Tag: amd

AMD faces Nvidia threat

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

AMD, SunnyvaleNvidia is ahead of AMD on the graphics front and it won’t be until next year that the Sunnyvale firm catches up.

That’s according to financial analyst Sean Chandler, who works for Seeking Alpha.

He said in a note to his clients that the Nvidia “Maxwell” architecture has put AMD under heavy pressure in the consumer graphics arena.  And that’s worry investors and taking its toll on the AMD share price.

Chandler said that while AMD’s restructuring are widely seen as positive, the firm “still needs to release competitive technologies to remain relevant”.

Nvidia Maxwell, he said, means “monumental advancements” in both efficiency and performance.

Nvidia’s 60watt 750Ti is comparable to AMD’s 150 watt R7 260X, he said.  And Maxwell also outforms AMD in performance efficiency per die size.

He added that the rumour mill suggests AMD may respond with 20 nanometre chips now chip foundry TSMC has got the shrink down pat.

He suggests to investors: “AMD is almost certainly not out of the game, but be cautious and don’t pour all of your eggs into one basket.”

AMD flounders

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

flounderThe surprise exit of Rory Read as CEO of AMD appears to have been explained as the company reported a lower-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter and announced job cuts.

Read cleaned out his desk,  handed over the keys to the executive drinks cabinet and his special poisoned chalice, to Chief Operating Officer Lisa Su this week. This sparked speculation that this quarter’s numbers were going to be bad.

AMD has seen its market value nearly halved since when Read took over in 2011 as the company lost market share to Intel.

Sure enough, in a statement, AMD reported third-quarter revenue and gave a forecast for current-quarter revenue, both of which missed expectations and its shares were down 5 percent in extended trade.

AMD said its revenue fell two percent to $1.43 billion in the third quarter, missing Wall Street expectations.

The company said its fourth quarter revenues would fall 13 percent, plus or minus three percent, from the September quarter. That would be about $1.244 billion.

Analysts on average had expected revenue of $1.47 billion in the third quarter and $1.48 billion in the fourth quarter

In response, AMD said that it was cutting seven percent of its workforce. This would be the outfit’s third major round of job cuts since 2011.

AMD said the cuts would be made by December and save about $9 million in the fourth quarter and $85 million next year.

AMD had 10,149 employees at the end of the September quarter.

AMD reported a net profit of $17 millionin the third quarter, compared with a net gain of $48 million a year earlier.

In the third quarter, AMD’s Computing and Graphics group, which includes processors for PCs, saw its revenue fall 16 percent year over year.

AMD Cuts Workforce – Sea Change 101 for Sailors?…,

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

AMD LayoffsJust one week and a day after assuming her new roll as AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced a reduction in force amounting to seven percent of the AMD’s current workforce of 10,149 employees.

The fallowing of ~700 people follows two rounds of layoffs under Rory Read’s three year tenure.

AMD did not provide any information about where the cuts would be made – the company recently split into two divisions “Computing and Graphics”, and “Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom”. Contacts indicate that “Computing and Graphics” will receive a majority of the “hits”.

Last Thursday’s warning by Microchip Chief Executive Steve Sanghi that a correction will spread more broadly across the industry in the near future sent shares of chipmakers lower last Friday.

Microchip is a broad spectrum supplier into the Chinese and Asian marketplace, booking revenue only after it is shipped by distributors – a closely coupled supply chain that quickly indicates impending sea changes. AMD shares a similar situation in China, the company’s biggest market, substantiating Microchip’s warning. Whether this is the beginning of a prolonged downturn or is merely another “noise blip” on the radar is entwined in controversy.

Strangely enough, AMD’s arch nemesis Intel, reported rather glowing results on Tuesday indicating that AMD might be suffering from Intel’s competitive resurgence in Asia. The fact that Intel is devoting resources to system level integration at the SoC level may now be having an effect on both competitors.

AMD’s experienced a 65% drop in quarterly profits and is expecting the current quarter to be 13% lower than the period ended in September. The company’s share price fell 6% to $2.49 in after-hours trading. The share price has dropped 43% in three months as of close Thursday.

Su went on to assure analysts that the company was moving toward customized chips for applications beyond videogames hinting at two customers that had the potential of bringing in $3 Billion in additional revenue over the next three years.

