Comments on AIMeD Corporation: AMD's Asset-Lite could be something really awful

Now in the quadcore high end server the story is.....

2008-06-18T03:17:00.000Z

Now in the quadcore high end server the story is......

from Anandtech.

Tick Tock Tick ....

"So for a few months, AMD might have a slight edge over the Intel Armada, but not for long. Looking at how well the Xeon "Harpertown" 5472 performs, and knowing that the next Xeon MP "Dunnington" is basically three of those "Harpertown" Xeons with a large L3 cache, it is clear Intel is going to assault AMD's last stronghold in the near future"

Tock

Hello Nehalem

Goodby AMD

If the Fuad rumor about Deneb being delayed is tru...

2008-06-05T04:22:00.000Z

If the Fuad rumor about Deneb being delayed is true, and the Nehalem 'benchmarks' are true (huge IPC increase over Yorkfield), and is already running at 3.6GHz on air (courtesy XtremeCPUs), then AMD's next few quarters are going to be worse, not better.

The issue is not Deneb or even Nehalem performance - Intel could release a 5GHz part in Q4 and it wouldn't really impact the economics until H2'09. Intel already has a superior product at the high end, so extending this lead just means Intel can fatten their margins - it's not like AMD is competing in that space right now anyway.

Yes they will start eating a bit into the high end server segment - but despite everyone yelling 'great margins' 'casj cow' in this area, the volume is low and while it helps the bottom line SOME, you are talkin about >10X lower volumes. Plus you will not see the true MP Nehalems server parts until 2009.

So the real question is, how quickly can Intel get more 45nm capacity on line? Nehalem is a bigger part than an MCM Penryn, so at this point outside of the server space, Intel is better off producing Penryn quads as opposed to Nehalems - better yield, smaller die. Only when Intel gets significantly more 45nm capacity online will you see substantial volumes of Nehalem in desktop space, and I suspect that will be closer to mid-2009. So that is when AMD has to have their act toghether by. The timing of Deneb at this point is less critical than the actual performance (so long as AMD gets it out in H1'09)

Sparks said "However, what you said about the AMD ...

2008-06-04T20:37:00.000Z

Sparks said "However, what you said about the AMD piss pumpers, is very true. They’ve been smacked down so many times they’re not going to say squat until they see some hard numbers. No doubt, that’s why they’re so quiet."

If the Fuad rumor about Deneb being delayed is true, and the Nehalem 'benchmarks' are true (huge IPC increase over Yorkfield), and is already running at 3.6GHz on air (courtesy XtremeCPUs), then AMD's next few quarters are going to be worse, not better.

If you believe FUD: (K10 dual core postponed?)http...

2008-06-03T23:46:00.000Z

If you believe FUD: (K10 dual core postponed?)
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7673&Itemid=1

I speculated a while back that without serious clockspeed increases there would be no point and now that AMD has sabotaged any potential 'high end' dual core market with their ridiculousness with tri-core... this may actually be a good business decision!

Why bother with K10 dual cores unless they are substantially better than K8 duals?

It will be interesting to see what happens on 45nm.... if they shrink K8, this in my view would be acknowledgment that the K10 core is just not much better than the K8 core and is more or less just a server chip with peripheral improvements like HT3.0, L3 cache, independent core clocking, etc.. that really only significantly comes into play in 4P+ type applications.

I guess we we'll have to wait even longer for an actual K8 vs K10 'core for core' comparison

errr....ignore last comment, the original math was...

2008-06-03T20:21:00.000Z

errr....ignore last comment, the original math was OK.

Ooops...off a decimal place the earnings range wou...

2008-06-03T20:19:00.000Z

Ooops...off a decimal place the earnings range would be in the $18-30Mil range

Sparks - not disagreeing with your competitive ass...

2008-06-03T20:11:00.000Z

Sparks - not disagreeing with your competitive assessment... but Wall St has already factored this (largely) in.

