Analysts: AMD Beating Intel in Chip Design
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Analysts&#39; assessments came after Intel announced last week that it was scrapping plans to develop a 4-gigahertz version of its Pentium 4 chip.
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AMD is expected to unveil its most powerful desktop processors to date today, a few days after rival Intel disclosed changes to its desktop processor road map.
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Processor could steal spotlight from AMD, Intel's forthcoming dual-core chips.
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AMD winning on strained silicon? Maybe not, but either way, money can't buy Intel any love.
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For years, ATI played itself as the performance leader in the graphics space. But now as part of AMD, which is having a difficult time of late making its case for CPU performance, ATI may have to make like its new corporate parent for a little while.
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Intel will always have AMD to worry about in the PC business. In the mobile world, however, it's shaping up a bit differently.
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With two new Athlon 64 chips, AMD (NYSE: AMD) continues to push industry giant Intel in the battle for position in the desktop-processor space. AMD has launched the Athlon 64 FX-55 and Athlon 64 4000+, with an eye on carving a bigger niche in high-performance personal computing.
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In an announcement before semiconductor engineers in San Francisco this morning, AMD and IBM put forth proof of what could be their breakthrough process - their response to Intel in the race to reduction.  It could pull AMD back even with Intel by 2008, if Intel doesn't respond in the intervening months.
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Worldwide&#160;lawsuits against Intel&#160;and&#160;four straight quarterly losses&#160;have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies, but the merger remains on track, according to industry analysts.AMD&#39;s acquisition of ATI&#160;for $5.4 billion, announced in July 2006 and completed one year ago Thursday, was viewed as a potent weapon in AMD&#39;s attempt to dent Intel&#39;s domination of the x86 processor market.The lawsuits against Intel and&#160;financial losses&#160;came at a critical time, when AMD&#39;s management needed help in integrating the ATI acquisition and making ATI employees understand AMD&#39;s culture, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.AMD filed antitrust lawsuits alleging monopolistic behavior against Intel in the U.S. and Japan, and lodged complaints with the European Commission, the Korean Fair Trade Commission and Japan Fair Trade Commission.The distraction was compounded by the departure of key executives, including David Orton, former president and CEO of ATI, who resigned as executive vice president of AMD in July after only 10 months.AMD didn&#39;t have any internal problems, Peddie said, and Orton left on his own accord. &quot;A little redundancy will always occur in all organizations. It&#39;s not surprising to see people shift,&quot; Peddie said. However, outside speculation about the departure may have distracted AMD during the integration, he said.AMD also took an acquisition-related charge of $76 million, or $0.14 per share, in the third quarter of 2007 ending Sept. 29. That added to the quarterly net loss of $396 million.Despite the distractions, AMD is pulling its resources together to ensure the ATI merger goes smoothly.&quot;The merger has allowed AMD to merge its plans with ATI, which were very similar prior to the acquisition.&quot; Peddie said. Both companies wanted to amalgamate the CPU with the graphics processor, and the acquisition puts them in a position to do so.A successful merger could help AMD reach profitability in a few quarters and position it for success in the future, wrote Doug Freedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, in a research report.&quot;We believe ATI is turning the corner, which is likely material to AMD&#39;s quest for profitability,&quot; Freedman wrote.The acquisition of ATI hasn&#39;t shown an immediate benefit, but could help&#160;AMD in the long term&#160;when the company&#39;s &quot;Fusion&quot; project comes to fruition, Peddie said. Fusion is the code name for is AMD&#39;s next-generation processor design that is expected to combine high-performance graphics and CPU processing on a single die. The project was announced when the merger was completed. AMD is not prepared to talk about Fusion yet, but it is intended to bring the cost of PCs down and reduce power consumption, Peddie said.AMD also announced the &quot;Spider&quot; platform, which will include AMD&#39;s upcoming Phenom chips and high-end graphics processors to provide users with the &quot;ultimate visual experience&quot; in computing, said Dirk Meyer, AMD&#39;s president and chief operating officer, on the company&#39;s third-quarter earnings call last week.With all the attention focused on Phenom and Spider, ATI&#39;s involvement in other businesses gets sidetracked, said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. AMD&#39;s ATI unit is a big player in supplying graphics to consumer electronics, set-top boxes and gaming consoles, Hester said. ATI supplies graphics processing units (GPUs) for Microsoft&#39;s Xbox 360 and Nintendo&#39;s Wii consoles, Hester said.&quot;Discrete GPUs will continue to be a good business for us,&quot; Hester said. AMD&#39;s graphics segment revenue grew 29 percent to $252 million sequentially, driven by the success of the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors.However, ATI&#39;s market share in the discrete graphics market has been hit by manufacturing problems and bad timing in bringing chips to market, Peddie said. Competitors such as Nvidia and Silicon Integrated Systems stepped up by shipping graphics chips on a timely basis, taking market share away from ATI.&quot;Market share could begin to swing back towards ATI even if it introduced simply comparable products to Nvidia in the near-term,&quot; wrote Doug Freedman in a research report. ATI&#39;s RV670 graphics card is competitive in the mainstream market with current Nvidia products, Freedman wrote.But AMD still has work to do to make the merger a success. Its biggest threat remains Intel, which maintains a stranglehold on the chip market.&quot;AMD must rebuild its brand value in the enthusiast market in order to garner better mainstream adoption and consumer recognition,&quot; Freedman wrote.
