New AMD Desktop Processors Trigger Price Drops
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The introduction this morning by AMD of new dual-core desktop processors, including the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, and the company's subsequent lowering of prices of existing processors, may have nearly or completely equalized the price/performance balance between AMD and Intel processors.
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TechWeb - The processor&#39;s sweet spot will be in four-way servers, and midrange two-way servers, but AMD will need to show increased performance for the price if it wants to add customers, analysts suggest.
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Not everyone is ready to do a complete switch over to the new Intel LGA 775 platform quite yet and perhaps for good reason. Should you decided you would like to say take a peek at it without having to &quot;Sell
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A new chipset offers high-end features for less cash, an effort to spark PC makers to update their low-price offerings.
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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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Aggressive 1333MHz FSB pricing strategy Intel has slashed the price of a number of its desktop and mobile processors, but the cuts, while deep, aren't as extensive as anticipated. However, the move confirms an aggressive pricing plan for the chip maker's 1333MHz frontside bus parts.â¦
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It's good news for users: as CPU and memory chip sales fall, so will prices--to vendors' dismay.
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Seeing red over Budapest Cray has blamed delayed shipments of Opteron-based servers for a likely massive fall in 2007 revenue.â¦
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Still carrying the weight of costs related to last year&#39;s&#160;acquisition of graphics vendor ATI, AMD recorded its fourth straight quarter of net losses Thursday.The company reported a net loss of $396 million, or $0.71 per share, for the third quarter, compared to net income of $136 million for the year-earlier quarter. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had estimated a loss of $0.62 per share. The loss included a $120 million charge related to its acquisition of ATI last year.AMD recorded third-quarter revenue of $1.632 billion for the quarter ending Sept. 29, an 18 percent year-over-year increase.The company sold a record number of microprocessors during the quarter, AMD said in a news release. Microprocessor unit shipments increased 19 percent year-over-year and mobile processor shipments increased 68 percent, AMD said.After months of delays,&#160;AMD finally released its latest quad-core Barcelona processor in September.&#160;AMD is locked in a quad-core chip battle with Intel, which shipped more than 2 million quad-core processors during the quarter, Intel said in its earnings call on Tuesday.AMD has already lost ground in the market for server chips to Intel in recent quarters. AMD&#39;s quad-core Opteron processor, also called Barcelona, opened up a revenue stream for company during the quarter, the company said.
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Microsoft has introduced pricier higher-end versions, as other PC components have fallen in price. So how does it all add up?
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AMD's Triple-Core Phenom processor, which will hit desktops at the beginning of next year, may be the oddball that the CPU market never expected. BetaNews spoke at length to one of the people who came up with the idea: AMD's desktop brand manager Simon Solotko. Is there enough of a market in-between high-end dual core and low-end quad-core, to sneak in a running attack up the middle?
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It may sound like carping coming from a big electronics company, but the price drops have surprised manufacturers and analysts alike.
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Cancels release of desktop chip in shift away from megahertz towards cache tweaks to improve processor performance.
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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.The biggest hit went to its quad-core microprocessor, code-named Barcelona, which it needs to compete against Intel among server vendors. The chips, along with AMD&#39;s desktop platform, Phenom, won&#39;t be generally available to customers until the first quarter of next year. The products were supposed to ship in volume by the end of this year, but&#160;a technical design error in the chips caused AMD to slow the schedule so it could apply a fix, said Dirk Meyer, the company&#39;s president and COO in a meeting with analysts on Thursday.The company&#39;s Puma platform, a set of chips aimed at laptop PCs, will also be delayed until the second quarter of next year, a costly miss considering the fact that the laptop PC market is growing at around 30 percent per year.AMD also reduced its planned spending on new production lines to $1.1 billion from a previous estimate of $1.7 billion and said all its business divisions wouldn&#39;t return to profitability until next year.The statements caused AMD&#39;s stock to fall as much as 5 percent during early trading on the New York Stock Exchange, before rebounding to down just 1.8 percent, at $8.81 in the afternoon. The market was still open as of this writing.AMD executives apologized for missteps, such as the delay in Barcelona.&quot;We blew it, we&#39;re very humbled by it, we learned from it, and we&#39;re not going to do it again,&quot; said Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO of AMD. He said AMD would go back to its habit of under-promising and over-delivering.To start, the company will be on a path to break even financially by the second quarter of next year and return to profitability by the end of the third quarter, he said. The financial performance will be boosted by the launch of several new products in graphics, chipsets, digital TV processors, and more, not including the delayed products.The company forecast its processor shipments will rise at least 15 percent next year, while graphics processor shipment growth will be greater than 6 percent, digital TV processors more than 13 percent, and handheld chips up 8 percent.AMD&#39;s gross margin will rise to between 46 percent and 50 percent next year, up from 37 percent during the past four quarters, said Bob Rivet, chief financial officer of AMD.&quot;We&#8217;re in a massive product refresh. In 2007, we were living on some old stuff. 2008 is all new stuff, and we believe it will yield goodness,&quot; he said.