If you figure semis should trade in the 15-20 P/E range (unless you are a high flier like Apple), this would mean a $6-7 stock should have ~$0.30-0.45 in earnings per share. With ~600mil shares this would mean ~180-300Mil type earnings. (I'm rounding liberally)

Now of course AMD is nowhere near this - but 'the street' is factoring in 2 things:
1) They continue to believe Ruiz claim of profitability in H2'08 (right or wrong - I personally think this is wrong)
2) There will be some sort of merger, takeover or spinoff (while I think this is a decent possibility, this should really never be a reason for the average home gamer to invest in a stock).

So I'll say here what I also said to the AMD crowd who said Barcy's coming out, time to buy the stock. Short term, products don't generally turn a stock price until volume sales are seen (except for startups/speculative stocks). So even if Nehalem comes out of the gate strong, you will not see this impact AMD's stock price (or Intel's for that matter) until well into 2009.

The key question for AMD, if Nehalem is strong, is will Intel use this to recover margins and keep prices up in the the enthusiast & server space or will they come in at the Penryn price points, pushing Penryn down the price change which will then push K10 down further. Personally, I think Intel will tend to mainly increase the price as the volume will be low and they will have pricing power in the spaces Nehalem will launch in. As a result it will hit some of AMD's high end server biz, but their main high volume biz at the low end of the desktop and server markets will remain largely unchanged through probably H1'09.

Ahh....here comes the fastball, high and tight.htt...

2008-06-03T14:04:00.000Z

Ahh....here comes the fastball, high and tight.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/03/computex-2008-great-wall

SPARKS

“Barring a catastrophe,………………..”Hmmm, I don’t abou...

2008-06-03T13:13:00.000Z

“Barring a catastrophe,………………..”

Hmmm, I don’t about you, but I think they’re already there. If they’re not there yet, they’re sure are on they’re way. The whole shebang gives a new meaning to AC/DC’s, “Highway To Hell”! About the only idiots that are holding on to this dog are the institutions, roughly 84%, and the ‘pie in the sky’ morons who bought this mess in the low thirties back 1Q and 2Q 2006. Hold, for seven quarters!?!? GMAFB

“(not that you should go buy the stock)” Now that is a sound financial piece of advice!

Here’s my point, considering the relentless blows by INTC and NVDA product lineups, AMD’s corporate musical chairs, fusion fissile (read: Issac, ATOM, Tegra), serious cuts in R+D, dwindling cash, and finally, AMD partner reluctance to move forward on future technologies, I think ‘Attila The Anon’s’, “Tic Toc, Tic Toc, BK!, BK!”, may come to fruition.

AMD’s flirtations with 7 dollars a share is over. They can put pounds of lipstick on the pig, yet someone’s going to wake up and smell the coffee.

I think 2Q is a turning point before INTC pounds home more scheduled price cuts and Nehalem performance numbers. Additionally, NVDA’s new GTX 200 and 280’s are looking at a gain of 2X performance.

A half a million Barcelona’s ain’t gonna cut it, not with this earnings report, and certainly not after cutting 10% of their work force with no appreciable improvement in margins.

Frankly, how friggin’ ugly can you go??

SPARKS

"The Street will hold no quarter for 2Q earnings, ...

2008-06-03T05:56:00.000Z

"The Street will hold no quarter for 2Q earnings, or lack of. This is gospel."

I beg to differ on this - the expectations are so low for AMD at this point that it will be hard for AMD to under-deliver (from a Wall St perspective). All Ruiz has to do is give something positive in the outlook - another veiled allusion to asset smart/light/[new name here], another we 'plan to break even', 'profitability is a top priority' (my personal favorite Ruiz-ism) and we sold 400K (replace with new # here) Barcelonas (as people will think wow that's a lot of chips, and then realize it is less than three days of total production when someone puts it into perspective. Sprinkle in another marketing study on the effects of the evil Intel monopoly and AMD will get yet another temporary bounce - until sanity comes back in, and some analyst asks... how? or could you provide some detail? or why will asset smart help again?

