AMD Touts Mobile Success, Questions Tablet Opportunity

[Guest]

AMD announced a solid quarter with revenue increase being driven by servers and mobile processors, but somewhat fell short in desktop processors. Then there was a rather stunning hint that AMD may not be going after the tablet market at all.

AMD Touts Mobile Success, Questions Tablet Opportunity : Read more

 

[krowbar]

Hard to take Wolfgang Gruener's articles serious after all the recent scrutiny. Hopefully AMD will get on track with better a better desktop cpu.

 

[beenthere]

The good news is demand for Llano, BD based Opterons and even FX chips exceeds demand and AMD is still profiable with all the ramping costs associated with Bulldozer based CPUs. With Trinity a few months away and Piledriver based CPUs expected in '12, AMD is headed in the right direction for sure.

 

[JeanLuc]

In case anyone is wondering the old ATI graphics division chipped in with a $12m profit for this quarter from a revenue of $403m although some of that might be down to the Fusion/APU chips depending on how AMD accounts for those sales.

 

[silverblue]

I suppose we'll know more in February.

As regards AMD's shrinking stake in GloFo, couldn't that be responsible for a good deal of AMD's revenue this past quarter? Fusion may be selling, but is AMD actually making money or hiding behind something else?

[citation][nom]JeanLuc[/nom]In case anyone is wondering the old ATI graphics division chipped in with a $12m profit for this quarter from a revenue of $403m although some of that might be down to the Fusion/APU chips depending on how AMD accounts for those sales.[/citation]
APU sales aren't part of those figures, according to Anandtech.
[citation][nom]beenthere[/nom]The good news is demand for Llano, BD based Opterons and even FX chips exceeds demand and AMD is still profiable with all the ramping costs associated with Bulldozer based CPUs. With Trinity a few months away and Piledriver based CPUs expected in '12, AMD is headed in the right direction for sure.[/citation]
Debatable. All that's saying is that AMD can make anything and people will buy it, regardless of its quality. Fortunately, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with Fusion. I just hope that when Fab 8 is finished, AMD can get more wafers out per month.

 

[SteelCity1981]

Amd's Mobile cpu and graphics division are doing fine, it's there desktop cpu division that are keeping them down.

 

[bustapr]

I really hope trinity is up to par with Phenom II when it comes out. they did pretty well fitting in an Athlon II in the llanos, lets just hope they make some space for L3 cache and ramp up the GPU. I really cant see Fusion failing at the moment.

 

[beenthere]

Debatable. All that's saying is that AMD can make anything and people will buy it, regardless of its quality. Fortunately, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with Fusion. I just hope that when Fab 8 is finished, AMD can get more wafers out per month.

You can debate anything but the bottom line is demand far exceeds supply for Llano, BD based Opterons and even FX chips. That is a fact. As far as CPU quality is concerned, the market decides what it wants and obviously it wants these three AMD products or the demand would not be so high. It's reported Cray got the first 10,000 BD based Opterons for their super computers so I expect Opteron 6200s work just fine for server use.

Few people buy bleeding edge CPUs as they are not cost effective or practical for mainstream PC users. AMD's APU is at least a year ahead of Intel's efforts so that's good for consumers.

Obviously when Fab 8 is finished AMD will get more wafers per month. How could they not unless they shut the plant down?????

 

[silverblue]

Fab 8 doesn't belong to AMD... it belongs to GloFo. AMD is one of many customers.

FX CPUs selling out isn't going to be difficult - AMD can hardly be producing huge numbers of them. Wouldn't mind seeing some sales figures.

 

[de5_Roy]

cool, amd has finally somewhat succeeded in the notebook market.
amd said they didn't want to enter ultrabook field at first, after a few days they said they have a platform ready(deccan and brazos-t iirc) for ultrabooks. amd'll flip their statement and go for tablet sooner or later(i've see a few c-50 tablets here and there).
fx chips (and may be llano desktop chips too) exceed demand because amd doesn't make too many of them because of the production problems. it's easy to twist that fact into 'amd is selling a lot of fx cpus, they're sold out.' type statement.
amd took a looong time to get bulldozer out, who knows how long they'll take getting piledriver out. they can let tsmc make piledriver if its possible.

 

[de5_Roy]

Time to consider TSMC for CPU manufacturing as well ?

tsmc made amd's 40 nm brazos apus.

 

[pelov]

Judging from his response to the desktop segment question, I'm a bit concerned. I think most people are very happy with the llano and want to see future fusion tech do well, but their bulldozer flop and yield issues at GloFo can potentially be serious issues for their desktop chips and future desktop chips. If they're going to stand by the bulldozer architecture, i think it'll be a few years and multiple revisions before we finally see a decent chip, and that would mainly have to do with the software industry embracing multithreaded optimization and not the actual performance of the chips.

I think focusing on the mobile sector is fine, but the #1 priority, even above performance, is low power consumption. Unfortunately, Intel isn't having any issues at all producing chips that consume less power and still perform respectably. They're about to start producing 22nm chips before the end of the year (Ivy) and don't appear to be having any unforeseen issues.