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(InfoWorld) - Global PC sales have slowed a tad over the past few weeks as the market waits for Intel to announce new price reductions, market researchers said. The world's largest chip maker is widely expected to publish a new price list on July 22 that shows lower prices for microprocessors aimed at the desktop PC market. The company regularly updates its pricing, but doesn't disclose when or how much prices will change, an Intel spokesman said Thursday. Still, PC makers in Taiwan, as well as analysts and market researchers said they receive word of price changes ahead of time, and that the expected Intel price reductions were the reason Advanced Micro DevicesÂ announced microprocessor price cuts earlier this month. AMD slashed prices on its top-of-the-line desktop PC microprocessors by a few hundred dollars, and now offers six AMD Athlon dual-core microprocessors for below $100 each. The AMD move was aimed atÂ pre-empting Intel's anticipated July reductions, according to a report by investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group. The expected price cuts are a continuation of Intel's battle for market share against rival AMD. It's a fight that has been great for users, particularly in desktop PCs. Microprocessors are among the most expensive parts in a PC, so price cuts on the chips usually lead to better deals for users, either on lower PC prices or more add-ons, such as better DVD drives, more memory, or larger hard disks. The market share battles have also prompted both Intel and AMD to boost technology, resulting in more bang for a user's buck. The price war hasn't been so good for the companies. Intel's stock fell 4.8 percent to end at $25.06 per share on the NASDAQ stock exchange Wednesday, a day afterÂ the company reportedÂ a lower than expected profit margin for the second quarter. Analysts blamed the price war. The fight with Intel has caused AMD to report weaker earnings in recent quarters, and analysts are not optimistic about its second quarter earnings, which it will report later Thursday in the U.S. "We believe the worse than expected gross margin, higher than expected R&D [research and development] spending and low quality earnings leverage (tax rate changes, sold depreciation, etc.) will cast a shadow over [Intel's] stock," wrote Michael Masdea, chip analyst at Credit Suisse Securities (USA), in a recent report. He predicted that Intel gained market share on AMD in the second quarter, based onÂ its earnings report. Market researchers were not able to say exactly how muchÂ the PC marketÂ has slowed over the past few weeks, but indicated that the weaker sales have shown up in various places in the PC component supply chain. Slower trading in the DRAM (dynamic RAM) market, for example, caused prices to drop last week, according to DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online DRAM trading site. The company blamed the anticipated Intel price adjustments for the declines. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Anyone looking to add a bit more memory to their computers won a gift from the DRAM (dynamic RAM) industry. Heavy competition has caused prices to tumble and industry analysts predict further price declines. The contract price of the most widely used DRAM chips, 512Mb, DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) chips that run at 667MHz dropped 12.5 percent from two weeks ago to $1.75 each as of Thursday, a new low for this year according to DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online trading site for the chips. That's great news for users for three reasons. DRAM price declines increase the likelihood that PC vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell will add more DRAM to the computers they sell, or offer extra DRAM as an incentive; it give users a chance to buy more DRAM on the cheap; and it generallyÂ spurs memory chip makers to move forward on new technologyÂ that will ultimately increase computing performance. Contract DRAM prices for DDR2-667 chips have plunged 70.5 percent so far this year to the Thursday low. The main reason is because memory chip makers built too many new production lines in anticipationÂ of strong demand for Microsoft's Windows Vista, which requires more DRAM per PC, as well as because stronger DRAM prices in general for the past few years was a sign to some that the market had stabilized, analysts say. DRAM prices may continue to decline a bit further, but downside appears limited, according to Gartner. Today's pricing is at a similar level to the lows reached in May of this year, when DRAM makers refused to sell because the price had hit their cash cost. "However, we may see some activity below this level, because some brokers and distributors who are holding inventory may be prepared to sell at a lower price to clear stock," the market researcher said. Over the years, DRAM makers have tended to place more emphasis on winning market share than on profits, and the current DRAM price declines are symptomatic of their battles. Companies have invested so much money in new factories that the increased output has caused a glut, leading to price declines. Prices for DRAM chips fellÂ almost 40 percent in the first half of this year, compared to the first half of 2006, offsetting a 66 percent increase in unit shipments, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Contract prices are typically renegotiated between DRAM makers and PC vendors every two weeks. Around four fifths of all DRAM is sold by contract, while the rest is sold on the spot market, just like commodities such as oil and gold. Â
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Intel has slashed prices by up to 35 percent on some of its  Pentium 4 and Itanium processors, bringing down the costs of some desktop and notebook computers by as much as &#36;200.