Intel having a hard time competing with AMD
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Recent months have seen AMD taking an upper hand over Intel in the chip market. And the latest news is another new indication that Intel is struggling to keep up with the pace they once spearheaded.
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A strong demand for its computer chips brightens otherwise dismal year for the maker of semiconductors. By Laurie J. Flynn. SAN FRANCISCO -- Eking out a strong finish to end a disappointing year, Intel Corp
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Intel's release this week of the 'Tigerton' Xeon 7300 chip is challenged by AMD's contention that the tech is merely packaged dual-cores, and not native quad-core.
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Loved and lost AMD's obsession with top server and PC makers has proved costly. The chip maker claims to have focused on so-called Tier 1 OEMs at the expense of its longtime channel partners and now blames declining channel sales for its expected first quarter revenue miss.â¦
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After its recent delays and missteps, chip maker sets its sights on a dual-core future. Intel will look to a multicore future during the Fall Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco this week as it tries
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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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.
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Over the past six months, the usual strict hierarchies of the chip world have seen some rearranging. Perennial underdog Advanced Micro Devices (AMD:NYSE - news - research) has made impressive strides with
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Processor could steal spotlight from AMD, Intel's forthcoming dual-core chips.
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(InfoWorld) - The leading quote from this weekâs news comes from Intel CEO Paul Otellini: "We're doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we invented and then stopped doing after Pentium 4, shame on us," Otellini said. "We fell off it -- mea culpa, we screwed up -- and now we're back on that pace." Otellini was speaking at a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, but regardless of the venue, every time a CEO speaks, he or she is using analysts and journalists as a conduit to shareholders. When a CEO takes a podium to apologize to shareholders, it tends to be the board of directorsâ idea. This is an obtuse, though profuse apology. The screwup to which Otellini refers is his decision to clear Intelâs shelves of x86 property and dump it on AMD in one drop so that Intel could end the year with a bang, having had the last volley in the CPU wars. It did that. But one could liken Intelâs strategy in latter 2006 to a massive spread of fireworks thatâs sent up simultaneously. Everybody goes nuts at the spectacle of it, but after that brief rush, all thatâs left is silence and smoke, soon followed by the glow of taillights. As tacky as it is to quote oneself, I put Otelliniâs present bind succinctly in a column I wrote last August: âIntel shot its entire wad on Core microarchitecture. From here, the only place Intel can go is bigger cache, more cores, and faster clocks.â Indeed, that sums up Intelâs plans for 2007, and thereâs no swaggering spin, distraction, or buzzword bending that can make up for the enormous technology gap between Core 2 and AMDâs reengineered Barcelona quad-core Opteron. It isnât likely that Intel can play engineering catch-up, given that Otellini has pink-slipped 10,500 workers. Otellini will have more than empty cupboards and empty desks to apologize for. He set a strategy to bulk up Intelâs manufacturing capacity and to jam up AMD by forcing prices down and leaving AMD unable to meet spiked market demand. Market demand is sagging, and if it returns, AMD has the capacity advantage: It has third-party foundries standing ready to stamp out AMD CPUs if need be. Another example of poor judgment is Otelliniâs fixation on CPUs and chip sets. AMDâs acquisition of ATI put Intelâs rival in the high-margin peripherals business as well as a growing role in high-performance chip sets for Intel desktop and notebook PCs. Intelâs hostile attitude toward chip-set makers drove graphics and chip-set giant Nvidia to make surprisingly close ties with AMD despite its purchase of Nvidiaâs sole competitor. If only it ended there. Recently, Intel informed the Delaware Federal District Court that it cannot produce relevant e-mail messages that were exchanged after the filing date of AMDâs antitrust suit. Intelâs letter to the court blames individual human error while heaping detailed praise on executivesâ document retention plan. Buried in the text is the Nixonian counterpoint, âSome of the tapes appear to have been recycled.â Itâs not that Otellini hasnât done anything right. He did put the brakes on NetBurst. He won an exclusive with Apple and got Sun Microsystems to add Intel to its product line. But in the minus column, Otellini lost the companyâs gold medal exclusive PC maker, Dell, and people will wonder whose inboxes those recycled tapes might have contained. Intelâs CEO should be gilding his parachute. If he lasts out the year, it will be because Intelâs board wisely takes its time to choose a replacement. My litmus test? Find someone who believes that Intelâs yearly sponsorship of the A. M. Turing Award matters more than convincing a judge in Delaware that evidence really, truly got lost. And find a CEO who, when he or she apologizes for lousy decisions, uses the pronouns âIâ and âme.â
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Somehow, Intel has skillfully avoided use of the metaphor "two-by-four" to represent its latest ultra-high-end CPU platform rollout this morning at GDC in San Francisco. But AMD might be feeling like it's been hit by one.
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Further pitting itself against Intel Corp.&#39;s Pentium-M offerings, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
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(InfoWorld) - As price competition takes its toll, AMD Thursday posted its third consecutive quarterly loss, saying that although revenue was relatively solid, it suffered a sharp second-quarter drop in income. Revenue for the quarter was $1.38 billion, an improvement from $1.22 billion a year earlier. But the company reported a net loss of $600 million, or a loss of $1.09 per share, a big drop from net income of $89 million, or $0.18 per share, a year earlier. A big part of the loss was due to restructuring costs and a $130 million, or $0.24 per share, charge related toÂ the acquisition of graphics-chip maker ATI last year. One piece of good news was that in the face of stiff price competition from Intel, AMD said its second quarter gross margin was 34 percent, excluding one-time charges, an improvement over its 31 percent margin in the first quarter of 2007. "We achieved a 12 percent sequential revenue increase, improved the gross margin, and won back microprocessor unit and revenue market share," said Robert J. Rivet, AMD's CFO, in a statement accompanying the company results. Looking ahead, AMD forecast that third-quarter revenue would increase in line with traditional seasonal growth rates. Though that does not point to a big increase in profit in the near future, traders reacted positively to the upbeat news on revenue and margins, driving up company shares by $0.32 to $15.78 in after-hours trading. Nevertheless, the second-quarter gross margin, for example, was still a far cry from AMD's 57 percent gross margin in the second quarter of 2006. Rivet acknowledged that to instill confidence in the company, "we must improve our financial results." AMD faces an uphill battle. After gaining ground, in terms of market share and technology, on Intel two years ago by coming out with dual-core processors, AMD suffered last year as Intel battled back with its own line of multicore chips. In the longer term, AMD is pinning its hopes to a great degree on its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip, due out in August. That chip will compete with Intel's dual-core "Woodcrest" and quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon processors launched last year. AMD also needs to stay on track and hit its 2009 goal to bring its new Fusion chip -- made with ATI technology -- to market.
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Advanced Micro Devices is counting on a new high-performance computer chip to hold on to hard-fought market share it has won from its principal rival, Intel.
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By Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Mar. 6--Intel said it may not be able to provide all the electronic documents that rival Advanced Micro Devices is requesting in an antitrust lawsuit because of human error.   In a letter Monday to U.S.
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The Intel chip, once expected to dominate the server market and even creep into PCs, takes yet another knock.
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InfoWorld - Amid further delays of AMD's quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.