I think it's perfect that the market isn't getting too excited about
AMDs latest offerings. It gives us more time to raise capital and get
into this stock.

For sure, they have their share of struggles (debt!) to overcome over
the next few months, but I think their long term prospects look good.
Here's an excerpt from a Frobes article:

"Intel's latest desktop processors have faster clocks speeds and use
smaller transistors--45 nanometers as opposed to 65 nanometers--that
allow them to do more work with less power, _all else being equal_.
"We think that Intel is consolidating its performance lead in
desktops," Wachovia analyst David Wong wrote in a note to investors
Monday."

!! "All else being equalt." All else is not equal. Sure, Intel can
brute force faster speeds with the working capital that they have, but
AMD is going to finesse it's way into the chip spotlight, just like
they did a few years ago.

The math-focused analysts don't understand the technology enough and
how a chip with less "megahertz" or more "nanometers" can outperform
another processor with better specs on paper. The engineers at AMD are
doing incredible things and we'll just start to see the beginning of
that. I think the graphics+math processors will give them a real leg
up.

Folks are even less loyal to Intel than they were a few years ago.
When AMD has the best processors again, people will buy them, AMD will
be selling out, and the stock will sore. That's my say.

I am sure AMD will come back with a strong CPU but it won't be anytime
soon.

Keep drinking that koolaid my friend.

But facts are Phenom is lagging behind Intel chips on all fronts.
Instructions per clock, clock speed, and power consumption.  This
leaves them without anything to compete with.  The only defense
they'll have is to drop prices more.

Fusion will not buy them anything either because Intel is doing the
same thing.  Ever hear of a little technology called Larabee.  Larabee
will be on the market long before Fusion.

Fusion is too far in the future to say anything about it because AMD
will have their new CPU launched by then that takes is up with
nehalem.
too many unknowns but both CPU's will be on 45nm.
Like it is know AMD CPU's will stay behind intel for at least until
their new CPU is launched in 2009.

A 2009 recovery is a very long shot.  They don't have enough working
capital to survive that long at their current burn rate.  The only way
they'll survive is if they: 1.) drastically reduce their spending, or
2.) receive a massive cash infusion from some nebulous source (another
investment offering? I don't know, are there that many suckers out
there?) or, 3.) are purchased by another company.  However, with their
massive debt load and non-competitive product lineup, a third-party
purchase is unattractive at best.  You can't sustain a company of this
size on graphics cards alone, unless of course they took the entire
market share, which is extremely unlikely (i.e. impossible given
current market conditions).  So, IMO, unless they outsource all their
fabs, they are most likely headed for bankruptcy.  However,
outsourcing the fabs will put them at a long-term competitive
disadvantage to Intel, due to the resulting cost structure... so this
won't be good news for the stock either.

I hate to rub it in your face, but those of you still holding on to
the stock should have listened to me when the stock was at $14.50
rather than simply relegating my opinion to one star.  I have very
valid, logical reasons for what I'm saying, and you need to think
seriously about why you're holding the stock.  If you're holding on
due to a potential recovery with the Fusion release, probably not a
smart move.  You'll make more money if you look for the next bottom
out price sometime in 2008.  Think about it, even if this stock
manages a massive rebound, you'll make a heck of a lot more money
buying in at $2 - $5/share than the current price point.  If they go
bankrupt, that doesn't necessarily mean they out altogether, but that
DOES mean you may be able to pick up a  huge amount of stock for $0.50
- $0.80/share.  Of course, you'll need to carefully weigh your
decision at that point in time and perform some sort of risk
analysis.  I still say SELL, before it hits $8/share.

Ever since Intel has gotten off that crap known as Netburst as
oldschool Pentium 4 technology, things have been going well for them,
and you can throw your "performance per mhz" talk out the window.
Intel is absolutely dominating the show right now.

AMD's only real chance to increase revenue right now is to pray that
their ATI division pulls in some good numbers on the new 3870 and 3850
Radeon HD. The 3870 is not much worse than the 8800 GT (Nvidia) and
costs only $219 (Newegg.. others are higher) while it's rival costs
anywhere from $269 to $300+. I do expect the two new Radeons to
achieve some impressive sales, assuming supply keeps up.

Fusion is such a joke it isn't even funny. Sure in the longterm (REAL
LONG), it may be the way for Intel and AMD to replace video card
providers, but that doesn't exactly help AMD all that much.
Furthermore, I don't see integrated-on-cpu-die graphics being that
impressive when they first get released. I'd go as far as to say most
consumers would still be buying motherboards with integrated graphics,
especially if prices are lower.