TechEye Take

The first time I saw Rory Read perform in front of analysts was somewhat of an embarrassment. He became so animated on stage that an additional two flaps of his arms per minute would have gotten him airborne (I heard that he fired his stage coach soon thereafter). His resignation came as no surprise, only late by three years. Lisa Su was the only stand-up with credibility and has remained so since.

Can we expect Dr. Su to right the AMD ship? She’s very smart and well experienced in the land of semiconductors and if anyone can accomplish the miracle required to make AMD a player she’d be my pick…,

Assassins bemoan poor console chip performance

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

assassins-creedAssassin’s Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has waded into AMD’s console performance saying that his new game’s 900p frame rate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance.

He said that while the GPUs on the machines are really powerful and the graphics look good, the game was technically CPU-bound and the CPU has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen. All these systems running in parallel.

Speaking to Hot Hardware, Pontbriand  said game designers were quickly bottlenecked and it was a bit frustrating.

“We thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second,” he said.

The comments are being seen as damning AMD’s APU. The Jaguar CPU inside both the Sony PS4 and Xbox One has a relatively low clock speed and, while both consoles may offer eight threads on paper, but it appears that games can’t access them.

Pontbriand said that one thread is reserved for the OS and several more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline. Between the two, Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations. This means that the performance is about the same as the last generation of Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs.  In fact these were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements.

To be fair it is hardly AMD’s fault. Microsoft or Sony could’ve specced out a variant of the core clocked at 2-2.4GHz and boosted total CPU throughput, but they didn’t. The programmable nature of the GCN architecture inside the Xbone and PS4 is meant to compensate for the relatively lightweight core, but AI calculations may simply be beyond this.  GPU calculations tend to be high latency, and AI typically requires fast response times.

Su in, Read out at AMD

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

readChipmaker AMD has announced that its Chief Operating Officer Lisa Su will replace Rory Read as chief executive officer.

Read has been doing the job for three years and analysts do not seem sad to see him go, they are only concerned about the timing. Earnings announcements are next week and an exit like this would suggest that the news is bad.

AMD has seen its market value nearly halved since Read took over in 2011 as the company lost market share to Intel. The outfit has been expanding into new markets such as game consoles and low-power servers and it aims to obtain half of its revenue from those additional businesses by the end of 2015, but progress has been too slow for the cocaine fuelled of Wall Street.

Su however is a popular choice amongst investors and customers.

It is not clear how Read was pushed out. Asked repeatedly on a conference call about the unexpected timing of AMD’s leadership change, Read said it was the result of a long-term succession strategy.

He said that the changeover was well planned, well understood.

Read’s response to the slump in PCs was to slashed the company’s workforce, hire a new senior management team, including Su, and launched AMD’s move into new markets, including ARM-based servers, digital signs and medical devices.

Su, who is 44, said her top focus would be on product development and that she would also simplify AMD and sharpen its focus. She joined AMD in 2012 and is widely seen as one of AMD’s most valuable executives.

AMD promoted Su to chief operating officer in June, increasing expectations among investors that she might eventually replace Read.

AMD said its board was discussing with Su the terms of her employment. She is currently paid an annual base salary of $650,000, the company said.

Read will remain with the company as an advisor until the end of the year.

Kaveri makes this Acer Aspire E5 sing

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News, Opinions, Products

Acer E5-551_1AMD has been making a big noise about its Kaveri chip range of Mobile APUs and we got a look at what it could do to Acer E5-551 15.6 laptop.

AMD A-Series APU family, codenamed Kaveri, is starting to pop up in systems from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba. According to AMD, the new mobile APUs mark the debut of Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) features and Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture for mobile. Acer’s Aspire E5 is first to arrive in the UK and will be sold through Debenhams so this makes it interesting from a user or a channel perspective.

The AMD A8 Kaveri chip is now powering the new Acer E5-551 laptop is designed for multi-tasking from gaming and light photo-editing to running multiples instances of software and streaming music. The E5-551 features a DVD reader and writer for long plane flights where you need a better movie. It is also well placed for the school market as it can practically anything a school kid could throw at it.

The machine is priced for about £409 which makes it a good budget model for smaller companies who are providing portables for those who have to do work, rather than just look at tablets. Normally there is not much between computers in this range. Most have WXGA screens based on TN technology and conventional hard drives and plastic bodies.

