second best in the VPU market by a very wide margin. To make things worse Intel released the 5300 (Clovertown) series of Core 2 Quad workstation/server CPUs and the Q6000 (Kentsfield) series Core 2 Quad desktop CPUs. If Intel releases the 45nm process (Penryn) CPU before AMD Ships a quad core it may be the last straw for AMD. Word gets around very fast in the business world and any company planning on a workstation/server upgrade will be looking at buying Intel because AMDs future is uncertain and they don't want to get stuck with a bunch of AMD socket 1207 servers with no replacement processors, they will buy Intel socket 771 servers because Intel will be around for many years to come and has more then 80% of the market share. When you are investing a half a million dollars in a 128 node cluster server uncertainty is something you try to avoid. On the performance side of things would you want a 128 node cluster server with AMD Opteron 285s with 512 CPU cores or Intel Xeon 5355s with 1024 CPU cores.

The farther behind AMD gets the more money they will loose.

[Variable]

Word gets around very fast in the business world and any company planning on a workstation/server upgrade will be looking at buying Intel because AMDs future is uncertain and they don't want to get stuck with a bunch of AMD socket 1207 servers with no replacement processors


Meh, I wouldn't count em dead just yet. Since I buy servers all the time, I can tell you the main concerns when purchasing new hardware for most clients...price and performance - price being the MAIN factor. Saying that companies buying new hardware would see AMD as failing and not buy AMD CPU's, is a bit premature at best. I put up four on Friday that were all AMD, six more coming in Monday - all AMD.... Anecdotal I agree, but these are folks surfing for the best deal will different vendors’ one their own and many spend a good amount of time researching the purchase believe me.

Anyone in the industry knows the benefit of having two CPU competitors. It is in no ones interest to see AMD go under. Server support is by the vendor anyway. Companies don't wink out of existence, there is a process and anyone supporting hardware would stock replacement parts. Any company concerned with down time stock replacement parts on site. It is moot anyway. It aint gonna happen.

I will go out on a limb and say, by this time next year AMD stock will be more than double what it is now.