AMD can make a comeback, but unless they do it soon, with some
impressive price:performance processors, their stock will keep
dropping. I see no reason as of yet why it shouldn't continue to drop
well into the Q4 report and beyond. Things may start to turn around if
the prospects for change become more apparent in 2008, but until then,
anyone who buys is just a longterm trader or a daytrader.. or a blind
optimist.

I believe that ATI will not pull significant numbers. Nvidia purposely
pumped out 40k chips EARLY for manufacturers to release. Thus
capturing most of the market/enthusiast news. 8800GT is slated at
$200MSRP!!

Again supply and demand comes into play for retailers, causing $269+
sales. With limited supply and everybody talking about the 8800GT...
it is surely another win.

Nvidia can still crush ATI after the demand is over when they sell the
8800GT for under $200MSRP

Fusion is a joke, I agree. Its a consumer thing really How is it going
to replace video cards and etc. High def is the new stuff now... soon
everybody needs a video card. Semiconductors are always aiming to be
faster and more efficient.  We need more infrastructure for the
internet to handle High def. Which means more high speed fiber for
servers. Which means more powerful CPUs and certainly fusion can't
come into play here.

I don't know how the OEMs are gonna handle this as fusion has to be
more completive against various other parts. Plus PCs are getting more
affordable and is a life product. There is really no need for Fusion
unless it can over take the discrete market. Its only aiming for the
lower end market, which I don't see why integrated graphics won't work
here.

I hope you guys understand my fusion part. I speculate that there is
going to be a huge demand for servers and IT will boom again. Pretty
much the consumer side has computers... we have to balance out the IT
side.

AMD can do something with fusion for the mobile market. Something that
intel sold their division a while back. Hopefully AMD can do something
with the opterons and mobile chips?

I would buy AMD for the thrill ride.

There is absolutely no reason to be excited about AMD right now. They
made some bad business decisions over the course of the year, not
going with dual+dual solution of a quad core CPU was worst of them
all. Intel did that and they sold over million of them months ago. AMD
willingly gave them time to capture even more market share, while they
were sticking to their own solution which was financially
unreasonable.

Their current offerings are nothing but major disappointment. They
fall far behind Intel's Q6600, which was introduced in february (I
believe). If what you've been working on for months and it's the
pinnacle of your architecture, can't beat what the competition
introduced a long time ago, then you're in serious trouble. As
everyone in the industry knows, a whole new architecture isn't
something that can be changed in a month. It takes a long time to
develop it and it's the basis on which the company will build for a
very long time ahead.

For AMD to come out successfully, their new architecture should
compete with Intel's Penryn, not Conroe. And there is this nasty TLB
bug that prevents them to scale to higher frequencies and many people
think there is more behind that. Just look at the Barcelona line
(which apparently nobody really cares about). They should run at much
higher speeds by now. Something is really going wrong at AMD labs and
they don't have  the time nor the money to afford a thing like that.

And there is Intel of course, who is not to be underestimated at all.
They had just too much time to claim a comfortable position on the
market and can afford to set their own pace and prices. All their
pricing over the year was based on what they were comfortable with
since they really had nothing to compete with. Now if AMD comes out
with anything remotely dangerous, they can slash prices anytime. I
doubt AMD can afford to go much lower.

As someone in the thread claims about the loyal customer base, things
have really changed a lot. AMD established a loyal base among the
gaming crowd in the Athlon era. But this times are gone now. They were
waiting patiently for months and months, hoping  that their favorite
brand will come up with something decent. The wait is over. They have
all switched to Intel by now and the remaining lot will switch now
when Phenom was revealed. November is the time when most major game
titles are released and this holiday season parents will have to buy
Intel.

That said, I wouldn't buy AMD now at all.

I totally agree with you.  For the last 6 months I was very excited
about there Phenom chip, but as you know it is12-15% slower than
intels .  Hopefully the Phenom FX chip will do better.  Till then I'll
just wait and see and watch the price drops after Christmas.

So do you think AMD will go bankrupt here soon or do you think someone
will buy them out?

All signs currently point to bankruptcy.

Bank ruptcy ..i don't think so ..
I am not expert but this what i think about AMD ..
Every one in this discussion are talking about Phenom being 13% slower
than the intel's latest offering and tend to forget that 13.65 %
cheaper. Also Intel's new 45 nano based chips require new set of
hardware, on other side AMD phenom is compatible with older Chip set.
 So my point is when we are looking at the price to performance ratio
we are pretty much seeing great edge for AMD.
Quad based processing is new in the industry .... I don't see people
want to put lot of money and replace whole hardware in transition from
dual to quad core... etc.
I am not predicting AMD to take INTEL neck to neck but i believe as of
medium processing requirements.. AMD is winner.