The same thing happened around Q1 earnings... it ran up a little the 2 days heading into earnings, only to drift back down after analysts realized all they did was hit the lowered #'s they warned on.

Barring a catastrophe, I think AMD has far less risk of disappointing Wall St then surprising them positively (not that you should go buy the stock). Given the recent issues and games AMD has played with the recent earnings forecasts, you need to consider that simply meeting the lowered expectations this time around will likely be considered a positive surprise by many analysts. The current average EPS estimate is -$0.52 (last quarter actual was -0.51, so analysts are expecting a slightly worse Q2 quarter than what was a really poor Q1)

“This thing wipes the floor with my old E8400 or Q...

2008-06-02T23:29:00.000Z

“This thing wipes the floor with my old E8400 or Q6600.”

“I was reading some of your conversations with Scientia when I came across the part involving a 4GHz QX9770..”

I strongly urge any of the ‘regulars’ on this site read that thread between Scientia and me. It will give you an insight on the outstanding performance of the QX9770/X48 combo, even with the staunchest skeptic hammering away at my data. In fact, at one point, he even suggested I was bragging. I wasn’t. I spent a lot of money on the fastest most powerful chip on the planet; I got what I paid for. Even he, peppered with denial, finally acquiesced with some arguable comment concerning socket power limitations. I felt the point was made. To his credit, however, he did post it verbatim.

Giant, as far as your applications are concerned, you couldn’t have made a wiser choice. That’s what we’re here for, top performance. Now both you and I have machines that can handle anything they throw at them, no compromises, no bullshit excuses; just the way I like ‘em.

Hardware must stay ahead of the software curve, always. INTC has done it spades. I’m glad to see you go extreme because nothin even comes close, enjoy.

Here’s to the top bin, Cheers!

BTW as a side note, NVDA is on the rebound, INTC is on the move, and AMD has dropped a buck in four days. Something’s ugly, and it ain’t getting better for the ‘Scrappy Little Company’. The Street will hold no quarter for 2Q earnings, or lack of. This is gospel.

SPARKS

How are you doing Sparks? The graphics wars certai...

2008-06-02T13:38:00.000Z

How are you doing Sparks? The graphics wars certainly seem to be heating up! Just over two weeks to go and we’ll find out who the victor is this time around. I can’t wait to see the performance graphs from our friends at Hexus, Anandtech, [H]ardOCP etc.

I’m prepared for either contingency; my P5B Deluxe (P965) board supports Crossfire, while the 790i board supports SLI. The only thing I’m not too sure about is Crossfire performance on the 965 board, since its second PCI-E slot is limited to 4X unlike the 790i board which delivers the full 16X to each slot.

Whoever offers the faster solution gets my money. I’ll likely start with a single 4870 X2 or 280 GTX and add another after a while when the prices go down a little. A pair of either should offer a tremendous boost over my current 8800 GT SLI solution.

I also have to admit to spending more money on this rather expensive hobby of ours! I was reading some of your conversations with Scientia when I came across the part involving a 4GHz QX9770 when I finally made the decision to buy one of my own! As luck would have it a friend of mine recently purchased a QX9650 on a tremendous sale at Fry’s Electronics and decided he didn’t need it after all. He asked if I wanted it. I snapped it up for $700 and slapped it in the 790i board! 1800 FSB with matching DD3 speeds, 9x multiplier and 1.38V for a rather nice 4.05GHz! Never passes 57C on air, with a TRUE 120 and a 120mm S-flex fan. This thing wipes the floor with my old E8400 or Q6600 in video encoding and rendering in Houdini. I transferred the E8400 back to the P5B Deluxe and as such I’ve got a spare Q6600 sitting around. I’ll probably end up selling that, I don’t need any more computers around here!

-GIANT

Giant- Remember when you asked a few weeks back wh...

2008-06-02T02:47:00.000Z

Giant-

Remember when you asked a few weeks back what will my graphic choice will be with the QX9770/P5E3/DDR-3 1800 setup? Well, I waited quite a while for the main structure to be built, and it seems the wait for the furnishing are going to pay off in spades during the next month.

