The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]

How are they still in business after this many consecutive quarters of huge losses?

 

How is America not bankrupt yet despite it's ginormous budget deficit? Time for some economy class.

 

Well there are some good signs for AMD at least...

Revenue is up quarter on quarter although still down year on year. Signals that things at AMD at least appear to be stabilizing after the large hit from the recession. Although still not up from a year ago.

There was a significant cost associated with spinning off the "Foundry" as well as restructuring costs. Otherwise it's possible they "may" have pulled even with Q1-08.

Q1 '09 gross margin of 43 percent is pretty good. Although it must be noted that 5% of that is attributed to sales of inventory that was previously written down in Q4 '08.

Note that includes CPU and GPU. I wish there was a way to see how each comes across. Considering the beating AMD have been taking in the CPU side of things, I'd suspect (pure opinion) that GPU margins are offsetting to a large degree lower CPU margins.

Overall, the outlook is better for AMD now than it was for most of 2008. However, that doesn't mean they are out of the woods. Continued good execution is still needed along with the economy recovering at least slightly at some point.

Also, they have to hope that Intel doesn't try to erode prices for the CPU segments they compete in.

I suspect Nvidia's Q1 report should show a similar uptrend in margins if they were also able to move significant quantities of inventory writedown from Q4. I'd say that's quite likely as Geforce 8xxx and 9xxx have continued to sell well.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm quite sure. "budget performance gaming" has taken a rise seen how (steam hardware survey.)
Where G80/92 was actually down in february, march has seen a rise of 1.25% versus 0.80% for RV770&GT200 combined. I hope the april numbers will give us a new insight in how the GTS250 actually affected the market after it's first sale splurge.

And, for the first time in a long while, the Calisto CPU's might actually put up a bit of a fight versus C2D E series. This CPU might actually win a lot of die hard socket 939 fans over to go DDR2/3.

 

It's not really comparable... the US guv has a magic bag of unlimited money. AMD does not obviously. AMD does however have patient Arab investors with very very deep pockets

 

Maybe the IMF could give some cash to AMD and SG so they could compete instead of survive.

 

America's credit is a whole lot better than AMD's, has nothing to do with economics. It's pure finance.

 

I'm glad that they still are; I'd hate to go back to the days of paying 1k for a 486. They survived by being a heavily leveraged company; they have issued lots of debt and have received some large middle eastern investments too.

 

How much did AMD version of 486 cost back then?

 

From conference call:

Will be interesting to compare to the nvidia results in a month or so. If the market overall is down say 15% from last quarter nvidia should report around $430m earnings i think.

Not sure exactly how many a "wave" is but some of those should be taped by now.

 

Heh I wish

 

Technically speaking any DX10 GPU is DX11 compatible =)

 

Wonder if that just means a x870 and x850 card coming out at about the same time with lower end cards coming out in the following months like 4xxx series? Or if they will try to launch some more low end cards closer to the initial offerings.

Also depending on how much inventory Nvidia wrote off in Q4 08 they could actually have quite a bit more revenue (quarter on quarter) if they wrote off substantially more inventory than AMD did.

Regards,
SB

 

True, but they've been hinting that the DX11 cards aren't that far from release, and that it was a good thing that MS would potentially release Win7 with DX11 early...

 

That was well before AMD got more competitive with its own designs. After the K6 which was a serious contender, Intel's own refreshes sped up and prices came down for everyone.

 

Do we really need these "hints"? =) It was kinda known for some time when DX11 will show up and when the next generation of GPUs will appear. Given AMDs track record i'd say that they better stop "hinting" and make sure that they release their DX11 GPUs without any delays and problems this time.

 

No they haven't, the top CPU still goes for $1000, high performance CPUs goes for $500+, and mainstream CPUs goes from $300 down. The pricing range of Intel CPUs haven't changed much over the years, only the products that occupy each pricing slot.

If you didn't want to pay $1000 for a 486, you should have bought whatever cheaper CPU Intel was offering at the time, much like there's nothing forcing anyone at this time to spend $1000 on the i7 965.

 

I should rephrase: "~0.5 - 1k was the average price then for an average CPU;" the price you paid for what was considered "average" performance was much higher then. Don't forget to take inflation into account too, that is a signficant factor. The price now for something costing $1k in the early 90's would be around $1.66k today adjusted.

I also shudder to think about the difference between what $1k and what $100 got you back then when budget parts really meant settling for something vastly inferior from atleast a generation back; a specifically budget oriented CPU wasn't something Intel actively marketed until the Celeron and that was a result of AMD's K6-2 line.

I'm aware that today's higher volumes do a lot to create the lower prices we enjoy, but it's also not speculation to say that AMD forced Intel to react and continues to do so now:

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/21/b...erence/Times Topics/Subjects/C/Computer Chips

I wasn't even talking about buying the lastest and greatest when I was talking about 1k for a 486; AMD is the reason we get to have a Core i7 920 that's ~$300 instead of a gap until the next highest bracket at ~$600.

 

Really? So all those people on amdzone.com claiming that AMD produced superior CPUs since around 368 were wrong?

Though still I'd like to know what the price was AMD asking back then.

Can you show any older price comparisons for CPUs? While I can believe that lower end of CPUs cost much more than today's <$30 I have hard time believing average CPU prices were > $500.

Or maybe it's Intel itself? After it wants people to buy its products, if they keep prices too high people won't see a reason to buy them. Sure, average prices will probably raise a bit but as long as Intel wants people to upgrade CPUs they can't go much higher than they are or they would have warehouses full of CPUs that nobody wants.