 Acer E5-551_9The Spec

Processor: AMD Quad-Core A8-7100

Mainboard: AMD A76M

Memory: 8192 MB, DDR3L, 1600 MHz, dual-channel, 2 memory banks, both filled

Graphics adapter :AMD Radeon R6 (Kaveri), Core: 533 MHz, DDR3L, shared memory, bus: 64 Bit

Display: 15.6 inch 16:9, 1366×768 pixel, AU Optronics AUO47EC, TN LED

Connections: 2 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, 1 VGA, 1 HDMI, 1 Kensington Lock, Audio Connections: 1 combo audio in/out, 3.5 mm jack, Card Reader: SD/SDHC/SDXC,

Networking: Realtek RTL8168/8111 Gigabit-LAN (10/100/1000MBit), Atheros Communications AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter (b g n ), 4.0 Bluetooth

Optical drive: Matshita DVD-RAM UJ8E2Q

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 64 Bit

Weight: 2.5 kg

Battery: 56 Wh Lithium-Ion

 Acer E5-551_10Design

The Aspire A5 design is, bluntly, a bit of a snooze and not its strongest feature. Certainly, it is thinner than many laptops in this range but it is not that thin. It is lighter and easy to carry than others we have had. Certainly in comparison to the bricks that are available in this price range it is certainly not bad. Besides, for £409 design is something that happens to other people’s computer.

The plastic case also seems to pick up every type of grease that a hand can generate and make the machine slimy.

 The chip

The important part of this computer is an AMD Quad-Core A8-7100 which is a quad core with eight GPU cores to carry out the AMD Radeon R7 series graphics. The idea of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is that it allows the CPU and GPU to work together by quickly dividing and directing the right tasks toward the appropriate cores to improve performance and efficiency. The chip managed to make running software a breeze and it even passed our Firefox running trillions of opens tabs trick without any problems.

 The Graphics

The graphics on the Kaveri platform is far better than Intel’s equivalent HD graphics cores integrated into the Haswell chips. This makes Kaveri armed laptop owners able to play reasonably demanding games and videos. Playing Civ 5 was not only possible it was a quality game on Acer E5-551, something that I have only seen on our other home laptop, which has a dedicated card, when there was nothing else running. HD films came out very well, limited only by the screen which for a budget machine was still not too bad.

Connectivity

The machine has an HDMI socket, Ethernet connection, two USB 2.0 sockets, a USB 3.0 connection and a VGA out.  Not bad not great.

Communication

The Atheros AR9565 Wi-Fi module supports the IEEE 901.11 b, g and n standards,  Bluetooth, version 4.0. The signal connections were fairly standard and nothing to right home about

Battery

The 56 Wh Lithium-Ion managed 4.5 half hours before needing a recharge, which was not too bad given the thrashing we were giving it.  Again, this is due to the lower power draw of the AMD A8 chip.

Noise and heat

There was no noise coming from the machine at all. This was unheard of in any laptop in this price range, particularly one with an ordinary hard drive. One could almost believe it is fanless. The heat levels were also not to bad.  The laptop did get warm, but not hot and was comfortable to put on your lap.

Keyboard

The flat, roughened keys were not bad and were capable of fast touch typing.

Touchpad

The ClickPad which is a large, single-surface which you press when you want to ‘click’ was reasonable in comparison to the alternatives we have used.  Generally, if you are not going to have a touch screen on a laptop you are always going to be better with a mouse. When such use was impossible though once you got used to it was fine. Most of the touchpad surface can be pressed, which is interpreted as a left click except for in the lower right of the Clickpad.

 Hard-drive

The hard drive is 1TB which is more than enough for any portable music or movie collection.  It is not an SSD but we never heard it in operation.

Summery

The Acer E5-551 would be a normal budget laptop where it not for the Kaveri chip making it into something special. It enabled speed, enhanced graphics, extended battery life, and quiet operation something which we have not seen from Intel equivalents in the market.  It is still a budget machine, limited by the lack of a quality screen, but for that price it it is jolly useful.

The Eyes have it

four-stars

 

 

 

Good value for money.

 

AMD reads Synopsys

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

AMDlogoAMD has signed a deal with Synopsys, which gives it access to a range of designs and intellectual property on advanced 16nm/14nm and 10nm FinFET process technologies.

According to Kitguru, AMD will give Synopsys IP and engineering resources.

AMD gets interface, memory compiler, logic library and analogue intellectual property from Synopsys and will use it to develop future generations of chips to be made using 14nm/16nm as well as 10nm FinFET manufacturing processes.

