6.05.2007

AMD Brings Down Another Customer - Cray

From Forbes: "Cray recently became aware that there has been a delay in volume parts availability for a key component of the quad-core XT4 until later in (the fourth quarter)," wrote Northland Securities analyst Chad Bennett in a note to investors. "We believe the most logical key component is the quad core processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (nyse: AMD - news - people )".

Be it Barcelona or just the old K8 Opteron that's going to be delayed, it doesn't matter. AMD has let down another customer by not meeting the committed volume. If it is Barcelona that is delayed then we can assume that the rumours of process issues are most likely true. But if its Budapest that's delayed, we can also assume that AMD's mistake of loading its tiny Fab with the large die Barcelona is finally affecting its overall Fab capacity and its ability to meet promised volume. You can look at it anyway you want, the bottom line is AMD is reinforcing its horrible reputation as an unreliable supplier with its already unprofitable business platform.

Dell, Sun, ATI and just about anybody on this list knows exactly what I'm talking about. Sun has learnt its lesson of the dangers of relying solely on AMD. Expect a Crey-Intel announcement in the coming months.

6 comments:

Heat said...

Well when you are in the business of selling powerpoint presentations and speculations instead of actual product things like this are expected..........

Anonymous said...

The news is a bit surprising, I mean we are talking Cray here, not a major OEM. It's not like it's millions of chips (or even hundreds of thousands)...

They must be having some serious yield problems or bin split issues (power and/or freq) or need one or two more steppings...

Either that or they are diverting Cray's supply away to a major OEM? It's not like AMD hasn't screwed smaller folks for the last few quarters in an attempt to expand major OEM business... Cray is pretty much a captive AMD customer for this application, so I wouldn't be shocked if someone at AMD thought why don't we divert some from their where there is no competition until we can get production better ramped...

BTW - I don't think the new Cray products that are referenced for the delay are K8, I'm pretty sure they are indeed Barcy...

Roborat, Ph.D said...

it just makes you wonder the extent of this delivery problem. i'm sure its not only Cray who's dissapointed here. Cray is a tier2 type cusomer and i'm quite sure AMD's channel partners comes lower than Cray.

Expect AMD's customers to make adjustments their AMD business. No business will allow itself to be continuously vulnerable to its suppliers - especially a consistently awful one.

Anonymous said...

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7554

"One vendor demonstrated Barcelona to DailyTech running at 1.6GHz. Current AMD Barcelona samples are not scaling too well. AMD partners confirmed the highest running, POST and OS capable, Barcelona processor is 2.0 GHz"

These must be the non-Inq/Fudzilla stepping, you know the know the one claimed to be operating near 3 Ghz :)

"AMD roadmaps show Barcelona-based Opteron processors will launch in July, but the general consensus from partners is the processor isn’t performing well enough for a July launch."

It's freakin June - you'd think AMD could update the July launch at this point in time?!?

They should confirm it's on schedule or admit it is slipping! Didn't some AMD bigwig say there were no manufacturing issues just a few days ago? (too tired to dig up the link)

If these things are true - someone (isn't this the board's job!?!) needs to shake up Sr management...esp given all the recent announcements: everything's great for Q1 earnings - oops we missed by >500Mil, we fixed the Q4 channel issues - oh we still had channel problems in Q1, we only do "hard launches" and are delaying graphics card in order to do a lunch across 10 products, we are comfortable with current cash position as we are over 600Mil of cash on hand - actually, it's now 1 week later so we'll take on 2.2Bil of funding just in case, etc...

Anonymous said...

Pwned
Pwned
And pwned

Anonymous said...

http://tinyurl.com/36dvtw

"Cinebench completed the default benchmark in 27 seconds for the 1.6 GHz K10; 17 seconds for the Intel Xeon X3220. Kentsfield Xeon was 58% faster with a 50% higher clock frequency for Cinebench"

K10 slower than Kentsfield.