Coming back to financial..I believe AMD phenom should have good market
considering price to performance ratio.. to answer y AMD is hitting
bottom (2 dolllars drop in 2 weeks) i think AMD has no new bad news
for this slump in value it has to do with over all TECH market that
is  going crazy.. because of the Credit issue
I think  it shall go back to  $13.00 by first week December.. I do
hold couple of hundred shares in AMD...

To be honest I really have no idea about the whole bankruptcy thing. I
know there are many people (like one post above) who agree that it is
inevitable. I know far too little to give any judgment on that. It is
a very interesting topic however. I heard one crazy rumor a while ago,
claiming that IBM was interested in buying them out. As I know very
little about IBM I don't know how this would be in their interest. I
believe AMD was using some of their production facilities. There were
cases in history where CPU technologies were bought by others (I think
Intel had something to do with DEC Alpha). Perhaps someone would be
interested to incorporate some of the designs into their own products.
I would rather not speculate on that.

On the other hand, there are very persistent speculations of Intel's
interest of keeping AMD alive to avoid monopoly problems. But then
again, people have been pointing out that some major software
companies have gone through that without major problems.

It will be very interesting to see how it all turns out.

I agree, but the stock is still over valued at $10. Three months ago
it was way over valued thats for sure.I think the current fundamentals
value is around $6.00. The stock should see price support @ around $8.
Personally  I'm advising my friends who against my free and sound
advice bought in at $16 to cut their losses and reinvest it elsewhere,
because this stock wont be making a comeback anytime soon.The company
is more than likely going to be bankrupt 1 year before Fusion even
hits the market in great quantity.

 I don't think anyone is going to buy them out given the debt and
product it currently has. I think the only company who would benefit
from buying them out would be Intel itself, but that brings up anti-
trust issues. I could see AMD selling off assets to stay afloat, but
that in itself creates problems with supply. I would certainly not be
too enthusiastic about investing in this company anytime soon. I bet
those Oil men are regretting having bought  even 1% of this company.
This is definitely a sell.

It can't be less value than what ATI was/is otherwise I would think
it's underrated.
The 'Oil men' didn't go for a short time investment, but they will
probably regret that they didn't waited a few more days before buying.

Nah Nanot, there are others who could potentially benefit in the long
run from acquiring AMD(and with it ATI). NVDA being an obvious
example, MSFT or GOOG may have some tiny interest in that prospect, as
well as the usual capital management Cerberus type groups. Hey if they
took on the crap that was Chrysler... anything is possible.

Ofcourse, I do agree with you that $10 is beyond what the company is
currently worth. $6, your belief, seems reasonable to me as well, and
I think anywhere in the $4.5-$6 range might even attract potential
buyers, even considering the huge amount of debt.

273, considering how the graphics card market has shifted way into
Nvidia's favor, it is reasonable to assume that ATI is worth less now
than it was worth before becoming part of AMD.

Anyways, until AMD drops to $6, I won't even consider buying any
stock. I probably still wouldnt buy it then but that depends on other
factors.

I'm sorry, but you're completely wrong. You don't need to change
"hardware" for intel quad cores.... by hardware I think you mean
motherboards? The intel 965p, 975 and nvidia 650i and 680i are fully
compatible with all intel processors p4 all the up to the new qx
series.....

What you're also forgetting is that the new phenom cannot be
overclocked much at all whereas the intel quads can. So you get far
more value out of the intel processors.

AMD provides nothing but less money in your wallet.

Well... I am not so sure...

Let me tell you about my story...

I was very skeptical of AMD. I remember I bought an AMD about five
years ago and it was not a good experience. About four months ago my
brother had a garage sale and he wanted to sell his new computer to
me. I asked what model is it, and he said AMD, etc, etc.

When he said AMD I was truly skeptical and said sure because he was my
brother. I thought the AMD box was slow (based on past experience) and
decided to use it as a simulation server. Something that I could leave
running.

Well.... Something funny happened. My main work station which happens
to be a dual core, and the other servers are dual core were 15% slower
in flat out simulation speed than the AMD. I was t'eed off because the
AMD was cheaper and yet faster. 15% to most folks is not much. For me
it is a world of diference. One simulation run takes 10 hours on a
dual core on the AMD it was under 9 hours. Multiply that by about 100
simulations and you are saving days...

So in the end I don't really care about more MGHz, or what have you. I
just care about real life processing power.

Christian Gross

You are absolutely correct. The only thing that really matters is real
life processing power, like you said. The problem is, right now, for
the same price you get better real life performance from Intel. All
the technical talk (native quad myth) doesn't help much if your
product doesn't deliver the performance.

As for your own story, are you sure your application is fully multi-
threaded (it should be as most scientific applications are). If,
however, it's not, then it's only logical that AMD would outperform
Intel.

