Intel, AMD Don't See Demand Falling Off Cliff
23976
Despite fluctuating stock prices, AMD and Intel assure investors that microprocessor market remains strong; analysts agree.
674841
The quad-core server chip won't appear until later this year, but AMD's trying to show potential customers the chips are up and running.
426588
As Intel pursues a new path with improved multi-core chips, AMD says itâs already one step ahead. Intel told the world this week that there is no race to market the next generation of microchips.
22264
Intel missed its earnings projection, but its inventories dropped. Or did they? Bill Mann thinks not.
426032
Intel Corp.&#39;s forecast of faltering demand for electronics such as personal computers and mobile phones heightened concern that consumer spending is declining.
700803
Intel Corp. , which has  been losing market share in computer processors to Advanced  Micro Devices Inc. , now looks better placed to weather  a brutal price war that seems set to worsen.
288101
With a few strong years of market gains and product reviews, AMD isn't about to rest on its laurels.
641670
Dual-core chips that AMD and Intel plan to bring to market next year won't be sharing their memories.
510323
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- With Intel Corp. apparently poised to announce the latest stage of its restructuring effort, speculation has centered not on whether the world's largest chip maker would be cutting jobs, but on how many.
465771
With stronger profits to report, Intel's looking forward to this week. Struggling AMD, on the other hand, will hope it goes by quickly.
435079
Faced with weak demand for PCs and technical limits on the speed of its products, Intel is betting on a future in which every chip it makes contains what amounts to two computers.
158706
As this year comes to a close, AMD executives won&#39;t be sorry to put 2007 behind them. Battered by rising debt, shrinking market share and mounting financial losses, AMD is counting on a comeback in 2008. But can the struggling chip maker make good on its promises to customers and investors that better times lie ahead?Many of AMD&#39;s current troubles are tied to Barcelona, the first version of its Quad-Core Opteron processor.&#160;Repeated delays of this chip weakened AMD&#39;s finances and undermined confidence in the company&#39;s ability to deliver new products as promised. Rebuilding that lost confidence among corporate users and the financial community won&#39;t be easy and the company can ill afford further missteps.Over the next six months, there are several milestones that AMD must hit in order to get back on track. The first, and arguably most important, involves volume shipments of Barcelona, scheduled to happen during the first quarter. AMD desperately needs this chip to shore up flagging revenue from its commercial business and to take back ground lost recently to Intel in the server market.With a bug that was recently discovered in Barcelona fixed, AMD expects the latest version of the chip to start coming out of its manufacturing plants in January. Barcelona shipments are expected to rise throughout the first quarter, reaching &quot;full volumes&quot; and widespread availability of servers based on the chip during the second quarter, according to Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.Another early milestone to look out for involves Shanghai, the second version of the Quad-Core Opteron chip that&#39;s set for volume production during the second half of 2008. AMD will produce Shanghai with a 45-nanometer manufacturing process that is one generation ahead of the 65-nanometer process used to make Barcelona.The numbers used to describe chip manufacturing processes refer to the average size of the smallest features that can be created on a chip. The smaller these features can be made, the better. Making these features smaller gives chip makers the ability to shrink the overall size of a chip, thereby reducing unit manufacturing costs, or to add new features. Chips made using a more advanced process may also consume less power and run faster than other versions. But semiconductor production is as much art as it is science, and moving to a more advanced process is fraught with risks.In the case of Shanghai, AMD will take advantage of the 45-nanometer process to triple the size of the Level 3 (L3) cache, from 2M bytes in Barcelona to 6M bytes. The L3 cache is a shared pool of memory that can be accessed by all four cores on the chip. Each core has 512K bytes of Level 2 (L2) cache. When data is moved out of the L2 cache, it moves into the L3 cache instead of main memory, meaning that the core can access this information more quickly than would otherwise be possible.Like AMD&#39;s existing server lineup, Barcelona and Shanghai also include an on-chip memory controller that further helps to increase performance.The memory structure used in the Quad-Core Opteron is different from Intel&#39;s server chips, which do not use an L3 cache and do not have an on-chip memory