AMD is a screaming buy. Their revenues are forecast at 1.5 billion for the quarter, and that's before the 'fixed' Barcelona has been rolled out. The rumor mill is burning that they, due to their acquisition of ATI, and co-research with IBM at their Fishkill, NY facility, are going to match if not exceed Intel's rollout of Nehalem with their Puma and Griffin offerings. While commodities and ag plays keep this market from crashing, building a position in AMD (and Intel, for a nice pair trade) makes a whole lot of sense. Buy what's out of favor and knocked down, but necessary, now. I'm bearish overall, but selectively bullish, now. AMD and Intel are absolute steals at current levels. Talk about a global play - the only two processor producers in the world, with a duopoly on the world's PC supply.
I would buy Intel but not AMD right for 2 reasons: 1. Intel is regaining market share where it counts - in servers (especially multi sockets). Barcelona can't even beat Intel's cheapest quad core right now and will consume more power relatively when Intel's 45nm production ramps up; when Nehalem comes out, the only true advantages that Barcelona still has (integrated memory controller and Hypertransport) will disappear and the performance gap between AMD and Intel will continue to widen. 2. AMD is gaining market share in the OEM and lower end markets. CPUs are alot like the airline seats - one first class passenger will produce more profit than 5 economy class customers. Likewise, AMD may be ramping up volume, but it is conceding the high profit margin markets to Intel. Intel also has a cost advantage in the form of 45nm, so Intel reserves the right to lower prices at any time to keep AMD in check. Puma is nothing more than a more power efficient platform for Turions and those clearly lag behind Intel in terms of performance. Bulldozer is coming out in 2009 so until then I don't see anything too bright for AMD.
Not talking about stock price, but Intel has killed AMD in terms of performance on the CPU. Intel is rolling out their Atom micro processor, which is taking the whole UMPC business market share. And that's where a lot of growth will come from in the next year or so. The PC market is pretty well saturated, people will continue to upgrade, but it's not going to drive growth. AMD is falling behind in the technology against Intel. Now they don't even save as much power as Intel. But as for stock price, who knows, layoffs are usually good for it. It still needs to put up a fight and a show for it to really gain traction.
Don't be surprised to see a lot of the R&D AMD has been performing pump out some products that AMD didn't necessarily want to trumpet too loudly until now. *World Exclusive* unreleased AMD Puma-based MSI notebook -v- Intel Penryn G35 - AMD Puma 3x quicker than Intel integrated? http://www.hexus.tv/show/2008/03/EXCLUSIVE_CONTENT_AMD_Puma_3x_quicker_than_Intel_integrated/
First of all, the Puma platform's integrated GPU will be competing with G45. Secondly, both Intel and AMD's solutions will be able to provide full 1080p decoding; users who actually need to use a GPU for other purposes will likely opt for a dedicated solution.
I'm not a computer engineer or chip/wafer designer, but it would seem that at a time when Moore's Law appears to be losing some steam, AMD has less ground to make up in order to catch Intel in the area of Intel's greatest strength; mobile CPUs. Since this is basically a duopolistic industry, I think AMD has caught a floor on it's stock price. It should only be a matter of time before they close that gap and maybe creep ahead of Intel, with any luck and support of IBM, which has been acting as a very active research partner of AMD. I own both AMD and Intel, but I believe the ground is shifting so that the risk/reward profile favors AMD in profit and revenue growth unless Intel has made some major new discovery that is going to fundamentally change chip design, rather than the old shrinking the die and packing more transistors and cores on each.
AMD CTO resigned. Typically not a good sign about how their technology fares against Intel. Like I said, Intel definitely has the advantage in the technological sense in every market right now.
those who have fallen will rise once more. something like that in security analysis by dodd and graham. i've bought amd @ 6.00 couple months ago....still holding. i will ride this one through the recession and miseries. i believe in underdogs. those running in first place must always look over their shoulder, it is more expensive to be 1st place. then there are those chasing behind 1st place, they have clearer goals. anyways too much rhetoric....im smoking too much maryjay