AMD looking to leave intensive care

Lincoln Russell 18 Jan, 2008 at 12:36pm ET Article published in Tech

Looks like AMD is slowly-but-surely coming off of life support. The HD 3000, B3, and tri-core Phenom should shore it up until The Next Big Thing (Kuma).

Comments

18 Jan 2008 ~ 12:37pm GHoosdum Yay!
18 Jan 2008 ~ 12:43pm Leonardo

AMD's gross margin rose to 44 percent in Q4, up from 41 percent in the third quarter and just 36 percent in Q4 2006. Revenue in the company's Computing Solutions group rose to $1.4 billion (up nine percent over Q3). Microprocessor revenues grew by 11 percent, overall microprocessor shipments were up seven percent, and server shipments grew by 22 percent. AMD attributed the dramatic rise in server shipments to strong interest in the company's quad-core products

Assuming the factual content is correct, this is very good news.
18 Jan 2008 ~ 12:45pm Thrax It's one long chain of "The next big thing, we promise!" with AMD. Not impressed.
18 Jan 2008 ~ 12:50pm Leonardo I'm not talking about the marketing garbage - on that we agree. It does though, appear that sales and margin are improving. That's real traction. Maybe AMD has finally hit rock bottom and is now rebounding. I am not saying this is the same turnaround we saw with introduction of the Athlon, but a turnaround nonetheless, even if a very modest recovery.
21 Jan 2008 ~ 1:07pm GooD It's been a while since the last 'good' news from AMD.

This is a good news
21 Jan 2008 ~ 1:29pm muddocktor

Thrax wrote:

It's one long chain of "The next big thing, we promise!" with AMD. Not impressed.

I'm afraid I have to agree with you, Thrax. AMD is a long way from being profitable and competitive. One of the ways they are cutting costs is in the R&D department, which will surely kill them down the road some time in the future. I think they are betting all their cookies on the Intel lawsuit going in their favor to bail them out.
21 Jan 2008 ~ 8:00pm mmonnin AMD was only $59 million from being profitable (excluding the loss from buying ATI) and that was with a ton of bad news, huge price cuts to compete with Intel, and a botched release of their latest and greatest. Hardly a long ways off from being profitable.
21 Jan 2008 ~ 8:10pm Leonardo Agree. Baring any further blunders, they should be bouncing back from rock bottom. Bad news - they hit rock bottom; good news - they know they hit rock bottom and will only move up, maybe not high, but will move up.
21 Jan 2008 ~ 8:12pm Esso AMD is not the saints, they have made mistakes.

My hope for the Swedish Intel FAN boys is that AMD went busted, and they
have to pay 1000 USD or more for their precious Intel CPU's.
But I am afraid that they have no brains to figure that out ...
21 Jan 2008 ~ 8:14pm mmonnin Aye, I don't know how much of the $5.4bil they still need to pay off for ATI but this Quater was nearly $1.8bil and I think last quarter was a nice chunk as well. Hopefully not too many quaters of that to dilute the real number.
21 Jan 2008 ~ 8:16pm mmonnin

Esso wrote:

AMD is not the saints, they have made mistakes.

My hope for the Swedish Intel FAN boys is that AMD went busted, and they
have to pay 1000 USD or more for their precious Intel CPU's.
But I am afraid that they have no brains to figure that out ...

AMD isnt going anywhere anytime soon.
21 Jan 2008 ~ 8:19pm Esso

mmonnin wrote:

AMD isnt going anywhere anytime soon.

I like that, because I like AMD. They have never disappointed me
22 Jan 2008 ~ 1:29am JB

mmonnin wrote:

Aye, I don't know how much of the $5.4bil they still need to pay off for ATI but this Quater was nearly $1.8bil and I think last quarter was a nice chunk as well. Hopefully not too many quaters of that to dilute the real number.

As of the 12/29/07 balance sheet: $5.031 billion in long term debt. Ouch.
22 Jan 2008 ~ 3:33am Leonardo Only time will tell if Ruiz was brilliant or rather an imbecile for driving the ATI purchase.
22 Jan 2008 ~ 4:54am JB

Leonardo wrote:

Only time will tell if Ruiz was brilliant or rather an imbecile for driving the ATI purchase.

We'll see. Licensing the technology may have been a better idea and saved them a ton of money that they could have poured into R&D.
22 Jan 2008 ~ 7:48am Zuntar R&D vs Production is a delicate balance.

R&D is essential to drive the future, but production is the only way your going to make the money for the R&D.

AMD will do fine in the long run.
22 Jan 2008 ~ 8:10pm mmonnin It depends on what they do to incorporate ATI/gpu technology into their CPUs. If they can do that better than Intel then it may be worth it. Only time will tell.

How much of that $5bil in long term debt is from ATI though?