NVDA’s share price is depressed and AMD/ATI are fighting for their lives. There is quite a bit of speculation that a major graphics battle is brewing. We all knew this was coming, but frankly, I didn’t think it was going to be this big.

INTC’s products are a lock. However, much remains to be seen with the X4870 X2 vs. GTX 280 setups.

In any case, what ever happens, I’ll be pulling the trigger on this next generation graphics solution(s). We shall see.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ati-radeon,5514.html

and………….

http://www.dvhardware.net/article27597.html

All said, this will be good, no doubt.

SPARKS

Some of you may find the following article on Ruiz...

2008-05-31T08:41:00.000Z

Some of you may find the following article on Ruiz's time at Motorola to be quiet fascinating:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10418988/1/amd-ceos-shoddy-record-taints-turnaround.html

I found it an enjoyable read.

There are actually claims denying the fine from EU...

2008-05-30T16:20:00.000Z

There are actually claims denying the fine from EU (yet?).

http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKL2891987820080529

These links are pretty much appear same page with the contradicting news. Nevertheless, those wishful thinking AMD fanbois like the one that running amdzone somehow can miss that easily.

If there was actually no such decision yet, the damage has been done to intel's image anyway as some would not be verifying the report.

Governments are like that. When you are the guys ...

2008-05-30T12:05:00.000Z

Governments are like that. When you are the guys who are responsible for writing and enforcing the law, you start to think that you're above it (and I guess in most non-democratic countries it is true). So I am not sure that any government official sees the hypocrisy when they are enforcing laws against one entity while bending or ignoring the law themselves.

I feel as if any action by the EU against Intel will be very bittersweet for AMD. And it will be heavy on the "bitter" part of that. Say that Intel has been taking part in anti-competitive practices and completely stops now, thus leveling the playing field from that standpoint. Now what? AMD is in a very poor position from which to attempt to take advantage of an opportunity like that, even assuming it was to develop. Intel can weather a heavy fine and added regulation, especially if AMD is unable to get back to a position similar to what they had when they were the performance leader.

So we may be watching a market where the market leader is restrained just when there is no competition to take advantage of it. I think AMD understood this absurd situation when they told a judge that their problem is that they're woefully short of the revenue share they need in order to survive. It's as if they were finally admitting that the problem isn't that Intel is making too much money or selling too many CPUs... it's that AMD isn't making enough money. Fining Intel isn't going to fix that. Throwing more investment dollars at AMD may not fix it, and giving them enormous breaks on building new fabs may not fix it. Or at least, may not fix it in time to keep AMD from becoming irrelevant.

Does anyone else find it humorous that the morally...

2008-05-30T04:55:00.000Z

Does anyone else find it humorous that the morally correct EU who is investigating Intel for fair trade is now defending itself about adding a tariff to certain electronic goods?

They're defense - well the parts they are taxing weren't part of the original WTO agreement.. so much for fair trade, eh?

http://www.physorg.com/news131191338.html

Well... they're all about free and fair trade, except when it applies to imports where they can make a buck... then it's about re-classifying parts and imposing tariffs. Hypocracy anyone? (or are the actions consistent in that they are both just EU government money grabs?)

It's all about a level playing field... except when the EU doesn't feel like it.

Attila The Anonymous-I’m glad you wrote that above...

2008-05-30T03:11:00.000Z

Attila The Anonymous-

I’m glad you wrote that above. I was starting to get a little depressed, sincerely. With all this goddamned bad press, along with Fuddie and the INQ, this has all been driving me nuts.

However, what you said about the AMD piss pumpers, is very true. They’ve been smacked down so many times they’re not going to say squat until they see some hard numbers. No doubt, that’s why they’re so quiet.

Frankly, I can’t wait to see 2nd quarter numbers to put everything in it's proper perspective, and put all this bullshit to rest.

Hmmm---Last Meal.

SPARKS

What a couple days for INTEL!The arrival of their ...

