AMD Climbs on Dell&#39;s Server Chip Interest
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Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD:NYSE - news - research) took a joyride Friday as news circulated that server giant Dell (DELL:Nasdaq - news - research) may adopt AMD&#39;s server chip.
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Processor could steal spotlight from AMD, Intel's forthcoming dual-core chips.
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Dell Inc. Tuesday pointed to its adoption of processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) for pushing it to US$677 million in profit for the third quarter, though the company has delayed reporting final numbers due to an accounting investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
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InfoWorld - AMD hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market from&#160;its rival Intel&#160;on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor.
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High-end processors for computer servers will compete with an upcoming new product from AMD.
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Advanced Micro Devices hopes its new Opteron server chips will help lift the company out of the doldrums.
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In the fourth calendar quarter of last year, Intel made the most headway against arch-rival AMD in the server CPU market in several years, surging ahead in shipments and reportedly taking back a few points of market share. Now, AMD is working to take those points back and then some.
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Though there may be fewer consumer notebook and desktop computers with AMD processor options available online through Dell Direct today than there were last week, an AMD spokesperson told BetaNews that Dell is not backing away.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) captured nearly 10 percent of computer microchip market revenue in the third quarter, the highest level
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SuperPuppy writes &quot;Hardcoreware.net has rounded up three 2500+ Socket A processors from AMD. An AthlonXP, based on the Barton core (this particular one predates the locked multipliers we&#39;ve been seeing lately
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AMD's and Intel's new quad-core processors will lead to increased demand for high-end servers.
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Amid further delays of AMD&#39;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.AMD preempted the analyst meeting with the announcement Wednesday that it plans to take a material charge for impaired goodwill from its US$5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI. But AMD didn&#39;t say how big that charge will be, promising to announce the amount within four days -- a span of time that implies details of the charge will be revealed after the analyst meeting.Goodwill is a financial term that describes the difference between the price that one company paid to acquire another and the net value of the assets that it acquires. This difference, or goodwill, reflects the intangibles that a company acquires, such as the reputation and intellectual property of the acquired company.AMD initially recorded goodwill of $3.22 billion from the acquisition of ATI. That was reduced to $3.17 billion at the end of September, primarily due to changes in income-tax liabilities recorded by the company. AMD&#39;s decision to write off a significant portion of this goodwill is a recognition that ATI is no longer worth the price it paid last year.The expected charge further dims AMD&#39;s gloomy financial outlook. The company has so far lost $1.6 billion this year on sales of $4.2 billion. By comparison, AMD recorded a $410 million profit on sales of $3.9 billion during the first nine months of 2006. At the same time, AMD borrowed heavily this year to keep its operations moving, issuing $3.7 billion in notes that are convertible into company shares.AMD received a further boost last month with a $608 million investment from a company owned by the Abu Dhabi government, but the company still faces significant challenges.Those challenges are reflected in the decline of AMD&#39;s gross margin since last year, partly as a result of the ATI acquisition, which brought lower-margin products into AMD&#39;s lineup, but also because server chips represented a lower percentage of the company&#39;s microprocessor sales. Server chips are generally more expensive and have higher margins than processors used in desktops and notebooks, and strong sales of server chips would give a badly needed boost to AMD&#39;s financial situation.The problem is that AMD&#39;s latest server chip, the Quad-Core Opteron formerly known as&#160;Barecelona has been repeatedly delayed,&#160;giving rival Intel an opening to expand sales of its own server chips at AMD&#39;s expense.After recently discovering&#160;a bug in the Quad-Core Opteron that stopped shipments of the chip, AMD now expects the processor, launched in September, to finally ship in large volumes sometime during the first quarter of 2008. That means the Quad-Core Opteron might not be available to most customers until March, six months after its launch and more than one year after the first pre-production samples of the chip were made available to server makers.While analysts will be looking for more detailed guidance on when AMD expects to ship Quad-Core Opteron chips in volume, they will also be looking for information on the next version of the Quad-Core Opteron, called Shanghai. AMD promised to ship Shanghai during the middle of 2008, but the company has yet to produce working samples of the chip.