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Although the FX-55 runs at 2.6 gigahertz, AMD claims its efficiency makes it a rival of the 4 GHz Pentium processor that Intel dropped from development last week.
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Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) continues to plug away at microprocessor rival Intel&#39;s (Nasdaq: INTC) lead, which once seemed insurmountable.
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Figures from ZDNet Germany labs indicate that AMD's fastest chips outpace those of Intel for mainstream applications.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices' move to cut overhead costs by outsourcing its chip manufacturing business may backfire in the long run, according to several analysts who have downgraded the company's stock. AMD is struggling it keep its head above water after posting losses of $611 million and $574 million for its past two quarters. The company has also drawn criticism for its manufacturing, with recent reports that it will delay the full-volume launch of the "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip from July to October. That would hobble AMD in its effort to compete with surging rival Intel. Although AMD's Opteron has won over many users of Intel's Xeon server chips since its launch in 2003, that trend is now in a sharp reversal, according to a June 13 report from Jon Peddie Research. In the market for workstation processors, AMD had pushed Intel's share down to 87.6 percent in the first quarter of 2006, but Intel has rebounded since then, reaching 92 percent share in the first quarter of 2007. The building pressure recently prompted some analysts to predict that AMD might stop manufacturing any chips at all and convert to a fully outsourced business model as soon as 2008. AMD said that rumor had come from a "speculative" Goldman Sachs report, but confirmed that the company is trying to focus its efforts on developing chips instead of manufacturing them, according to AMD spokesman Drew Prarie. AMD currently has a deal giving it access to IBM's chip fabrication plant in East Fishkill, New York. Under that arrangement, AMD can perform much of its research and development without having to incur the cost of owning its own manufacturing plant, he said. "We're looking to find ways to extend that model beyond research and development to the full range of the manufacturing supply chain," Prarie said Monday. "That could run the range from increasing the amount of processors we send out for chartered manufacturing, and could also include things like establishing partnerships on the manufacturing side." AMD has already taken some steps in this direction. In 2006, AMD announced a plan to give Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing a heavier load, asking the firm to begin making the new 65-nanometer scale Athlon chips and other processors. And in May, AMD announced that it hadÂ awarded the job of manufacturing its newest graphics chips to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Now the company may be preparing to expand that model, according to a June 17 report from Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung. AMD is on the verge of making a "transformational move" such as outsourcing a larger share of low-end processors to TSMC, selling a share of the manufacturing capacity in its Fab 30 chip-making plant in Dresden, Germany, or even selling a share in its planned $3.2 billion chip plant in Saratoga County, New York, Yeung wrote. Despite AMD's insistence that such an arrangement would simply allow it to stay in the chip business while cutting costs, the uncertainty makes Wall Street analysts nervous. The Citigroup report lowered its estimate of AMD's future revenue from $1.3 billion to $1.1 billion for the second quarter, and from $5.8 billion to $5.6 billion for the full year of 2007. Those figures would represent a flat performance compared to AMD's performance last year, with $1.22 billion of revenue in the second quarter of 2006 and $5.6 billion for the full year. "We are again lowering AMD estimates, this time for 2Q07 (we had previously lowered 2H07), reflecting our field checks suggesting current conditions are weak," Yeung wrote. While Citigroup recognizes that AMD could be moving away from its own manufacturing and that could help the company cut costs, "we remain on hold for the shares given near-term weakness," he wrote. In contrast, Yeung said Intel would continue to enjoy a competitive advantage thanks to theÂ potential delay of AMD's Barcelona chips, the rising popularity of Intel's new Santa Rosa notebook platform, and the continued sales of Core-family chips for desktop PCs.
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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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By Laurie J. Flynn  Advanced Micro Devices has said it is unlikely that the company will meet its target of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion in revenue for the first quarter, providing evidence that the chip maker's price war with Intel was continuing to take its toll.
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This morning, AMD announced its desktop-level integrated chipset combining its designs for systems and peripheral bus controllers with ATI's graphics logic, all in one package. AMD already has the lead in components for value-priced systems, and ATI's logic may help it maintain that lead. But as Intel has proven over the years, that effort might not always bear fruit.
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Intel's new Centrino platform and 45nm fabrication process, AMD's innovative new CPU design and hints from both companies about quad-core mobile CPUs mean the mobile chip wars are hotter than ever.