2008-05-30T02:24:00.000Z

What a couple days for INTEL!

The arrival of their Centrino2 is delayed due to a bug and missing some paper work? Can’t wait to here more about the bug and how they missed filing some papers, AMD gets time for a last meal.

Rumors of a big fine coming from the EU. Too bad won’t make materially difference to INTEL. It’s the old narrow old world thinking of the EU again. INTEL has something like 8 billion bucks in the bank. Even with its massive capital investments and R&D continues to generate positive cash flow, continues to buy back stock at billion dollar plus rate. A fine of a billion or two would be painful, but not change matters one bit for AMD. In the worst scenario that INTEL loses the appeal, and certainly they will appeal and keep this in the courts for a few more years it matters not. Not one dollar will go to AMD, not one quarter will INTEL lift of the gas pedal and slow down process or design development. The money won’t go to AMD so sometimes I find it so laughable that AMD has a leader who spends time on such things. You’d think Hector would spend more time figuring out if his design team is doing good pre silicon validation, that the process team is doing real work instead of just taking IBM’s shoddy joint venture process and giving it to Dresden. Damm is Hector doing anything at all justifying the ridiculous pay he earns. He already ruined one company and has all but completed the ruizing of a second.

First benchmarks are out showing Barcelona performance. What a disappointment, Nehalem has little to stretch. Perhaps it was AMD’s strategy all along. Hey we are so far behind lets turn out another turd so they will go to sleep then we’ll give the a can of whoop ass at 32nm.

In the end I’m surprised the AMD cum lappers aren’t celebrating, but in the end its clear why. They have experience so much whoop ass that they got nothing left in them. Only so much whoop ass can one dog take.

Tick Tock Tick Tock AMD’s clock has been cleaned

Here we go again Doc the EU gangsters are at it ag...

2008-05-28T18:42:00.000Z

Here we go again Doc the EU gangsters are at it again!

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=Bcom&Date=20080527&ID=8693851&Symbol=INTC

That's WITHOUT a major sacrifice in margins, sorry...

2008-05-28T18:39:00.000Z

That's WITHOUT a major sacrifice in margins, sorry.

SPARKS

Tonus-Exactly! INTC doesn’t need to simply because...

2008-05-28T18:37:00.000Z

Tonus-

Exactly! INTC doesn’t need to simply because there’s absolutely no threat. Further, as 45nM fully ramps AND the process matures over the next six month they simply adjust their products on two fronts both speed AND price with a major sacrifice in margins. Any other assertions like the so called Tri-Core threat is utter nonsense.

The chip is a last ditch effort to return some money on the entirely failed line called Barcelona. Ok, so you got great scaling with HPC and servers with the functional quads. This is not enough to save the day, however.

If they didn't sell the broken quads (x3), they would be merely scrap, anyway. Caveat Emptor.

SPARKS

"I would say that your results show exactly what I...

2008-05-28T13:11:00.000Z

"I would say that your results show exactly what I said: If Intel sockets were designed to handle more wattage then Intel could easily increase clock speed. But since the great majority of Intel systems are stock this doesn't help Intel much right now. However, you could make the argument that Intel could bump dual core speed enough to remain competitive with AMD's triple cores, but I doubt Intel would actually do this."

Isn't it also possible that Intel doesn't raise the speed on a model because they feel they do not need to? If sales were simply a direct reflection of performance, AMD would have gained lots more market share during the time when they had a performance lead, prior to the time when Intel finally scrapped Netburst and developed Core.

There is also the factor that it is not AMD that is setting the pricing levels, it is Intel. If AMD has a better price/performance ratio at a specific level, I think that it's because they positioned their products and prices in response to Intel, and not that Intel is struggling to match them in either price or performance.

There are lots of other factors, including OEM deals and manufacturing capacity, to consider when thinking about how each company prices its products. Maybe Intel could increase the speed on some dual-cores to better compete against AMD triple-cores, performance-wise. But do they need to?