controller. Instead, Intel&#39;s quad-core Xeon 7300 server chips have 8M bytes of shared L2 cache. Since Intel processors actually pack two dual-core chips inside a single package, the L2 cache is divided into two parts, with 4M bytes on each silicon chip. Intel&#39;s processors do not use an on-chip memory controller.Boosting the Quad-Core Opteron&#39;s L3 cache with Shanghai should give AMD&#39;s quad-core chips the opportunity to stretch their legs, but the company has to make them first. The first working samples of Shanghai are due out of AMD&#39;s factory in Dresden, Germany, in January, according to recent remarks by Mario Rivas, executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group. If these samples arrive late or suffer from unexpected technical problems, this could delay volume production of Shanghai to late 2008 or even early 2009. Conversely, working samples that arrive on schedule and meet or exceed expectations would give AMD an added boost.Besides the server segment, there are a couple of key product milestones on AMD&#39;s roadmap for desktop and mobile processors that bear watching as well.For example, the company plans a first-quarter rollout of Perseus, a package of chips aimed at PCs for the corporate market and centered on a quad-core or triple-core processor and an RS780 or SB700 chipset. A dual-core version will also be rolled out. During the second quarter, AMD plans to roll out Puma, a chip package designed for notebooks. Puma is based on a new processor, called Griffin, expected to offer better performance and power efficiency than AMD&#39;s existing line of mobile processors.AMD plans to offer additional details of its plans and upcoming products at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas during January, Hughes said.
27421
(InfoWorld) - Despite a revenue plunge of 9.5 percent, Intel Corp. will retain its title as king of the hill for the worldwide semiconductor industry, posting annual revenue of $31.3 billion for 2006, according to Gartner. Intel's top competitors will post much better numbers, all recording double-digit revenue growth as they enjoy strong sales in dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory chips, wireless semiconductors and NAND flash, according to preliminary results for 2006 that Gartner released Thursday. Overall, the market is set to grow 11.3 percent to $261.4 billion. Intel's sinking results in this rising tide will cause its market share to sag from 14.7 percent in 2005 to 12 percent. The company was only able to record its 15th straight year as a market leader because it had banked such a large lead on smaller rivals like Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (with 7.9 percent market share) and Texas Instruments Inc. (4.5 percent). Intel's problem was that its competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) sold superior processors through the third quarter, judging by the chips' balance of price and performance in the server and consumer enthusiast segments, Gartner said. Intel lost even more revenue as the two companies launched a price war, which hurt Intel more than AMD as the larger company. Meanwhile, Samsung strengthened its position as the industry's second-biggest vendor by selling more DRAM, static RAM (SRAM) and NAND flash chips than any other company. Samsung will grow 12.4 percent to reach revenues of $20.6 billion, followed by Texas Instruments growing 17.4 percent to $11.9 billion and Infineon Technologies AG growing 29 percent to reach $10.6 billion, Gartner said. The bottom half of the top 10 were all predicted to record revenue of single-digit billions, including STMicroelectronics NV, Toshiba Corp., Renesas Technology Corp., Hynix Semiconductor Inc., AMD and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The semiconductor industry will grow more slowly in 2007, likely rising by a high single-digit percentage compared to its 11.3 percent rise in 2006, Gartner said. The high points of the coming year will include continuing strength in the DRAM market and strong consumer electronics sales.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
116616
Intel Corp., the world's largest computer chip company, is not suffering from overcapacity and new areas are emerging that will increase global demand for microprocessors, its chief executive said Friday.
507329
In a rough year for semi stocks, Advanced Micro Devices has thrived. Is there more room to run? NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Tech stocks have had a nice year-end rally but that hasn&#39;t been enough to pull the chip sector out of the red.
196920
Well, just about For the last six months, AMD's market share has been on the wane as arch-rival Intel regained much of the lead it lost to the smaller chip maker during 2006. But new figures show AMD's slide may have come to a halt.â¦
219725
Intel on Tuesday released third-quarter financial results showing that it continues to struggle to sell a substantial stockpile of computer chips as demand for personal computers remains slow.