- Jul 1, 2005
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AMD will writedown $880 million related to ATI acquisition
- Thread starter Wreckage
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- Jul 1, 2005
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ATI really must have been laughing its way to the bank back in 2006, knowing what R600 was going to be like.
AMD stock looks like a real bargin right now, then again I could have said the same when it was $10-15. It's hard to imagine that this was a $40 stock not too long ago.
It's not so much that AMD is doing worse now than they were last year.... at least they are not losing $600M like in Q1 2007. But at least back then they had a plan to get back to the top. Now they have exposed their cards, and we know that there is no way they can get back to competing with Intel performance-wise until 2010 at the earliest.
AMD stock looks like a real bargin right now, then again I could have said the same when it was $10-15. It's hard to imagine that this was a $40 stock not too long ago.
It's not so much that AMD is doing worse now than they were last year.... at least they are not losing $600M like in Q1 2007. But at least back then they had a plan to get back to the top. Now they have exposed their cards, and we know that there is no way they can get back to competing with Intel performance-wise until 2010 at the earliest.
The business of selling 285mm^2 CPUs for <$200 is not such a juicy market.
It costs Intel less to make a $1,200 QX9770 than it costs AMD to make a $125 X3 8450. The yield on a chip that size with the defect density of AMD's process... not pretty.
45nm brings it down to 243mm^2, but the die is still too big for the kind of price AMD is going to have to sell it for. Propus should be <200mm^2 and be able to compete for price better, but it's still not the ideal solution.
AMD also hasn't come out with much new in the CPU arena in the past year, whereas intel has come out with a multitude of chips and has successfully transitioned to 45nm.
It's easy to see their stock as a good buy right now, but I wouldn't touch it for at least the next few years. It might be worth taking a gamble on Fusion once its launch approaches.
The graphics division is doing great, but their CPU division looks to be in shambles. It's reached the point that I'm not sure that they will be competitive with intel again during the next few years. They're too far behind, and their future roadmaps don't look great.
Propus has a chance to compete in the low-end market and it may be able to compete performance wise with dual-core Nehalem, but it isn't going to get close to Yorkfield or probably even Kentsfield in performance.
Deneb will be more interesting from a performance perspective (probably close to Kentsfield / clock) but I think AMD might focus more on Propus for the desktop. Deneb will be faster than Propus, but still nowhere near fast enough to compete with Nehalem and probably not capable of the clocks needed to compete with Yorkfield either. It will also cost just as much to manufacture as Nehalem.
As you said, there is nothing until 2010 at the very least that looks interesting IMO. DDR3 / RD890 comes in early 2009, but DDR3 isn't going to do anything significant except slightly improve performance. If AMD really converts to a HK/MG 45nm process in '09 like they are saying.... then that could be significant. But somehow I think that is just another one of AMD's lies to make its roadmap look somewhat palatable.
In 2010, San Paolo & Magny Cours look interesting, but that is server only. How competitive they are will depend on whether or not Intel has octal Nehalem by that point and how low AMD has to set the clocks to get a 12-core CPU running on a 45nm process. By then Intel will be shipping 32nm in volume, and I wouldn't be surprised if that will include native Octal-core 32nm Nehalems. A 12-core K10.5 is not going to compete with something like that.
AMD needs Bulldozer but at this point it's a 2010-2011 product from what we know. In the Q1 conference call it was said that 45nm Bulldozer will be sampling in 2009.... but who knows what is the truth. Perhaps AMD will sample Bulldozer on 45nm and then release it on 32nm in 2010. Regardless.... by the time Bulldozer is here, so is Sandy Bridge.
evolucion8
Platinum Member
- Jun 17, 2005
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Yeah, the CPU part is not completely profitable, but is more competitive now, the new Phenom 9950 which runs at 2.6GHz for some reason overclocks easily to 3.2GHz, and even at stock is able to match or outperform the ancient Q6600 CPU in lots of tasks, once the Phenom is overclocked it can rival easily higher end Intel Quad CPU's (Seems that higher clocks have better performance scalability than Intel CPU's but it comes at a cost, that CPU at stock has a TDP of 140W which is horrible and the die size is huge, I don't see how AMD will manage to release a faster CPU using the 65nm process keeping the envelope within the 140W range, AMD needs the 45nm badly)
...ATI still handles their own operations AFAIK, AMD had nothing to do with their last architecture.