&quot;We will have initial samples also in January. I&#39;m fairly confident that those puppies are going to boot, and then we can have a follow-up conference call and I&#39;ll tell you, &#39;The sucker is booting,&#39;&quot; said Mario Rivas, the executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group, responding to a question about Shanghai during a recent interview with CRN.Whether that means AMD will release Shanghai in mid-2008 as promised remains to be seen.Shanghai is a 45-nanometer &quot;shrink&quot; of the problematic Barcelona chip, which is produced using a 65-nanometer process. These numbers represent the average size of the smallest feature that can be created on a chip, and smaller is generally considered better.Moving to a more advanced production process offers chip makers several benefits, such as reducing unit production costs by making the chip smaller or adding more features, such as additional on-chip cache. But the move to a more advanced process also carries risks, such as the possibility of lower production yields that can result in limited availability or chips that run at lower clock speeds than expected.Along with these issues looming over AMD, there are questions about the future of Hector Ruiz, the company&#39;s CEO and chairman. As head of the company, Ruiz ultimately bears responsibility for the company&#39;s recent performance problems and the impending write down of goodwill from the ATI acquisition. For months, there has been speculation within the industry that Ruiz would be forced to step down from his current position.However, that&#39;s unlikely to happen, according to a Reuters report citing comments made by Ruiz in a television interview to be aired by CNBC Europe later today. During that interview, Ruiz named AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer as his successor, but scotched speculation he plans to step down next year, the report said.
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After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.&#39;s latest processor, a quad-core server chip called Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the market Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has pumped up the performance of its Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor and cooled down two single-core Athlon 64 processors. The top-of-the-range AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor is now the 6000+, with a clock speed of 3GHz and 2MB of L2 cache. It sells for $464 in quantities of 1,000 or more. The previous fastest model, the 5600+ with a clock speed of 2.8GHz, now sells for $326 in quantities of 1,000 or more. With its high-performance dual-core systems, AMD hopes to profit from the introduction of Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista, which places greater demands on computing hardware. There's no speed boost for the single-core Athlon 64 processor, but AMD is now manufacturing the 3500+ and 3800+ models using a 65-nanometer production process, reducing the chips' die-size and energy consumption while offering the same computing performance. The latest versions consume 45 watts, compared to 62 watts for the previous generation, in which the smallest features etched on the chips had a spacing of 90nm. The 3500+ sells for $88 in quantities of 1,000 or more, and the 3800+ for $93. The faster dual-core chips will appeal primarily to gaming enthusiasts, and will appear shortly in PCs from Alienware and Voodoo, the gaming PC divisions of Dell and Hewlett-Packard, respectively, said AMD. Fujitsu Siemens Computers (Holding) will use the lower-power processors in its Esprimo enterprise desktop range, which it promotes as an energy-efficient range, the company said. Two weeks ago, AMDÂ introduced new dual-core Opteron processorsÂ for servers that are either faster or consume less power than previous chips. While AMD had begun to pull ahead in the market for low-power server and desktop chips, IntelÂ is fighting back. Last month,Â Intel persuaded Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use its Xeon processors in future servers and workstations based on the x86 architecture. Sun had only used AMD chips in those machines in recent years, and will now use chips from both manufacturers. At the top of the scale, Intel took the lead in the market for quad-core server chips last November, with the launch of its Xeon 5300 series, previously known as Clovertown. AMD won't introduce its range of energy-efficient quad-core server processors, code-named Barcelona, until the middle of this year.
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InfoWorld - Advanced Micro Devices&#160;(AMD) is&#160;getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip.
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AMD has proved time and time again that its processors offer better performance than the competitionâs - and better value for money too.
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Dell president and CEO Kevin Rollins indicated that the company is actively considering including AMD processors in its server roster in the foreseeable future.