CPU watchtower

FortuNet Makes a Fortunate Decision on Dividends

The company now lacks cash, which makes it more risky if it encounters hard times. Most of the best companies (like Apple) maintain substantial cash cushions.

Advanced Micro: Despite Meeting, The Wait for Details Continues

AMD better get moving. Intel is bent on copying everything AMD did and using it to slaughter AMD. Intel is preparing Nehalem by copying Opteron features like Hypertransport, NUMA, the crossbar switch, and monolithic quad-core. With those features in place, Intel will steal the 2P and 4P server business away from AMD. If I were part of AMD management, I would have AMD copy pieces of Intel's Core 2 microarchitecture, like macro ops fusion and memory disambiguation. And increase clock speed. Fight fire with fire! Yeah, well, of course it won't happen. With clueless Hector around the company is headed to the grave.

AMD's New Roadmap: Can It Find the Way?

AMD better get moving. Intel is bent on copying everything AMD did and using it to slaughter AMD. Intel is preparing Nehalem by copying Opteron features like the crossbar switch, Hypertransport, monolithic quad-core, and the NUMA design. With those features, Intel will steal the 4 socket server business away from AMD. If I were part of AMD management, I would have AMD copy pieces of Intel's Core 2 microarchitecture, like macro ops fusion and memory disambiguation. And increase clock speed. Fight fire with fire! Yeah, well, of course it won't happen. With clueless Hector around the company is headed to the grave.

Advanced Micro: Despite Meeting, The Wait for Details Continues

It's not necessary to know what Hector's plans for manufacturing, asset light, or asset smart are. Whatever it is, it will be a failure. Under Hector, everything fails to make a profit. Examples are the Personal Internet Communicator, the overly expensive purchase of ATI, the flash memory business, Alchemy MIPS, snd native quad-core. Only a clueless Hector would waste so much cash to buy ATI at too high a price. Now he says he is structuring AMD to make money without having to depend on continuous performance leadership over Intel. Impossible. What a joke! AMD Phenom and Barcelona are simply too far behind Intel's quad-core processors in frequency, IPC, and power consumption for AMD to succeed in any way. Many AMD executives have quit in the past year. It's time for Hector to get out and hand the reigns to someone else.

AMD Product Ramp-up and New Factory Plan: What Gives?

As long as AMD wants to be a value player, as opposed to being a manufacturer of superior higher-priced products, it will lose money. There is no money to be made by making processors for computers sold at Walmart or by catering to impoverished people around the world. They have to hire gifted and brilliant employees and improve their product lineup. AMD management has to realize this or slowly sink the company into bankruptcy.

AMD management continues making bad decisions. For example, Athlons and Turions (including the forthcoming Turion Ultra) are not being updated to support SSE4a. It appears Athlons and Turions will continue to be sold for quite a long time, and will become incompatible with Phenom and quad-core Opteron which do support SSE4a. All of these will be sold to corporations which may demand compatibility as a requirement for purchase. So AMD has been promulgating SSE4a and certainly wants to drive its adoption, but will not even support it in all its processors sold to corporations. If I needed a notebook which supports AMD's SSE4a, where can I buy one?

Finally, AMD still has not fixed the disk controller problems in its southbridge chips (SB600 and SB700), which means engineering execution remains sub par.

AMD: A Dog Chasing Its Tail

Marketing is secondary. Historically, AMD's stock runs the highest when AMD has a superior product, and falls in the gutter when AMD has a lagging product.

Jerry Sanders says it's all about the product. He says if AMD doesn't have a great product, engineered properly, then AMD has no future. He goes on to say everybody should do everything they can so that AMD engineers are the most productive.

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AMD: A Dog Chasing Its Tail

The article has everything backwards. AMD came closer to breakeven but does not have great technology. Margins have improved in its most recently completed quarter.

Here is the correct story. A couple of years ago, AMD led. Now AMD is trailing the competition in technology, performance, and power dissipation. At this time, AMD has been forced into the low-end computer market. The problem seems to be that AMD does not know how to improve its quad core processors to make them more competitive. What is holding back the clock rate? What is leading to more power dissipation? So far AMD has not demonstrated the engineering expertise to address these issues.

AMD: Is The Worst Over?

AMD calls its quad core processor fixed? It ain't fixed till it's running reliably at 3.0 GHz. Management makes it appear the TLB errata is the only issue with quad core. It's not.

AMD management can't face up to its own problems and tries to put a positive spin on everything. Stop pretending there's nothing wrong. Look at the complacent Hector say "we're really thrilled..." Baloney!

Hector, if you are thrilled, why not show some insider buying like Jerry Sanders used to do?

AMD Management Has Serious Communication Problems

AMD management suffers from a credibility problem and a lack of detail in nearly all statements. When management says AMD’s 65 nm process is in excellent shape, they mean it works great up to 2.4 GHz and it has a low defect density. But how is 65 nm for 3.0 GHz chips and beyond? When Dirk Meyer says he knows how to fix the quad-core problem, is he referring to the TLB errata or the low clockspeed problem or the power dissipation problem at higher frequencies? AMD’s management makes ambiguous statements which are missing important details. Unless it is an obvious problem, they tend to hide the facts, and only later do you find out AMD has encountered limitations preventing it from producing higher-end products.

AMD Needs a Multi-Core Killer App

AMD quad core does have some advantages: better performance on multi-threaded memory-intensive code and much less power dissipation when idling. One place where AMD will certainly help save on electricity bills is in data centers where many servers sit at idle throughout the night. In other areas, AMD lacks a performance edge. There are a couple main reasons for this. First, the L2 cache is too small. Barcelona's L2 cache at 512 KB per core is even less than that for the current dual core Opteron and far less than what is available on Intel CPU's. The other reason is that the Intel Core 2 architecture executes more instructions per cycle: up to 5 per clock cycle per core if you include the macro ops fusion feature, while Barcelona comes in at a maximum of 3. For AMD to win, it cannot stay one step behind. One has to wonder why AMD makes design decisions that leave it one step behind. It is even behind on clock speed. Its fewer pipeline stages makes it more difficult to introduce the product at higher clock speeds. Compare that to the Intel Tigerton or the IBM POWER6 which are available at high clock speeds immediately upon introduction. AMD will have to tweak more to get the frequency up (another delay).