"I realized that immediately. AMD being late to th...

2008-05-28T07:59:00.000Z

"I realized that immediately. AMD being late to the table with 300mm wafers is a mater of history."

Ignorance is bliss... what is rather amusing is the comment well they trailed by a few years, so he assumes 450mm will be similar. The old 'extrapolation' analysis, which again shows his lack of background on these matters.

One, ummm, slight problem... 300mm saw a greater ratio of equipment capital cost to overall wafer cost (vs 200mm). 450mm will get worse for this ratio as capital costs will grow at a faster rate than things like conusmables, chemicals, silicon costs, etc (on a normalized basis). So why it this important? Well the up front cost is now much bigger, while the 'operating' or ongoing costs (I'm not using these in the strict economic sense of the words) shrinks. This means AMD needs an even greater cash flow for upfront fab investments.

You also need a sizeable factory to use the equipment efficiency - while you get a theoretical 2-2.5X die output increase, you can't simply just cut the fab size in terms of wafer starts in half because then you will have a highly inefficient tool utilization. This means you need to have a fairly large demand to justify building a fab which is ~2X the output of a 300mm fab. AMD is struggling to load a single 300mm fab - they would need to more than 2X their demand to load a reasonably sized and efficient 450mm fab. (Actually this would be more like a 3X demand increase as I would suspect they would not kill their 300mm fab off and would want to keep that loaded efficienntly too).

This is a fairly high level overview from a manufacturing perspective - if folks want more detail on some of the generalizations I made let me know.

Perhaps people will also tie this into the eventual fabless (with the intermediate fab-share) philospophy AMD is heading in. To build a fully loaded 450mm fab (or for that matter a 2nd 300mm fab); AMD will need the cash for the upfront capital investments (which I think everyone sees and understands), but they will also need the partners' demand (in addition to their own) to keep that fab reasonably utilized to give it a shot at operating it in the black.

“Does that not have any bearing on the financial p...

2008-05-28T05:19:00.000Z

“Does that not have any bearing on the financial position that AMD finds itself in today?”

I realized that immediately. AMD being late to the table with 300mm wafers is a mater of history. More importantly, what good is 300mm it if you’re making chips larger that mosaic tiles and the half you’re making come out cracked anyway? Further, each time you refine the process, the cost of doing so never reaches the expected (or desperately needed) gains, 3 times?!?!

As far as him criticizing this site or the individuals on it, I take it with a grain of salt. I’ve clearly (and gratefully) have obtained a wealth of insight and knowledge here on this site, which isn’t open to debate, anyway.

However, when it come to the performance of my beloved QX9770 and X48, well let us say that’s an entirely different mater. I took him up on his challenge to run Prime95 for a half hour. He certainly wouldn’t admit that these were, indeed, terrific products, and cleverly avoided any positive comments concerning the results.

I’m not certain you read the entire thread, beginning with my first post. But to his credit, he did post them. His final reply was a meek:

“ I would say that your results show exactly what I said: If Intel sockets were designed to handle more wattage then Intel could easily increase clock speed. But since the great majority of Intel systems are stock this doesn't help Intel much right now. However, you could make the argument that Intel could bump dual core speed enough to remain competitive with AMD's triple cores, but I doubt Intel would actually do this.”

Huh? I’ve got a Gigabyte P35 motherboard released last fall that can clock the piss out of a Q6600. Hell, my Bad Axe (975X) was doing fine up until the X48!

I really didn’t want to get into an argument with him. I KNOW most everything I’ve seen with ANYTHING C2D has TERMENDOUS head room, especially the dual core stuff at 45nM. INTC can ramp up speeds any damned time they want, damned the sockets.

This was my point. He thinks AMD’s broken quads are going to be competitive.

Personally, I would piss on a three core chip. I don’t relish the idea of THROWING my money away on a busted, second rate product, even if it was FREE! I’d simply buy a Q6600 clock the hell out of it and pound the X3 into the pavement.

Wait, huh, I did that last year!

SPARKS