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AMD Admits To Slowing Sales
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes is reporting that AMD has fessed up to investors about slowing chip sales. The price war that Intel has initiated seems to be taking its toll on the manufacturer." From the article: "The current drivers of business in the computer chip industry seem to revolve around Intel and AMD price war, uncertainty about how a slowing economy will impact consumer spending plans, and imminent product introductions from Intel that may be causing some consumers to hold off on purchases. Investors should get a better picture in the next few weeks--AMD will issue its full second-quarter report on July 20, a day after Intel is scheduled to report its results."
are the customers - without competition we would have been paying a lot more for the power we get.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have been a big fan of AMD since I bought an Athlon XP 1700+. It's very easy to overclock when you buy the right one (not limited). I've owned an XP 2500+ (running like a 2800+), and a laptop with a XP-M 2800+. I just bought a laptop recently with an Intel T2400 core duo. I compared running programs side-by-side on both laptops, and for single-processor tasks, the T2400 is about 5% faster. However, it runs MUCH cooler than the XP-M, and therefore the fan doesn't run as fast and so is quieter.
And with Intel making the prices very competitive, they are doing something right. Personally I am very happy to see that there is real competition between the two big CPU chip makers. This is where the real innovation comes from.
It's not surprising that sales are down, considering this is always the weakest quarter and the huge price war.
However according to Inquirer (http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=32880), server sales continue to improve.
I am currently in the market for a new computer. I was going to buy a new computer back in January, but I waited for a price drop for the AMD X2 chip that I wanted. Then I learned that there was going to be a completely new socket AM2 coming out that will use DDR2 RAM. So I held off a little longer. Its six months later, and now I hear that there is another AMD chipset coming out in January with 4 cores, and a new Intel chip coming out in a month that trounces anything AMD has.
No matter how long you wait, as soon as you buy a computer it will begin its journey down from top-of-the-range to below entry-level.
Given that you know that this is going to happen, why bother waiting? Just get a computer that fulfills your needs now. If in 2 years time that PC is no longer good enough for you, then get it upgraded.
Who cares whether it is top-of-the-range or next best, as long as it is good enough for what you need?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Price fixing, in a nutshell, is when competitors join forces to set prices in such a way to inflate the market value of a product. Price fixing is illegal, but it isn't what is going on here.
What is going on here is Intel decided that it can afford to lower its margins in order to either take back the market it lost, or squeeze its competitors because they cannot afford to operate on lower margins.
There is nothing illegal about operating this way (though some might find it immoral). AMD employed a very similar strategy in the late 90's, early 00's in order to position themselves where they are today in the market.
From TFA, it is still unclear if AMD is losing market share or if the whole chip market is slowing right now. Basically Intel and AMD are in a price war (good for consumers) and we will have to see how it all works out.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
For one reason...
While I rarely upgrade CPU or Mobo without the other, I do often use RAM across generations of PCs. The system I'm using right now has 1GB of PC-133 RAM, removed from several other systems. PC-133 obviously doesn't have any future, and when it comes time to spend $100 on new sticks of RAM, I'd like to get something that will be useful (in less-performance-sensative systems) for years to come.
It looks now like DDR is nearing the end of it's life, while DDR2 is coming onto the scene. Unfortunately the less expensive systems are still DDR. So should I buy a cheap system now, and get stuck with a dead-end investment in large quantities of RAM (and possibly a CPU/mobo)? Or should I wait a while as AM2 prices drop, and then purchase lots of RAM I'll be sure to find reusable for several years to come?
Unless you NEED a new system immediately, it would certainly be prudent to wait and see how things develop for a while longer. I wish I had been as cautious back when Slot (1, A) CPUs were all the rage.
A very short-sighted view of the world. You should put a little bit of effort into making sure your system will be useful more than 2 years into the future. Even if it won't be useful to you, being compatible with common parts would make it more likely to be useful to whomever you give it to.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
AMD's slashing prices 30-50% at the end of this month. The X2 3800+ will be in the vicinity of $170.
1) Intel is dumping its aging Netburst cores onto the market at such low prices that they're displacing lower-end AMD sales.
2) Intel is setting up for a Big Bath in their Q2 earnings report. Their selling off of their ARM processor unit to Marvell is part of this (they'll have to recognize a huge loss on the sale).
3) All of this is obvious to AMD, so they're putting even more emphasis on Opteron sales where Intel is weakest. This results in lower total sales, as they sell in far fewer numbers than low-end CPUs, but should keep net income at a nice level since they're extremely high margin chips.
4) Since each Opteron sale displaces an Intel Xeon sale, Intel's net income is hurting.
5) Any advantage Intel will gain from C/M/W will be gone when AMD does their transition to 65nm in Q4. Sooner if Intel screws up, as is reported.
I see, that's because no one needs more than 640k of memory, right? The funny thing about computers is how every time someone says no more power is necessary somebody else invents a new application.
What do you mean, run office "decently"? If it's just basic text editing, then any old VT-100 terminal coupled to a 6502 CPU motherboard with 64k memory and a 1.44Mb floppy will do. However, if you mean the whole lot of tasks one does in an office, then we still need a lot more power than we have today.
Let's see, for a start, how about a system that reliably corrects the "to-two-too" mistakes that so many slashdotters commit? Do you have an idea on how difficult is that? Or how about automated translation? Or reliable OCR, including handwriting recognition? Or speech to text?
A truly "decent" office software would need a CPU with at least the same processing and storage power as a human brain. Meanwhile, we have to cope with office systems that in many cases hinder more than help us.