What’s the matter with AMD? The number two chip maker in the whole world just posted some numbers that don’t reflect too kindly on its performance over the last few months. The big, bad Sunnyvale, Calif.-based corp lost $416 million last quarter; about $195 million of that was related to a corporate spinoff (see: GlobalFoundries). When put into scary percentages, AMD’s sales fell off 21 percent. Meanwhile, Intel, what with its Core 2 Duo and, more importantly, its Atom, continues to hum along nicely, expecting sales to rise for this same quarter. So what gives, AMD?
A few things, it looks like. One, you can’t ignore the fact that we’ve been in an economic funk for the past several months. People can’t as easily drop a few hundred dollars on a system pieced together from Newegg parts.
But then why isn’t Intel doing as poorly? Well, if you buy a netbook, those tiny, pointless computers that are all the rage these days (unless your name is “Apple, Inc.”), odds are you’ll find an Intel Atom processor in there. How the Atom compares to AMD’s Nano is the subject of many a message board thread, but message board threads don’t pay the bills.
(Sales of ATI GPUs aren’t doing so great, either, for whatever reason. That’s also not helping AMD’s bottom line now that it owns ATI.)
So, yeah. How about the fight for La Liga this year? Pretty damn interesting.
Photo: Flickr
Not good, I may be an nvidia fanboy, but I can’t have amd/ati dying off! I have to pay enough for new hardware as it is. I need amd’s competition to bring ludicrous prices down to the ridiculous level.
Intel spends about 5.8 billion every year on R&D, while AMD is around 1.9 billion. In the long run, this R&D is going to be very important to maintain a lead. AMD is really going to need a killer product or two to avoid losing the long term battle with Intel.
As a consumer, I don’t want to see everyone using just one brand either, that opens up the possibilities of a monopoly just too much.
It took next to nothing in R&D for Intel to come up with the dumbed down Atom and marry it to an ancient power hungry chipset that needs a fan to cool it down.
The reason why AMD is floundering is because it is too late to the game – where is the bloody nano?
Plus AMD is in a unique position to marry nano with an ATI video part that can at least handle HD without sputtering to a halt like the Atom. Finally, AMD might be smart enough to not firce netbook makers to limit screen size. C’mon AMD what are you guys doing? This can’t be that hard!