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wise or manufacturing wise, he is trying to whip up the speeds on K8 in an effort to try and compete with this outdated technology.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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In order for AMD to survive, they need to stop worrying about Intel as a competitor. They better cut cost and quite frankly fire the guys who put them in this strategic mess.
The idiot who gloated about signing up Dell will soon find out that Dell is going back to Intel. That is probably not bad news for AMD since Dell will not put a broken phenom/barcelona into their cheap computers. But losing most of Dell business is as a big of a psych as signing them was.

Unknown said...

Well, smart or not, at the moment Mr. Ruiz has no other moves. You know, in chess it is called Zugzwang. Factories have to be loaded, and even if they had only K6 to produce, they should do it.

They were supposed to have 12 months window of opportunity before Nehalem, but this window is now shut... by themselves