Synopsys hires approximately 150 AMD IP R&D engineers and gains access to AMD’s interface and foundation IP. The move clearly saves AMD money although it is not so good in terms of resources, whereas Synopsys becomes stronger.

Synopsys provides chip designers a broad range of high-quality IP for integration into system-on-chips (SoCs) and delivering expert technical support. It makes its cash effectively developing non-critical areas of chips.

AMD has a huge library of various complex IP used in advanced microprocessors and graphics processing units.  AMD gets silicon-proven IP for the chips it will make in the next several years in exchange for interface and foundation IP as well as engineers. AMD claims that it will give it ability to “focus its valuable engineering resources on its ongoing product differentiation and IP reuse strategy.”

Mark Papermaster, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer said that it will allow AMD to focus internal teams on designing the 64-bit processor, graphics and peripheral IP that makes the difference between AMD and its competition.

Synopsys can deal with AMD’s future SoCs.  The two companies have been working together for more than a decade.

 

AMD ready to bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

maxwellMystery surrounds the launch of a new AMD product this week, with pundits suggesting that it might be a new GPU.

AMD released a GPU related teaser comes a day after NVIDIA showed off its new  Maxwell graphics card which include the GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970. The launch was important because it is supposed to be a new era of powerful and highly efficient graphics cards. AMD might have an answer to that.

It released a tweet connected to its matrix pills campaign to market the new GPUs — one is blue and one is red. A similar marketing campaign was used during the launch of the HD 7770 GHz graphics card.

The Verdetrol pills were used as a teaser for the launch of the first GHz edition graphic card from AMD but they did another teaser with the Radeon R9 295X2 where they used two packs of chips and a water bottle to indicate their water-cooled dual GPU solution.

Since the marketing is similar there’s a blue pill which might indicate a water cooling solution such as the one that was leaked a while ago and the red pill may indicate the Radeon chip which will be used to power the graphics card based on the GCN architecture.

Smart money is that it is the launch of the new Radeon R9 285X sometime in late September.

AMD is not just messing around with the pills either. AMD has a teaser for a FirePro product where they ask “Can you name our first product that processed graphics independently of the CPU”.

This could be related to either a Radeon or a FirePro product.  It will be a year since AMD has introduced most of their lineup next month and will probably be the best time for AMD to offer new replacements.

Nevertheless, AMD has to do something to tackle Nvidia’s Maxwell and if has new high-end chips ready then it will need to play them fast.

AMD’s Read discusses firm’s future

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

AMDlogoThe CEO of AMD, Rory Read spoke at a Deutsche Bank tech conference earlier this week and the transcript makes interesting reading.

He’s pretty clear that AMD needs to diversify and to move to more profitable businesses, such as Pro Graphics. Gross margins there yield 50 percent to 70 percent.  The next generation AMD server chips will deliver between 55 percent to 65 percent gross margin.

He said corporations started buying again and it’s not just the demise of Windows XP that is the reason.  He said they will continue to do refreshes and there will be another four to eight reasonable quarters. Server chip sales at the commercial level will be good.

AMD is  “over indexed” on consumer entry notebooks and that’s a problem, “it’s a dollars and cents play, both with the OEM and with the channel partners. You have got to diversify out.”

AMD is develping next generation products for 2015 and 2016 codenamed Carrizo.

He said AMD’s decision to go fabless was the right move and gives it more flexibility. He said 28 nanometre processors will be the dominant node for the next three to four years.  It will move to 14 nanometre.  He said that AMD’s relationship with Global Foundries (GloFo) has “fundamentally improved” over the past three years after a choppy relationship.  TSMC will also play a role in the future.

Data centres face revolution

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

server-racksFour disruptive forces are set to change the face of the data centre by 2016.

That’s according to market research firm Gartner, which estimates that although the data centre market seems poised for growth, existing assumptions will be challenged.

Vendors like the 50 percent or more gross margins in storage and networking hardware and software but  one vendor might decide to slash its margins, so forcing a price war in the data centre industry.

Traditional data centre firms will also face disruption from cloud computing which will reduce the demand of for total amount of compute to total workload.  And Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Baidu are offering platform as a service, with the existing companies failing to offer something equally compelling.

Thirdly, economic warfare between the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will largely increase competition in the data centre infrastructure market.

