Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210608)	9/11/2006 11:54:00 AM
From: inex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Chris, I disagree with your take on Hector. While I would not say that he has been perfect, I will say that given the environment in which he has had to operate, he has done extremely well. I'm not quite sure how you can blame Hector for what you claim is "being a year late with FAB36". For that matter, I'm not sure how you can claim that FAB36 is a year late (Are you referring to 65nm at FAB36???). There have been countless advantages that Intel has enjoyed over the past several years which has made it difficult for AMD to simply focus on "pulling a K7" on Intel. Each and every decision cannot simply be made on technical merit. It also must consider time to market and the effects that this will have on short and long term profitability. Certainly this "brainiac" CPU of which you allude would have failed if AMD was not left with a competitive core on which to base current profits. AMD is just recently getting to the point where they may have the luxury to employ an elite design team for just such a task. My point here is that Hector has done a very good job of balancing operating income with the structural buildout needed to neutralize Intel's advantages systematically. One of the most recent steps taken was the news that AMD has expanded its resources to address the needs of the developer community by providing tools to assist them in developing multi-threaded apps. Without such advances in non-core design areas, AMD is continually left at the whim of Intel's and MS's compilers and devoloper tools which may, or may not treat AMD's processors fairly, and, certainly would not be as likely to take advantage of any cutting edge designs which support additional extensions to the X86-64 instruction set. Competing against Intel has never proven to be an easy task, and, the fact that AMD is essentially the last competitor standing is admirable. This taken with the fact that they have been able to make inroads toward breaking Intel's hold on the global X86 CPU market is downright amazing... Since Hector was on board for several years prior to Jerry leaving, I don't see where anyone other than a high ranking insider would have the ability to attribute any particular event to either Jerry or Hector, but, I for one have admired both leaders for their different strengths. Scott

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210608)	9/13/2006 4:46:56 PM
From: jspeed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Jerry handed him a golden opportunity, and he squandered it by being a year late with FAB36 If AMD had FAB36 at 100% capacity and a super-duper core at the end of '05 they would be in no better position than they are today. At that time AMD had no presence in the commercial market, about a 11% marketshare in notebooks (still lacking a platform), and could not possibly have more momentum in server share. Without Dell, they were still not in a huge chunk of the desktop market. They were already selling over 50% of the consumer desktops. So where is the advantage in taking on the additional technical risk and debt for the extraneous capacity? These markets had to be systematically opened and minimizing risk while that was happening was the smart thing to do.