things are weird for AMD at the moment sure, but profits/turnover and debt are NEVER indications of how a company is doing.
for instance arsenal spent 400mil on a stadium which put us 300 mil in debt, but the increased sales mean 30-40mil extra tickets sales a year. the business model is something like, pay off 15-20 mil, make 10-15mil MORE profits than you were making without the debt. so you're making MORE money, even though you appear to be in debt. man u's takeover is the same deal, massive massive debt, but still making profits. thats how companies work.
the biggest problem is lack of capital to invest in more fabs and getting them working. the Dell deal was MASSIVE for amd, the problem is chip capacity and the lack thereof.
i would not be in the least bit surprised if in the next year, probo sooner there is a deal announced, a merger, or fab sharing, or some kind of big partnership betweenwith AMD and IBM, or AMD and TSMC(who are a very very big chip producing company who make chips to order for loads of companies, and who already produce extra chips for AMD due to them needing more than they can make and make ATI's chips
).
the problem is, when you have 3 fabs, can sell more chips than they can make and need to move to newer processes which means downtime for the fabs you have issues. intel can simply change one fab over at a time out of their 762 fabs, to newer processes and chips as and when demand increases. at first conroe's sell a small amount on launch and sales are massive on p4's so they change one fab over, then another and slowly phase out older chips. amd haven't got the capacity or time/luxury to do that.
the problem is when a company like Dell call for 500k chips a year and AMD can't provide it they might lose the deal, so AMD simply can't afford not to keep producing chips which can delay switches to new process's and so on. if they are thought of in the industry of being unable to come up with chips they agree to make then no one will sign new deals for them. if buy using 3rd party fabs like TSMC to make extra chips at less profit then can keep Dell, their market share will keep increasing.
PS, their market share has INCREASED in the last year.
a TSMC deal would be fairly useful to them for added capacity , but only if TSMC can make more profit of amd chips than other chips, which means the deal would have to be pretty much a merger. if it was a deal with IBM, they already make chips together, IBM make chips for consoles that ati supply gpu's for, a combo design of a cpu with gpu on it for future consoles. design teams working together. AMD need some way to fund increased production anyhow.
as for chips, i'm about 90% sure we'll see a barcelona at 2.4-2.6Ghz on release, and it will poop on Intel, penryn is barely faster clock for clock than a kentsfield unless the app can use sse4, so in everything but encoding penryn = kentsfield native, + 20% clocks + 50% fsb.
intel were "behind" the Ath 64 range for 2-3 years? and yet didn't lose much market share, AMD despite the better chip didn't really gain market share any faster per year than they did with ath xp's which weren't officially faster than P4's. 1 year not with the official best cpu doesn't mean anything. judging from what i think is coming from both companies, amd's new chip will put them ahead again till the 16 cored cpu's from intel come out late 2k9, and only because they'll be able to switch to lower process much sooner than AMD.
