CPU watchtower

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).