SAN FRANCISCO -- Advanced Micro Devices ( (NYSE:AMD - news) ) doesn't seem to have many fans these days. After the chip maker missed third-quarter earnings expectations Jan. 13, investors bailed, hammering the stock down 43%.
Lucky for AMD that 16-year-old Anand Shimpi is on its side.
Shimpi, who runs a tech review Web site called Anandtech.com, gave a rousing review of AMD's hotly awaited K6-3, the chip that's supposed to challenge the upcoming Pentium III from Intel ( (Nasdaq:INTC - news) ).
"AMD's K6-3 is going to be a hit," the high school junior from Raleigh, N.C., says in a phone interview.
Why would his opinion matter? Up until that point, no one outside AMD had gotten a hold of the chip to test it, so Shimpi's Dec. 23 review was the world's first. And second, his site already boasted more than 150,000 page views a day. For AMD, which can't hope to match Intel's advertising budget, that's nice free marketing.
Someone had given Shimpi a copy of the K6-3. "I got it from a source very close to AMD," Shimpi insists. Computer engineers had been waiting to get hold of the chip, code-named Sharptooth, ever since October, when AMD first sneaked them a peak at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose.
"When the K6-3 is officially released," he wrote, "you can expect to see a processor that is highly competitive in price ... and a real blow to Intel's market share."
Not surprisingly, investors with long positions in AMD ate this up. "The part about AMD pulling ahead of Intel and the microprocessor industry in the last paragraph is what I'm betting on," wrote "AMD_inside" on a tech-stock message board Yahoo! ( (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) ). "And that's why I've put a lot of money into AMD stock recently."
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Shimpi's site 'is one of hundreds of sites that do product reviews,' says Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. 'But he is every bit as good as the rest of them.'
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Some, however, say Shimpi has simply made up the numbers. Such accusations don't faze Shimpi, nor has any of the attention. By day, he remains an unassuming teenager. "I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't let this interfere with my social life," he says. "Most of my friends aren't computer people. They don't follow computer hardware."
When evening comes, Shimpi turns into Anandtech.com, a burgeoning online enterprise. The first time we attempted to talk to him, he had to call us back because of an unfolding crisis over his new $40,000 server, a piece of equipment he paid for with ad revenues. To ease up, he recently hired three employees -- two editors, who receive a small salary, and a database expert, who works for the gadgets computer companies send Shimpi to review.
But like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Shimpi has trouble keeping his work a secret. "I am completely in awe of it -- I don't do anything like that," says classmate Dana Sherman, who has watched Shimpi juggle press interviews and class work. The two met in a class on world history. "We did a project together on the Eiffel Tower," says Sherman. "It was the worst project. We stood up in front of the class and said 'This is the tower.'"
As a product reviewer and market force, Shimpi's no CNet ( (Nasdaq:CNET - news) ), with its $45 million in revenue. But his site has evolved quickly from something that less than two years ago started out as a self-designed Web page on GeoCities ( (Nasdaq:GCTY - news) ).
"It was mostly my thoughts, online," Shimpi says. "I got 36 visitors on the first day." Nothing near the audience he garnered when he released his notes on AMD's new chip: In the first 12 hours, the site received more than 300,000 hits. "It took my server down," he says. Over the next three weeks, his readership rose from an average of 150,000 to 260,000 page views a day.
"I really have no way of assessing him," says Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. "But the benchmark results for the Sharptooth were about what I had expected, so he must be a pretty sharp kid."
Shimpi even got Intel's attention. "We've heard of him," says Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. His site "is one of hundreds of sites that do product reviews. He has some speculation and interesting analysis. But he is every bit as good as the rest of them."
Since his review, Shimpi has tackled Intel's low-priced Celeron chip and has shown he's not an enemy of the world's biggest chip maker. But what he wrote about the Celeron could make an Intel investor nervous: "As a low-cost system that can compete with the best of them, the ... Celeron is a wonderful buy. Even those that aren't overclocking can get Pentium II 400 levels of performance for less than half the cost of a Pentium II 400."
That's what Intel investors fear -- that the company's own customers will realize they can buy the low-margin Celeron instead of the more profitable Pentiums.
What's next for Shimpi? He still has a year and a half of high school left, and already he's been fending off job offers from semiconductor manufacturers who want him as an equipment tester. He's headed instead for college. "It's always been a goal of mine," he says.
Yeah, that's what college dropout Bill Gates said.
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