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

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210694)	9/12/2006 9:41:36 AM
From: inex	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

No, I believe Jerry would have managed to start construction a year earlier, and ramp 90nm from mid 2005 I'm not quite sure that you recall AMD's financial condition in the late 2002/early 2003 timeframe. After posting a loss of ~$600M in Q4 2002 (including restructuring charges), AMD went on to post a $150M loss in Q1 2003 and a loss of $140M in Q2 2003. It was not until Q3 2003 that AMD started to see some light and posted a loss of only $30M. Given this financial condition, how do you suppose Jerry would have opened the doors on a new $2B fab any earlier??? For a fraction of the ATI acquisition, AMD could have had two design teams working on two brainiacs for the past 3 years. Couldn't it be argued that the ATI acquisition essentially will get AMD the raw benchmark scores that this so called "brainiac" processor would have gotten them if they are able to successfully implement GPU (or several) on die as a coprocessor. AND, they get the incremental revenue to boot... In this manner, the new design teams pay for themselves from the beginning rather than AMD having to finance the design teams until they actually have a shippable product. I'm sure that anyone can argue points for and against the route that Hector and Co. have chosen, however, ATI provides AMD with some world class engineers who have been working on some world class products over the past several years. Isn't buying this IP and design expertise virtually the same as having it in-house over the past few years once the interconnects are there? Is it possible that Hector may have taken a different road but gotten to the same or similar place? I agree that the IPC needs to improve in AMD cores and I make the assumption that K8L (or whatever you want to call it) will address this. And, certainly it would be exciting to have a core that ran circles around the CMW. And your "brainiac" CPU may have been the answer. We'll never know. But, I don't see the competitive landscape as being dire, and, I'm hoping K8L is everything that it should be... Scott

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210694)	9/14/2006 4:53:22 PM
From: graphicsguru	Respond to of 275872

Chris, I appreciate your technical contributions to this thread very much. However, think this comment of yours is mistaken: The mere fact that AMD have spent years getting rid of debt and saving up cash, only to make a huge buyout, tells me Hector has ignored a lot of opportunities since he took the helm. He's obviously a "mergers and acquisitions" type of business man. AMD has not been in a comfortable cash position at any time in the last few years, until Q1 this year when the stock went up, and they took the opportunity to do a private stock placement. The fact that they're able to make the ATI acquisition is mostly due to that placement, not to a longstanding lack of investment in CPU design. In fact, shortly after the stock placement, they began building up more CPU design teams. I agree with you about the importance of good core design. I think the fact that AMD isn't in better shape today is due more to the failure of several design efforts rather than the lack of investment.