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AMD Reports $611 Million Loss
mpfife writes "Toms Hardware reports that declining microprocessor sales have pushed AMD deeply into the red. 'The company reported a net loss of $611 million on revenues of $1.233 billion, which is more than 20% below the guidance the company expected at the end of Q4 2006. The loss includes charges related to the ATI acquisition in the amount of $113 million, but is mainly a result of the increasing competition with Intel in the microprocessor market.'"
For a while there Sun was only using AMD chips in there X86_64 architecture based systems. Very soon they will have Intel based systems available.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Do we risk going back to having only one big CPU producer?
I seem to recall that Solaris is now also based on Intel chips (or was that AMD chips).
I have always been buying Intel CPU's until now, but still I am rather fond of AMD as they have forced Intel to get their act together. Solaris is the OS, Sparc is the traditional CPU in their boxes. I forget the true name of the box, but Sun Fire can support AMD CPUs.
Why UNIX?
While it is true that they are in a world of hurt right now, they have taken concrete actions that should deliver another round of highly profitable quarters, and their new quad core processors and power consumption ratings should result in their usage in a lot of boxen.
That plus the breakdown of the MSFT monopoly and the Wintel dictatorship (disclosure - I have owned MSFT before, and own I think 400 shares of Intel) with the low cost push and power push for PCs and laptops using processor chips, should mean they will return to profit in short order.
The market always projects 4-6 months ahead, except in Japan and Europe where it tends to project 6-18 months ahead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unless you know precisely what you're going to be doing with such a system (or are living happily with a comparable one right now), I'd recommend against it. You can instead go with a mobile chip - intended for laptops, so they're more efficient - and underclock it. Changing the processor's core speed is a native feature of modern mobile CPUs, so it's reasonably well supported and you can do it "on the fly" (without rebooting into the BIOS). There's a Windows program, whose name I forget, which lets you control the CPU speed, setting via slider the highest it'll go even under peak load and so on. So you can run at the lowest-configurable clock (and voltage) 99% of the time, and when you need the power just turn the knob to 11.
Also, unless you specifically want something small, I'd try to stay away from the microscopic cases. They usually have worse air flow, which means you need more powerful fans, which means more noise. With a bigger case, you have room for bigger but slower fans, which make much less noise. You could even go with an exotic heat pipe setup and just about eliminate fans entirely. This has nothing to do with energy efficiency - the fans are a minimal draw compared to everything else in the box - but usually people with your requirements want something quiet and cool too.
No they were just not sufficiently on top to be able to generate the capital required to upgrade their fabs to the level where they could match Intels volume of production. This has largely precluded them from being able to clinch the big money deals with Dell,HP etc. AMD's chips were excellent, there just weren't enough of them.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Competition is always good for the consumer. When one company dominates, there's no pressure, and that company will only marginally improve their products over their previous iteration.
If you have a real bear of a system, that uses every last watt of that massive 350 W PSU you bought, you could be spending as much as $370 per year. Not to mention the cooling load if you're located in a hot region.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Monopolies aren't inherently bad.
Actually, they are.
Monopolies means no competitors to control the retail pricing of companies who are usually legally required to maximize profits.
Unless you want government price controls. Do you want government price controls?
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
You don't know that's true. Intel would raise prices as far as it wouldn't decrease sales.
... did you have a headache when you woke up from that 14 year coma? Let me fill you in on how MSFT vs the DOJ went: they made it to the next major election cycle, and then the winner pulled the plug on the whole case and let them off with a slap on the wrist. They haven't bothered going after a big tech company again, and they probably never will.
True. However, if they were the only one producing x86 chips, since the demand for them is so high, and the cost for a new competitor to enter into the market (setting up fabs, withstanding the resources Intel would use to try and kill them) would be so great, they could drive up prices significantly and most people would just have to bend over and take it in the wallet.
If they rose prices too high, a competitor could undercut them.
This isn't some nice macro-101 magic-widget-factory; the barriers to entry in the desktop microprocessor market are huge. You're talking about resources only possessed by huge multinational corporations and governments in order to do it, not only the fabrication, but also the research. IBM might be able to compete, and maybe Siemens, Fujitsu, and some of the other big tech-oriented conglomerates, but it's a pretty short list. Everyone else could be squashed or bought. With that high a barrier to entry, Intel could increase prices quite a lot before it would become attractive for someone else to step in and compete against them, particularly if the world had just watched AMD -- an established competitor with billions in resources and millions of man-years of experience -- go down in flames.
If they did anything illegal, the government would go after them.
So
Politicians are dirt fucking cheap to buy; for the amount Intel probably spends on hors d'oeuvres at its shareholder meetings, they could bribe--I mean, lobby--a few key senators and bury anything that was remotely threatening. And they'd have the capital to do it, too, because they'd be making money hand over fist (which would mean that all the investment bankers and other Wall Street types living on their droppings would be right with them, undermining any efforts to slow down the gravy train). By the time the Madison Avenue PR people got done, Intel would be patriots -- marketing good, solid American technology, preserving our lead against the great {Asian|European|whatever} horde.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No. The $113m is not the equity cost of the acquisition. That gets treated differently for accounting purposes, and doesn't appear in the profit/loss numbers, rather it appears in the capital investment/assets part of the balance sheet. The $113m is "acquisition related charges", which is all the other costs they can think of associated with the acquisition, like paying lawyers and possibly some write-offs of inventory or in-process technology. The numbers generally are rather fungible, and I'm not speaking here with any particular knowledge of the actual acounting treatment used. But, bottom line: No, ATI was certainly not valued at $113m - the number was in single digit billions IIRC.
I think that you're overlooking other architectural and production reasons for there being comparably less cache on the Athlon64 dies. My (single-core) Turion64 has 1024 KiB of L2 cache, and came out shorly before AMD shrunk their cache sizes and moved to DDR2 memory.
The issue has two potential causes: one is smaller silicon die space allows AMD to sell more chips to Dell, low-end whitebox builders and enthusiasts, which must also come with the admission that the K8 architecture was never going to hold on to the performance crown after the arrival of Core. The other is that the on-die memory interface with DDR2 memory causes so small a performance gain for having larger L2 cache that it's not even worth the branding pissing contest (and it's also possible that the Turion64 X2 has 256KiB for energy efficiency reasons). If you want to compare the Athlon 64 FX-53 Clawhammer and Athlon 63 3800+ Newcastle -- same generation, clock speed and memory frequency -- at http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html, there is a benefit for having the 1 MiB L2 on the Clawhammer over the Newcastle, albeit a marginal one.
I'll contest that the Pentium D was a Pentium III, but was instead a dual-processor Prestcott Pentium 4 without the HyperThreading capabilities. I'll also contest that your AMD64 3000+ would be a huge amount better for the additional cache. On-die cache was a trick Intel pulled to try and improve the Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Xeon and Itanium perforance, and while it helps performance, I'm not convinced huge L2 cahces are essential.