Last, Gartner thinks that buyers will come to regard multinational providers as untrustworthy. Also there is an increase in small white box assemblers.

Gartner believes that while Intel, AMD, Western Digital and Seagate will sit pretty for the next fee years, the first two will see erosion from ARM and other architectures.  Storage will shift to flash.

Next year’s server wars may be cancelled

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

soldiers-2The major battle in the server space planned for next year may be only a minor skirmish with the usual suspects winning.

Intel needs to see off the expected competition from ARM and is going to chuck a lot more cash in the area to keep its position as market leader. What we are seeing from the Intel Developer Forum is that its answer will be a a new Xeon D family of chips.

Xeon D chips will be the first server chips based on the Broadwell architecture, and will go into dense servers starting next year. But these are not your normal server chips, they are effectively systems on a chip which means that they will be deliberately targeting anything “low level and power efficient” that ARM is expected to come up with.

It means that Intel does not think that its Xeon E3 and Atom chips code-named Avoton will be up to the task of taking on ARM. The Xeon D chip will be faster, but more power hungry than Avoton, which is based on an architecture called Silvermont used in mobile chips.

But Intel thinks that the Xeon D will provide more performance-per-watt, which punters will find attractive.

Intel does have some other advantages in any coming server war. Intel’s chips already go into more than 90 percent of servers, and server makers like Dell have said that the chances for success of ARM servers are diminishing due to product delays. Intel also has a head-start on software development over ARM.

ARM’s server chips are based on the ARMv8 architecture, and have integrated networking, storage and I/O controllers. Its key weapon against Intel is still lower power consumption, something Chipzilla is fast catching up on.

A variety of companies had indicated interest in making server processors based on blueprints from ARM,  but so far ARM 64-bit server processors have not been made available commercially.

Chip makers like Applied Micro and Advanced Micro Devices have delayed shipment of ARM-based chips.

Dell is offering prototype ARM servers for benchmarking and application development. Hewlett-Packard announced plans to use ARM processors in its Moonshot “dense” server, which uses x86 chips, but hasn’t announced a definitive release date for the ARM edition.

The other player in any coming war AMD is also expanding its low-power server processor lines,  which could also will hurt adoption of ARM servers.

The other big hurdle for ARM is the fact that most firms already have software and hardware based around x86. To adopt ARM-based servers, companies will not only have to invest in new servers and components, but also port applications to the architecture.

This could make a switch to ARM very expensive in terms of capital and final cost of ownership. Then there are some licensing issues surrounding the adoption of ARM servers, as companies will have to pay more for software per core used in them, Norrod said.

ARM is also finding its allies thin on the ground. ARM server pioneer Calxeda folded operations and earlier this year Nvidia scrapped server chip plans. Samsung has also abandoned ARM server chip development.

AMD slashes prices

Posted on August 21, 2014 by - News

The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum_(1961_film)_posterAMD appears to have been going on a campaign of price cutting to take out  Intel’s Core i5 “Devil’s Canyon”.

According to Xbit Labs,  Intel wants to cut prices of its AMD FX-9000 “Centurion” microprocessors in a bid to make them more competitive “Devil’s Canyon” and several other chips from its rival.

AMD has also slightly reduced prices of other FX-series chips and culled some older and lower-end models.

From September 1, 2014, AMD’s FX-9370, with eight cores, 4.40/4.70GHz, 8MB L2 cache, 8MB L3 cache, 220W thermal design power will cost $199 .  The  top-of-the-range FX-9590, eight cores, 4.70/5.0GHz, 8MB L2 cache, 8MB L3 cache, 220W thermal design power will set you back $215.

The prices of the FX-9370 and the FX-9590 will be cut by 23 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Given the minimal difference between pricing of the FX-9370 and the FX-9590.

AMD has promised to cut the prices of “mainstream” FX-series chips slightly on the 1st of September to make them more competitive.

The company said that it will discontinue or will not change the price of many older AMD FX central processing units, including FX-8150, FX-8120, FX-6200, FX-6100, FX-4170, FX-4130 and FX-4100.

Centurion was AMD’s attempt to deal with the launch of Haswell. AMD released two “extreme” FX-class central processing units code-named “Centurion”, which are compatible with advanced AM3+ mainboards and require sophisticated cooling systems. Initially the FX-9370 and the FX-9590 chips were only available to select system integrators and cost up to $800-$900 per unit.

