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Is Qualcomm the New AMD?

Posted by timothy on from the champing-at-the-bit dept.

colinneagle writes "It's a darned shame, but the writing is on the wall for AMD. The ATI graphics business is the only thing keeping it afloat right now as sales shrivel up and the company faces yet another round of staffing cuts. You can only cut so many times before there's no one left to innovate you out of the mess you're in. Qualcomm, on the other hand, dominates this space, and it has the chips to back it up. The Snapdragon line of ARM-based processors alone is found in a ridiculous number of prominent devices, including Samsung Galaxy S II and S III, Nokia Lumia 900 and 920, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and the Samsung Galaxy Note. Mind you, Samsung is also in the ARM processor business, yet it is licensing Qualcomm's parts. That's quite a statement."

2 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Re:anti competitive? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I disagree. Without Intel's backroom dealings AMD would have made enough money to weather the idiocy of Hector the Sector Wrecker (as muh ex-Motorolla buddies call him).

    The whole reason that GloFo had to be spun off is because AMD invested in huge new fabs because they were fab-limited, but then found out they were Intel-limited, their marketshare didn't increase and their fab capacity was unusued. That's crippling for a silicon manufacturing company, so AMD had to stop being one.

    Hector was no help, that's for sure, but I really think it was Intel that crippled AMD at the worst/best time.

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  2. Re:anti competitive? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess you're just unaware of when AMD had the superior product, but couldn't get OEMs to sell products at the volumes such price and performance superiority would have suggested, because Intel, still the dominant player, had made deals with them not to sell AMD parts. Their market share was growing, necessitating a new fab, but then they hit the artificial limits defined by Intel, a crippling blow after investing billions in a new fab.

    There's only been several verdicts against them by the regulatory authorities of multiple governments, and a lawsuit settled between Intel and AMD in AMD's favor with a 1.75 (iirc) billion payout. A pittance compared to what was lost, of course, but still heavily in the news.

    I suppose it would have been easy to miss if you only just started following the CPU industry.

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