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Is the end imminent for AMD?

555BUK

555BUK

555BUK

Soldato
Joined
10 Feb 2007
Posts
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Massive recent stock price drops, huge fall is 3rd Quarter revenues, runours of 30% staff layoff's, massive debts, little money for investiments, and a wider gap than ever between Intel and AMD CPU's for both performace and efficiency.

Sure, they (and to a lesser extent Intel) have been affected by the Global Recession, but that doesn't detract from the fact that AMD processors suck when compared to their big rival.

Will AMD still be here (producing micro processors) this time next year, or has Goliath hammered the final nail into David's coffin?
 
AMD should be fine if only they could get their products out there.
Their APU's could make for some epic Windows 8 tablets, but where the hell are they?

I use a C50 on Windows 8 on my tablet, and it's a brilliant little chip, no reason on Earth that we don't see more.
I mean seriously, this thing can play the likes of torchlight etc, and it's not exactly a new chip, they've improved upon it, they have new netbook type tablets coming out, so why don't I see any in the announced tablets?
 
I don't think and are doomed they have there apu as already stated And they seem very impressive Dobt forget they dont just have the cpu side the have the gpu as well the way the market it going it is anyones guess in the end
 
Martini1991 said:
AMD should be fine if only they could get their products out there.
Their APU's could make for some epic Windows 8 tablets, but where the hell are they?

I use a C50 on Windows 8 on my tablet, and it's a brilliant little chip, no reason on Earth that we don't see more.
I mean seriously, this thing can play the likes of torchlight etc, and it's not exactly a new chip, they've improved upon it, they have new netbook type tablets coming out, so why don't I see any in the announced tablets?
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The problem for both AMD and Intel is that ARM, Qualcomm and Samsung have the smartphone and tablet makets sewn up. Even Intel with it's almost unlimited development budget cannot get a toe in the door.
 
That should change with the Windows 8 launch.
Although Microsoft didn't help matters by making the Surface RT Tegra 3 device (Wasted potential, should have been a Windows 8 tablet with Clovertrail or an APU)
 
AMD share price high Feb 2006 = $41 (immediatedly prior to purchasing ATI)
Share price 6 months ago = $8
Share price 1 month ago = $3.70
Share price now =$2.75

AMD did recover from a similar share price slump back in 2008, but few companies recover from performance like this twice. Investor confidence is non-existent and funds (debt restructuring/bailouts) will run dry.

As a last resort perhaps Intel or NVidia will be allowed to save them by acquiring their microprocessor and/or GPU divisions. AMD's patents must be worth something.
 
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To be honest, if they could get a lot more contracts with their APU's, they'd probably be getting on the right track.

In the right devices, the APU's can be pretty good, I'd love to buy a next gen APU Windows 8 tablet, depending on the price.

But those figures don't really look promising lol.
 
AMD will probably survive in some form or another even if it is more licensing of IP and development of custom designs for customers. Many companies have been nearly bankrupt before like Apple,and have re-organised themselves and become successful.

Remember,unlike in the UK,companies have more chances to re-organise due to the way things work in the US.

TBH,I can see them moving towards APUs and custom SOCs,which target OEMs more than DIY PC owners. The most sucessful design they have recently is Zacate which has made them a decent amount of money.

Manufacturing has been the main issue for AMD, and looking at the increased portability of Jaguar, it appears future designs will be more easily made on multiple process technologies.

Even on the graphics side I can see them developing larger chips for HPC usage,and probably pushing more economic solutions for the DIY market. In some ways Nvidia is already doing this by pushing the GK104 and GK114 as high end chips, and the GK110 for HPC usage as it has much higher margins.

They probably at the same time will leave the higher end desktop CPU and server CPU market,and use customs SOCs for servers. Their purchase of Seamicro is an example of this.
 
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passey89 said:
i hope not else better buy a load of cpu's now cus the price with no competitors is gonna go up up up
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Well I wouldn't go that far. However, without any competition prices are unlikely to go down much. What has happened so far (since Conroe and the end of NetBust) is more along the lines of Intel keeping the same prices but reducing choice / value in other ways. For instance killing low-end overclocking etc.