That's because AMD has always had a better Floating Point Unit than
intel.
Your program is probably also only using one core (even if you have a
dual core)

Ill tell you guys I have a 3.2ee P4, a dual core 2.4ghz 90nm AMD and a
q6600 2.4ghz. Honestly no kidding aside I dont see any difference in
the processors except when I am telling it to do many task at the same
time which is rarely. The difference is so minimal to the naked eye.
Benchmarks right now that say 20% faster etc. in this and that may
seem like wow so much better but in real time it only translate to at
most 3 secs. and most of the time it is under 1 sec difference!

Only benefit for quad is for graphic editing or video editing but if
that is all you do then you should even consider a cheaper dual quad
core server part over a 3ghz $1000 processor. You can soon get
probably a dual quad xeon or opteron for that price.

People are just naive most of the tiem that is why I wont be upgrading
to penryn.

"The math-focused analysts don't understand the technology enough and
how a chip with less "megahertz" or more "nanometers" can outperform
another processor with better specs on paper."

This is a really a very poor analysis of the situation. The analysts
have this one right. AMD caught Intel sleeping at the wheel 4 years
ago when Athlon and Opteron were taking sales away from Pentium 4 and
high-power/low MIPS Xeon processors. Intel is too smart a company to
let that happen again.

To counter the argument that less "megahertz" and more "nanometers"
don't necessarily translate to better performance I would point you to
recent reviews that are easy to find (tomeshardware.com or
anandtech.com or hexus.net) that show that even at the same clock
speed Penryn based Intel CPUs outperform AMDs latest and greatest
Barcelona desktop CPUs. Compounding this problem is that AMD must
recall some Phenom chips because of a TLB problem with a workaround
that drops performance by 10-20%. Then add in the fact that Intel CPUs
can be clocked MUCH higher than current Barcelona chips. All these
facts add up to a very poor performance by AMD.

AMD needed to execute flawlessly to stay in the game with Intel. So
far they have fumbled and thrown and interception and Intel is much
more paranoid about the competition because of the surprise AMD gave
them 4 years ago.

AMD's only hope at this point is for a huge lawsuit settlement in the
EU under their anti-trust claims against Intel but that will take
years to settle. I can only predict more pain for AMD in the near to
mid term.

Intel does not want to kill Amd. But it will keep AMD under control
( < 20% market share)
AMD was Intel little brother. It still is. IBM demanded an alternative
cpu supplier. Intel came to AMD. Both companies share the x86
technology.
without AMD, all MFGs will sue Intel. The gov will break up Intel.

Guys, I don't really get into this whole discussion business. However
I will tell you where I stand. I had AMD at about 21.00 and I sold it
around 14.00 I recognized the drowning ship. HOWEVER, that doesn't
mean AMD is gone. There are several reasons. The acquisition of ATI is
still killing their profits. Also, if you have noticed, the amd
numbers are SLOWLY, slowly changing for the better.

In addition, to say AMD is headed for bankruptcy is absurd. The market
will not allow for just one major chip maker, INTEL. That involves too
much with anti-trust suits, monopolies, etc. Intel already has that
reputation and I doubt they want to get involved more with it. AMD is
not down and out. Also from a computer users perspective. AMD chips
are great. They are affordable and truly fast. You can't go wrong with
an AMD chip and will rarely have performance problems.

At this rate, it is good to watch it drop, settle, and then throw a
good amount in for some gains. I would say by second quater next year,
the numbers will be very different. If it goes down to 5.00 a share, I
would head right back into it. However, until they change their
guidance, just hang out for now and wait to jump on it.

I don't think the gov is going to break up one of the biggest assets
to the country. Damn that would be a bad day on the markets. Intel
manufactures outside of the US and the brains behind the latest
processors are from Israel. The gov might want to be careful with
Intel. A fab in china on the way. There are plenty of countries that
would happily take their business. As long as Intel are making good
new technology the world will buy it. If America wants to be a part of
that it's their choice. America is one of the only countries that has
ditched the anti-trust case too I wonder why that is?

Last time I checked you can't sue a company because the competition
isn't good enough either. Intel don't want AMD completely dead, but if
AMD dies on their own I don't think Intel are liable. It's Hector Ruiz
the manufacturers shoul sue. He's turned a real Intel challenger into
a VIA clone.

You say under 20% market share. AMD can't make profit at this share
with current pricing strategy. Only way they will is if ASP's rise or
they invest in less R&D etc cut costs. Cutting costs will lead to less
new technology which means less performance / lower ASP's because
performance drives price. Or Intel will charge $400 for their cheapest
processor in which case AMD have a market. But that would be stupid
since people would start ditching Intel again. As long as Intel have
cheap processors AMD are going to need more performance before they
can turn profit.

I am planning to get more shares in small chunks while its at 8-9 or
going down.