It had been expected that AMD would introduce all-new AMD FX-9000-series “Centurion” microprocessors with increased clock-rates, but it looks like the price cut will make them look better against Intel’s Core i5-4690K “Devil’s Canyon”.

 

AMD releases Radeon R7 SSDs

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - News

small_radeon-ssd-5AMD announced a new technology partnership with OCZ to build AMD Radeon branded Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Starting today, users can buy the AMD Radeon  R7 Series SSDs in 120GB, 240GB or 480GB capacities online retailers.

The AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are designed for gamers looking to upgrade their system’s overall responsiveness with something a little cheaper.

Roman Kyrychynskyi, director of memory, AMD said that with the new AMD Radeon  R7 Series SSDs powered by outstanding OCZ designs, was a good mix of performance, reliability and affordability.

They are being pitched as high performance SSDs which uses the A19 MLC NAND flash process and the Barefoot 3 M00 controller. The disks have a write endurance of 30GB/day, as well as read/write speeds of up to 550MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively.

This exclusive combination of hardware also features an anodized black housing, characteristic of the AMD Radeon brand.

AMD Radeon  R7 Series SSDs will be available at a starting price of $99.99 USD for the 120GB drive.

Intel kicks AMD in its low end

Posted on July 25, 2014 by - News

kung-fuAMD’s results have revealed a weakness in the outfit’s bread and butter lower end chips which is being exploited by Intel.

Intel’s  Atom Bay Trail is taking notebook share from AMD and  consumer-notebooks do not appear to be making up the missing cash.  It seems that Intel has been doing a much better job of convincing OEMs to Atom Bay Trail than AMD. This means that as demand for laptops has stabilised, Chipzilla is in a stronger position.

Barrons  said that its recent conversations with notebook ODMs indicate that AMD is ceding material share to Intel’s Atom Bay Trail platform in the sub-$399 computing market.

Intel’s cunning plan, which was to focus on the low-end x86 computing segment after giving up on the netbook in 2012, is paying off.  It still has a long way to go before it has the sort of control of that market that it has with overall PC processor sales. It has been estimated that Intel has half of the low end market in comparison to 80 per cent overall in PC processors.

One of Chipzilla’s sales points is that Atom Bay Trail 4-watt processors have outperformed AMD’s 26-watt processors in performance benchmarks.

If that is correct, then the only thing that is holding AMD together is that its APU business division. It has increased 20 percent or more over the past six months thanks to the recently launched Kaveri and Beema APUs. This will make  AMD’s desktop APU sales increasingly dependent on expansion from Application Service Providers which some analysts have written off as unlikely.

It might be simply another example where Intel has nobbled a key rival while its back was turned.

 

AMD loss shocks Wall Street

Posted on July 18, 2014 by - News

AMD_lassDespite winning all sorts of console contracts, AMD managed to disappoint Wall Street by posting a loss this quarter and gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that missed expectations.

AMD’s stock fell 15 percent in extended trade after the outfit said it had a net loss of $36 million in the June quarter, compared with a loss of $74 million, a year earlier.

Intel’s results had created expectations on Wall Street that the worst is over for the personal computer industry.  However this seems to suggest that AMD does not think so.

AMD has been expanding into new markets like game consoles and low-power servers and it aims to obtain half of its revenue from those additional businesses by the end of 2015.

Some of the dafter analysts think that the problem is because AMD is too dependent on the PC and does not make enough cash making mobile gear. That argument falls flat when you realise that Intel made a stonking profit but its mobile division bled cash.

Generally it was nothing to do with falling PC sales, or a drift to mobile. AMD’s biggest problem is debt. Each quarter it has to pay $49 million to service its huge debt pile.  If this were not, there the company would have reported a non-GAAP operating profit of $67 million.

In fact AMD’s revenue rose 24 percent to $1.44 billion in the second quarter. The company said its third-quarter revenue would rise 2 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, from the June quarter. That would be about $1.47 billion. Analysts on average had expected revenue of $1.44 billion in the second quarter and $1.57 billion in the third quarter.

Revenue in the Computing Solutions Group dropped 20 percent from a year ago, to $669 million, as microprocessor unit shipments declined. But notebook processor sales rose, while AMD sold fewer desktop processors and chipsets. GPU revenue declined as well, partially offset by a rise in chips sold into graphics workstations and add-on cards.