As I posted on the 'PC market shrinks for the first time in a decade' thread, the main reason I'm still on my overclocked Pentium E5300 (aside from it being quick enough of course) is that Intel have not offered any compelling upgrade in that price range. Which is a problem for Intel in that with their 14nm fabs costing $5 billion, they have to keep them near 100% utilization and if people don't upgrade they have to find sizeable new markets.
 
passey89 said:
i hope not else better buy a load of cpu's now cus the price with no competitors is gonna go up up up
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Only if performance continues on the upward trend.

In some ways, Intel depends upon AMD's survival. They push eachother to new high's, and these new high's drive sales. Imagine if Ford never had any competition after developing the Model T. Cars would be much much difeerent nowadays, and horses could still be our main form of transport.

According to Market Capitisation, Intel are currently 50x larger than AMD. During AMD's peak (Feb 2006) Intel was just 7x larger. Comparatively, Intel's value ($110bn to $116bn) has stayed the same during the past 6 years, but AMD's (16bn to <2bn) has fallen massively. Intel could potentially kill off AMD's microprocessor division any time they want to by simply cutting prices.
 
Certainly with hindsight but even at the time, the ATI purchase was questionable. Not only was the price far too high, the amount of debt AMD took on meant that they didn't have enough money to invest into R&D or fab capacity.

Now, they were complacent before Conroe and waited before investing in 65nm but the debt probably was the reason why APUs took so long to come out (five to six years during which time Intel beat them to integrating a GPU on die).

If AMD go under, they'll probably take what was ATI with them. Also, another major mistake was selling Imageon to Qualcomm for a pittance. Doubt AMD's management would have been so quick if Imageon had not been an ATI division. Now AMD has nothing to offer the phone / SOC market.
 
AMD paid $4.2 billion in cash for ATI plus gave away 57 million AMD shares (worth a further $2.3 billion at the time). The combined value of AMD (including ATI) is now just $1.95 billion, making it worth less than some debt laden Premier League Footbal clubs.

So, AMD+ATI combined is now worth less than one-third of what AMD paid for ATI alone six years ago. It doesn't look like buying ATI was a very wise investment.

NVidia are currently valued at $8 billion.
 
Yes certainly. Thing is for them to be worth less than $2 billion yet still have sales of $6.5 billion (2011 - obviously 2012 is going to be less) is a bit strange. I guess investors are a finicky bunch - and AMD having no major growth plans worries them. The execution of Llano was rather poor though: tons of unsold stock and the rumour was that some OEMs had made too many mobos and hence AMD continued making more Llanos but then didn't sell them (no surprise since they didn't lower the price).

And of course Bulldozer has been nothing but bad news too. A decent 28nm Phenom without a GPU could either have run very fast or been eight core. There's nothing magical about onchip GPUs: to get good performance requires devoting a large % of the chip and also as much memory bandwidth as possible. Irony being that although Intel were late to having an onboard memory controller, their design is better than AMDs (those R&D budgets again).
 
How are you guys getting these valuations, there are a number of methods but you can't simply add up the current cost of all available shares and call it at that only. The share price is a reflection of market opinion and confidence in a companies future, their price is subject to demand of the shares themselves and not truly representative of a business's state and ability to continue. (It can be detrimental as has been noted as it will make investors wary).
 
eddyr said:
How are you guys getting these valuations, there are a number of methods but you can't simply add up the current cost of all available shares and call it at that only. The share price is a reflection of market opinion and confidence in a companies future, their price is subject to demand of the shares themselves and not truly representative of a business's state and ability to continue. (It can be detrimental as has been noted as it will make investors wary).
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Market Cap is the most common method for measuring a companies value. It is the sum of it's shares times current market value. Basically, if you wanted to buy AMD and were able/allowed to purchase all of it's shares, that is the value. Share price fluctuations of course reflect investor confidence, but investors base their ratings upon sound financials (revenue, margin, profit, expectations, expenditure, debt, assets etc). If a company is clearly worth more than the sum of it's shares, share price goes up or else someone will snap it up.
 
All you have is the sum of the shares. It might be common becasue it is quick but alone is somewhat meaningless it needs greater context. It's market cap is simply based on speculation, the very act of purchasing shares alters its price as market responds to the demand.
Someone interested in buying the company, or an forming objective estimation of a companies worth for example would use alternate methods to value it.
 
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