Flash dims AMD&#39;s revenue outlook
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With the economy slowly turning up, upgrading hardware has been on businesses radar in the past 12 months as their number two priority.
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A negative financial update from  Advanced Micro Devices Inc. late on Monday raised a potentially  ominous sign for semiconductor stocks ahead of Tuesday's  bellwether earnings report from Intel Corp.
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U.S. stocks to watch on Tuesday:  SILICON STORAGE TECHNOLOGY SSTI.O: The flash memory company  said its fourth-quarter revenue would fall below expectations.  Its stock closed at $7.01 on the Nasdaq.
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Once more, with feeling: Why is AMD on the lam, and how can it get back up?
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Watch your portfolio: Company expects a sharp loss as flash memory prices fall.
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The high-end computer maker says revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2005 will be lower than previously projected.
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Intel Corp., the world&#39;s biggest maker of semiconductors, reduced its third-quarter revenue forecast Thursday, blaming lower-than-expected demand for flash memory and PC chips.
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At the opening of an analyst meeting this morning, the president of AMD lowered expectations for his company, saying it no longer needs to produce the best performing CPUs, and hinted at scaling back its R&D.
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Credit Suisse First Boston maintained a &quot;neutral&quot; rating on Advanced Micro Devices (nyse: AMD - news - people ), saying third-quarter earnings fell below expectations but that fourth-quarter outlook appears surprisingly healthy.
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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.
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Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  Inc. AMD.N on Tuesday reported a quarterly loss from a  year-earlier profit following a reduced forecast it gave last  week.
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AMD has delayed general availability of some key products until early next year, when it projects the chips, along with other new processors, will return it to profitability.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD)  , the world's second-largest maker of computer  microprocessors, said on Tuesday it expects its declining  market share to bottom out and return to an upward trend by the  end of the year.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday reported a $44 million third-quarter profit from a loss a year earlier, and predicted
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Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  on Tuesday reported a quarterly loss from a year-earlier profit following a reduced forecast it gave last week.
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NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Advanced Micro Devices drew praise, and some concerns from Wall Street on Friday after the chipmaker met its lowered third-quarter financial targets.
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Earnings reports from IBM, Intel, and AMD and acquisition news from Oracle and Sun did nothing to calm IT investor fears about an uncertain U.S. economy this week.The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index has gotten off to its slowest start in years. Even though the Nasdaq finished 2007 up by 9.8 percent for the year, it has been sliding steadily in the past few weeks.More analysts are starting to forecast a recession. U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, testifying Thursday before the House Budget Committee, warned that the risks of an economic downturn are growing. Though he said an economic stimulus package, including low interest rates, could help avoid recession, IT investors are clearly worried. After President George Bush endorsed some of Bernanke&#39;s comments about stimulus, a Friday morning market rally fizzled out by the end of the day.IBM, which issued a preliminary earnings report Monday and its full results Thursday, had good news for its investors.&#160;IBM said that it would post $28.9 billion in revenue for the 2007 quarter, a 10 percent jump from the same period one year earlier. Fourth-quarter earnings are $2.80 per share, up 24 percent and above analyst expectations. But the company said results were helped mainly by strong sales in Asia, Europe, and emerging markets -- not the U.S.IBM shares rose $5.26 to close at $102.93 Monday when it issued its preliminary report and sparked a temporary jump in tech stocks overall. But ultimately most technology companies did not fare well on the market this week.AMD on Thursday reported a loss for the fourth quarter&#160;due mostly to charges connected to its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI. AMD had a net loss of $1.8 billion and revenue of only $1.8 billion. Because the loss was smaller than expected, the beleaguered chip maker was rewarded in a down market Friday, when its shares rose by $0.70 to close at $7.04Meanwhile,&#160;Intel Tuesday announced a revenue increase for the fourth quarter that fell short of analysts&#39; estimates, in part due to weak prices for memory chips. The company said revenue was $10.7 billion, up 10.5 percent, but missed the $10.8 billion estimated by analysts polled by Thomson Financial. Intel shares lost $2.81 Wednesday to close at $19.88, further declining during the rest of the week.The Intel first-quarter revenue outlook is particularly disappointing, according to CitiGroup Capital Markets analyst Glen Yeung. Yeung expects a downward revision of the 2008 revenue outlook because while Intel is benefiting from market share gains against AMD, the U.S. economy is having a worse impact than expected.Acquisitions did provide some excitement this week.&#160;Oracle Wednesday announced a deal to buy BEA Systems for about $8.5 billion. Oracle shares gained $0.61 to close at $21.92 Wednesday on the news, flattening out over the rest of the week in the down market. The deal makes Oracle the biggest player in middleware, ahead of even IBM, pointed out JMP securities analyst Patrick Walravens in a research note.Sun&#39;s $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, also announced Wednesday, was looked on favorably by traders as well. Sun is buying an open-source database used by some of the most widely trafficked Web sites in the world, such as Facebook and Google. Sun also said that next week it expects to report net income of $89 million for the quarter ending Dec. 31, compared to a loss of $56 million for the same period in 2006. Sun shares gained $0.55 Wednesday to close at $15.53, and rose slightly over the rest of the week even as most other stocks declined.