I know I may sound like a heretic, but AMD should really reconsider and perhaps go the ARM route. I don't think dropping x86 chip power consumption to ARM levels will ever be possible. Opting to do so can put them ahead of Intel in the mobile market while still pumping out fusion for lappies. Maybe they can then pay a little more attention to us desktop folk as well

 

[jwcalla]

It seems like the area where AMD is excelling the most is the same space that represents the greatest growth opportunity for ARM in the near future: low-end, low-power, smaller mobile devices and servers.

The current AMD reminds me a lot of Sun, which simply couldn't grasp certain realities about how technology was changing, and therefore wasn't able to adapt, until finally fading away into irrelevancy. That AMD continues to clutch to x86 even when they're clearly bested by Intel is rather puzzling.

 

[Parsian]

I dunno what is it about AMD that I so love them much and want to them to succeed. Maybe its because Athlon 64 was super sweet and the taste hasnt gone away.

I hope AMD can boost their production yield and they should get into more tablets. Their C60 chips are great especially when coupled with Win8

 

[beenthere]

Hey at least when you buy AMD you aren't supporting a convicted criminal corporation who is still being sued for violations of anti-trust laws that cost all consumers... Intel has also been convicted of U.S. tax fraud several time.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2120866/intel-antitrust-claims-dismissed

 

[ojas]

No wonder their shares are up...so is their market capital...back above $4B for the first time since Bulldozer...

 

[dreamer77dd]

Well at least they know they have a lot of work ahead of them. They are getting feedback from their customers and keeping them close. I think we will only see the changes happen in a few years from now because things are already in progress before the new CEO was even announced. you can have 32nm or even 22nm but it wont make a difference for AMD if they cant do justice with what they have. AMD FX-850 2 billion transistors loses to Intel 1.16 billion transistors, I think they need to work on the fine tuning of their product. It still a new architecture but hopefully Trinity/pile-driver will show improvements even though it is early.

 

[bustapr]

[citation][nom]ashane[/nom]Concise article on the Kindle Fire.AMD should fear the Kindle Fire--it is the true iPad killer. It has more CONTENT than Apple and Android combined! Steve Jobs wanted to nuke Android, but Amazon was nipping in the back tablet door whilst Jobs was fighting Android! Jobs will be turning in his grave...a third tablet rival rises Beware AMD!ashanehttp://www.kindlefiregeek.blogspot.com/[/citation]
i wonder if toms will take out the hammer for this one

 

[danwat1234]

I am really looking forward to Trinity, which has PileDriver CPU cores with their new integrated GPU. Should womp Intel's mobile Sandy Bridge GPU.

 

[nezzymighty]

Does this feel like another misguided and confusing article, throwing together facts, to prove ... um... prove what?

This is funny:

"...and I don't think that I was the only one coming out of the conference call scratching my head and trying to make sense of what AMD is telling us..."

So then why did you write and publish the article? I think you were all over the map that you didn't even know where you were headed with the article.

If I want to complete a stock valuation, I'll do it myself. If I want a trusted business opinion of a company, I'll stick to the Wall Street Journal. If I want to understand specs and stats on the latest technology, I'll stick to Toms.... so stick to the format... evaluate technology only please.

 

[buzznut]

[citation][nom]de5_roy[/nom]tsmc made amd's 40 nm brazos apus.[/citation]

Yeah I like this idea too. If GloFo can't handle things for AMD they'd be stupid to rely solely on them.

 

[Guest]

Why is a "tablet strategy" essential to a company's success? Only 1 company out of 40 companies are making a profit on tablets, and the rest are losing money, mainly because tablets are useless toys that nobody wants or needs. It'd be a bit naive and foolish to assume that AMD could make money off of tablets. They're not like Intel, where they have endless amounts of money to throw at failed ideas like Larrabee, Itanium and Atom.

 

[buzznut]

The comments from the CEO don't really surprise me. It reminds me of when you see NFL coaches answering questions at a post game press conference.
You almost never hear them be completely honest and say. "Well, the quarterback threw 4 interceptions and our line let him be sacked 5 times. In other words, our offence sucks and we probably shouldn't be playing in this league."

So many people are so worried about being politically correct that a lot of truth gets lost along the way. People should just be more honest simply on the basis of clarity, I'm not sure what the CEO was trying to say either, except deftly avoiding any unpleasantness.

 

[buzznut]

[citation][nom]juniper_berry[/nom]Why is a "tablet strategy" essential to a company's success? Only 1 company out of 40 companies are making a profit on tablets, and the rest are losing money, mainly because tablets are useless toys that nobody wants or needs. It'd be a bit naive and foolish to assume that AMD could make money off of tablets. They're not like Intel, where they have endless amounts of money to throw at failed ideas like Larrabee, Itanium and Atom.[/citation]

Because tablets are outselling netbooks by quite a lot right now.

 

[jdwii]

Maybe because of the BD launch!