Tuesday, December 11, 2007

AMD - thermal consumption heading north

Read this - pretty self explanatory and not too shocking. After all why change from TDP to ACP after so many years. It's just deceptive marketing to hide the truth about a sad product line up.

In further evidence of their "head in the sand syndrome" - they hired a new high level VP when one would think they should be cutting costs till they stage some kind of recovery.

AMD is going down...

Friday, December 07, 2007

Why isn't it surprising

With everything else heading backward, it's not surprising AMD's roadmap is doing the same. AMD plans to bring more K8 models out while reducing it's K10 line up.

Well - why would anyone in their right mind do this? No reason actually. But remember, we're talking about someone who is not in their right mind currently. My Ruiz continues to be obsessed with unseating Intel and getting to 30% market share.

How does this help? It's clear that AMD is having problems ramping K10 in volume and at the bins they want. So now Hector is going to have a yard sale of K8s. He needs to keep his factories full. And since K10 is not competitive performance wise or manufacturing wise, he is trying to whip up the speeds on K8 in an effort to try and compete with this outdated technology. Undoubtedly, his next step will be to drop prices on these parts so he can sell in volume to keep all the excess capacity he has built full.

But this is going to be tough. Why - even people in emerging markets where price is more important will not buy yesterday's technology. So he's really going to have to drop prices and even then his customers will find it tough to sell this old technology.

Another desperate and not so smart move from the boys who wanted to be men too soon.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

AMD stock hits 52 week low

AMD stock is now $ 8.91 due to an analyst lowering his rating. If they deliver a fantastic quarter as defined by some combination of the following:

1. Revenue grows faster than the market (without a significant inventory bloat)
2. ASPs flat to up.
3. Gross margins increase
4. Net loss decreases significantly to the region of 100 million $ (due to an improvement in business conditions and not just cost reductions).
5. The forecast improved momentum into Q108.
6. They gain market share from Intel (and not just from the other miniscule x86 players).

At which point the stock may return to around 10-11$. If not, the stock is heading south of $8 and toward 7 bucks. And Hector will be "monster.comming" his way out soon after.

Intel stock today is $27.22...close to it's 52 week high.