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

To: mas_ who wrote (255261)	8/5/2008 5:03:53 PM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: They will not buy an Atom at the same price because it is inferior in performance and laptop Performance/W. Everything I've seen leads me to believe that Atom is vastly superior in laptop performance/watt. But clearly, on the desktop reviews have been fairly negative. Of course, if it takes a 25.0W Nano to beat a 4.0W Atom desktop chip by 20-30%, you could call that impressive if you want, but to me I'd be completely surprised if VIA couldn't beat an in-order design from Intel, while dissipating >6x more power under load. If it were really an apples to apples comparison, you may not expect a 5.0W Nano, which is 45% lower in frequency, but much closer in power, to still come with higher performance. And in mobile, the Atom still runs at 1.6GHz, but only dissipates 2.5W TDP power. I would expect the actual performance/watt measurements to show Atom being >2x better than Nano, at least as far as the socket. Actual system level power and performance should favor Atom at low power points as well. Relative to AMD and Sempron, your statement assumes the same price, but I think vendors will be offering Atom based laptops at lower prices, and with equivalent feature sets compared to some Sempron based systems, and one should expect a certain level of arbitrage, even with Sempron offering better absolute performance.

To: mas_ who wrote (255261)	8/5/2008 9:13:20 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Atom's primary goal is the low power handheld device market. You are correct that due its tiny size it can be a very low cost competitor to ARM. So Superficially AMD would not be threatened by Atom. Right now Atom is in short supply and so obviously Intel will not drop its price to the floor, and the immediate threat for AMD is Penryn. However AMD can be in an uncomfortable position when the Atom gets to very low price points, since Intel could potentially sell Atom at decent margins and still be below the AMD variable cost. A lot of customers buy quality or performance only. AMD Opteron made handsome profits when it was performance king. Now the performance situation for AMD has degraded, and threatens to get even worse with Nehalem. So AMD will lose the high end sales. AMD can only play the price card, and offer lower cost for equivalent performance for mid to low range parts. A lot of customers buy on price alone, ie they are perfectly willing to compromise on performance and buy the cheapest product. This is particularly true for emerging markets. This has been AMDs refuge. It has dominated sales in the low cost market market. If and when Atom pricing gets to the $10 range or less, AMD could lose a big chunk of its sales and revenue. If this happens AMD would be overrun from the top and threatened from below. Luckily at this time Intel does not have the capacity to mount a major attack from below. But this could change in a years time.