AMD's Plan To Recover From Its Perfect Storm

An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily has an interesting write-up on AMD's big Q1 loss and how the company plans to get back into the black. AMD admitted that Q1 was a meltdown and not just a miss. Looks like cost cutting, including layoffs, may be on the way. But the company says it won't change its overal direction. The CEO Hector Ruiz is quoted as saying, 'We are not going to change our strategy because of one lousy quarter.'"

Comments

Not quite exactly a monopoly

[DrYak]

Intel with an 80%+ market share

In the very specific and narrow subset of "processors only used in computers (laptops, desktops and servers)".
BUT overall, the ARM is probably the most widespread architecture by far, once you exist the computers market and look for all produced processors.
In fact, if you count it as a processor, maybe the PICs are being even much more widespread than the rest.

On those markets, although Intel is also a producer of embedable RISC CPUs, it isn't the only producer.

Never underestimate the modern world of electronics where even a fridge is microprocessor-controlled.

In fact several components inside a PC or connected to it have their own RISC CPU :
- on-board target controller on harddrives, may use generic RISCs.
- most advanced host controller with real hardware acceleration (true hardware RAID) use small embed CPUs.
- Highend hardware monitor
- Advanced network card with either accelerator or even-when-turned-off-diagnosis
- Protection handling of optical drivers.
- WiFi card.
- Pretty much everything else inside your computer that has a firmware.

- the printer and its Postscript or PCL interpreter (except if it's WinPrinter)
- external enclosure with advanced functions
- the DSL router

Re:...because of one lousy quarter

[Rukie]

Hmm, I'm curious as to whether they knew that they would take a hit for Q1 but think that there will be brighter days ahead. Although, it doesn't look like they are going to be doing anything except reduce expenditures. But uhm, 600million in expenditures can't be stopped. However, their merger with ATI may help with some new technologies. Intel seems to really be putting the pressure on AMD as of late with a lot of new architectures, but if AMD can get one extremely efficient/cheap/powerful processor that can dominate the x86 market, they will recoup a lot of their market share, and possibly take some more.

I like AMD and their products, and I think that they have some new products that haven't been seen yet, but will be seen in Q2.But another beating like this, and they'll need some serious help.

Re:Antitrust Enforcement?

[Valar]

There's no limit on the percentage of market share you can have and still be legal. Did you know that there are some companies with 100% market share that aren't illegal monopolies (monopolies, but not illegal ones)? In fact, in some markets, monopolies form naturally (because either the market can't bear more than one firm or because there are high fixed costs associated with entering the market). So, the legal test isn't market share or number of competing companies, but rather whether the company has demonstrated an abuse of their monopoly posistion. Intel has done this in the past, and has been taken to court over it (by AMD) and lost. As a result, they had to hand over a lot of documentation to AMD and anyone else who asks for it (which is why I have seven volumes of manuals on the x86 and x86-64 ISA from Intel and a matching set from AMD).

Re:Will AMD improve ATI, or will ATI ruin AMD?

[maxume]

Microsoft doesn't care about linux drivers. They might keep an eye on the situation, but compare 20 million copies of Vista sold in a couple of months to the installed base of linux on the desktop, and it is clear that they aren't hugely concerned about linux on the desktop right now(and I mean to be agnostic in that statement, it is just that there is very visible evidence that Microsoft is still doing very, very well on the desktop). They certainly aren't playing games with XBox contracts, they are just going with what they think will work best.

Intel won't buy Nvidia, either because they don't get anything out of it(they cross license heavily anyway right?), or because antitrust won't let them. My impression is that intel does graphics to make sure that they can make sales at low end price points rather than for the fantastic revenues, as they have figured out that their business works better when the volume is as high as possible. I think they also benefit from being able to provide 'spec' systems that don't need a whole lot of integration on the part of a vendor.

If AMD does go towards closed, they are just going to evaporate.