Slashdot Mirror
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.
What a terrible comparison to make. Your benchmarking an old generation of AMD's chips (non-Opteron/non-AMD64) to the latest of Intel's chips.
And even with that, it's highly subjective, since AMD had a wide range of mobile processors, some of which were just as low power as the best (common) Intel chips, and still rather fast.
I know you're not really trying to say Intel chips are better, but still... What a terrible comparison.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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...
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.
Consumers are holding off purchases...because they don't need new computers. The processor is the last thing most "Best Buy"-level consumers need to even think about replacing these days, and with upgradability so easy for the other major components the need has simply leveled out.
We've reached a threshold where some people aren't going to need any "better" computers for quite some time. For the average user, once you've got a nice flat screen, a nice big HD, and a reasonably fast computer, that's all they are ever going to need to email, burn CDs, and browse the web. The people that have driven the market the last few years (newer and/or first time buyers) are not falling to the "new box every 24 months" syndrome that felt like the norm before.
Add to that how easy things like storage and RAM are to upgrade these days (especially the former, aided by the convenience of USB), and most of the casual users (i.e. one or possibly two PC's in the home) I know are quite happy with what they've got. Unless you are an extreme gamer, there is little reason to upgrade. Same reason people don't upgrade Office every year (if they still use it...); to most people Office '97 does everything they'd ever want to do and then some. The only people upgrading are IT departments and corporations that just like to spend money. Very few industries need state-of-the-art tech, and even fewer individuals do.
The individuals are learning, because they aren't buying. At least that's what it seems like to me.
AE