ATI is a brand or trademark, not a division, subsidiary, or other entity. AMD wholly acquired ATI, creating a new company that retained AMD's name. ATI does not exist except as AMD's intellectual property.
I wasn't suggesting that AMD's 'people' somehow had anything to do with ATI's last architecture. I was suggesting that AMD's horrible execution of the reorganization plan nearly killed the both of them.
well not entirely, the chipset division is still highly AMD influenced. and those layoffs that AMD had, about 1600 ppl, that DID affect ATI.
evolucion8
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- Jun 17, 2005
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819103273
I was browsing the CPU category and I found that and got surprised that it didn't even got any advertising.
Well, actually the HD 38XX series were profitable because they were so cheap to manufacture that dropping the prices like they did didn't affect by much the profits like nVidia had with their G92 GPU, also the AGP version surprisingly sold well too.
http://www.techwarelabs.com/re...ssors/amd-phenom-9950/ <It is currently the quickest of the AMD Phenom line and is priced very competitively with the equivalent Intel processor. Performing neck and neck with the Intel Q6600 (2.4GHz), the AMD Phenom 9950 (2.6GHz) becomes a formidable rival. Overall we have seen that the AMD Phenom 9950 can easily be overclocked to 3.0GHz and with more tweaking it can get much higher. Overall I feel as if the new Phenom 9950 is a good processor with a reasonable price. With review such a nice product, we look forward to future releases by AMD.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/735/13/ <<The AMD Phenom X4 9950 raises the performance bar for AMD and it was able to hang with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 in many of our benchmarks. The Phenom X4 9950 is just a speed bump, so there isn't too much fun to say about it. The processor enjoys a 100MHz clock frequency increase, but on the flip side the max TDP went from 120W on the Phenom X4 9850 to 140W on the Phenom X4 9950.
http://www.firingsquad.com/har..._performance/page9.asp <<With the introduction of the Phenom 9950 Black Edition, the top of AMD?s Phenom line is one peg closer to Intel?s baseline quad-core CPU, the Core 2 Quad Q6600. In our testing the Q6600 ran faster in games, while the 9950 and Q6600 traded blows in our media encoding and rendering benchmarks. The 9950 was faster in our HD video encoding test with Windows Media Encoder, but the Q6600 pulled ahead of the 9950 in Cinebench 10. As always with gaming tests though, keep in mind that most gamers don?t play at 800x600 with 0xAA/0xAF. The vast majority of you will crank up the screen resolution and graphics settings in-game; greater than 50% will also turn on AA/AF in most games (Crysis perhaps being the one exception). Under these conditions, CPU performance doesn?t matter, instead the GPU becomes the bottleneck. And as you saw in our benchmarks, the Radeon 4870/Phenom combo was just as potent as the Q6600/Radeon 4870 system.
So, essentially what you're saying through all the linked reviews, evolucion8, is that AMD just released a Phenom that finally competes with a cpu Intel released approx. 18 months ago. Now that's progress....and I noticed a lack of comparisons with the newest generation of quad core Intel chips, just comparisons to Intel's old quad core. Seems sort of unfair to Intel to compare a new cpu from AMD to an old Intel cpu when there is a newer generation out there.....guess the reviewers didn't want to embarrass AMD any more than they had to.
evolucion8
Platinum Member
- Jun 17, 2005
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Yeah probably, but considering that AMD is aiming at the $2XX price range, for sure it won't be competitive against more expensive Intel CPU's.
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