4.25.2007

Apple Profit Soars 88% - Thanks to Intel based Macs

April 25 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. said second-quarter profit rose 88 percent because of soaring consumer demand for its iPod media players and Macintosh computers. The company's shares surged 6.3 percent in extended trading.
Apple sold 10.5 million iPods and 1.52 million Macs in the quarter ended March 31, boosted by demand for notebook computers and the low-cost iPod Shuffle. Lower prices for memory chips and screens increased profit. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs is counting on the new iPhone, a product due in late June, to help spur results this quarter.

It pays to partner with someone that can deliver superior products. This $2 Billion dollar a year business between Apple and intel is proving to be very fruitful to both companies. Bear in mind that the 6 million units Apple ships every year is outside the 81-19% market share fought by Intel and AMD. This is an unchallenged business that guarantees revenue but AMD doesn't have access to.

Recent dealings between AMD and Dell proved to be inconsequential to one and disastrous to the other. I'll let you guess which one paid a heavy price. ATI is another company seemed to have been infected by inefficiency after the AMD takeover. I'll point out the trend, you make the conclusions.

Meanwhile SUN Microsystems is suggesting that there is a significant declining trend in growth of its Opteron based Sunfire Galaxy servers. Sun hints that Clovertown's advantage in performance and performance per watt is causing customers to look elsewhere. Luckily SUN plans to transition the product line to Intel by June - before it gets too late.

Again, the trend, you make the conclusions.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

ooo, i like the look.

Unknown said...

This trend can be contributed to AMD's silence on its K10 and R600 product lineups.

So far, only TGDaily have 2900XT/XTX to play around, while other journalists are under the effect of NDA. Having only one source of information is bad enough, having a 6-month old product to outperform the current one is utterly embarrassing.

As for K10, no one knows how it performs. No one has photos, CPU-Z, nothing. Two months before the release of K10, we know nothing about it, except that its name and clockspeed.

In 2002, AMD released the information on Hammerhead, 1 year prior to the actual launch.

AMD really has no one to blame, but itself.

Scientia from AMDZone said...

roborat

"Meanwhile SUN Microsystems is suggesting that there is a significant declining trend in growth of its Opteron based Sunfire Galaxy servers."

Actually this is not true. That statement was made by Timothy Morgan from Computer Business Online Review. What Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief executive officer actually said was:

"Our growth is a multiple of the industry average, so by every measure, we are gaining share."

"Sun hints that Clovertown's advantage in performance and performance per watt is causing customers to look elsewhere."

Also not true. Again:

"The current dual-core Opterons are competitive on every front with the dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeons"

" Luckily SUN plans to transition the product line to Intel by June - before it gets too late."

And, once again, not true. There is no transition. Instead:

"the first Xeon-based server products, made in partnership with Intel, would be added to the Galaxy line in June"

Rather than transitioning from Opteron to Woodcrest, Sun is adding Woodcrest models to the existing Opteron Galaxy offerings. Sun apparently intends to sell both Clovertown and Barcelona Galaxy servers.

Finally, it is beyond silly to try to downplay Opteron's role at Sun. Specifically, according to Michael Lehman, the company's chief financial officer:

Niagara Sparc T1 server line is somewhere between $500m and $600m in annualized sales for fiscal 2007. Sparc sales fell 17%.

Opteron Galaxy is at an annual run rate of about $600m and up 12%.

Frankly, selling Clovertown along with Barcelona makes a lot of sense to me because this covers customers who might prefer Intel based systems. It is also a nice hedge if for example Barcelona were delayed. But it is false to suggest that this means that Sun is phasing out Opteron. It is obvious that Sun is looking forward to selling Barcelona.

Scientia from AMDZone said...

yomamafor2

"In 2002, AMD released the information on Hammerhead, 1 year prior to the actual launch."

Okay, you are implying that AMD released lots of information about K8 in 2002 but that they are doing something different now. Unfortunately, this is simply not true:

AMD releases Opteron benchmarks

"AMD's chief technology officer, Fred Weber, said that during tests in the company's labs, a server running a 2GHz Opteron achieved an "estimated" SPECint 2000 score of 1,202 and an estimated SPECfp 2000 score of 1,170

Other than the test scores, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD kept a tight lid on details surrounding Opteron and other members of the Hammer line."


A little less FUD would be nice.