Aceshardware

More bad press for AMD:

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/ar ... Bankruptcy

10 Big Companies That Are Veering Toward Bankruptcy

[..]

8. Advanced Micro Devices

When will AMD actually make money again? The question is becoming more important by the day since it carries over $5 billion in long-term debt.
After losing almost $3 billion from 2007 – 2008, analysts expect the company to lose more money in 2009 and 2010.
While the shares rallied from their February $2 low, they still appear stuck in a long-term down trend from $40 highs way back in 2006.

Repeated negative attention like this has to have a cumulative effect on OEM and customer
perception of AMD and its products after a while.

You have been losing too many nerve cells, awaiting for AMD collapse.
Relax. AMD will live forever.

Prospects for profitability at AMD recede even further into the future - fixed costs jump at
the end of the year as paycuts are rescinded.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/0 ... _reversal/

It's a wonder why AMD didn't keep the pay cuts in place and let it drop to the bottom line
until the company had a few quarters of profits under its belt.

AMD shareholder's equity was NEGATIVE half billion dollars in Q2 and is dropping rapidly. Don't
worry though, the top suits at AMD will give themselves a 25% raise as a Christmas present
for doing such a great job. ;^)

The pockets of AMD's current backers are pretty deep. They have a 25 year time horizon for their investment. They've been happily funding new FABs, such as the ones being built for AMD in New York, and buying other, existing FABs to bring in additional experience and increased economies of scale.

AMD's' current investors have to figure out what to do with $1,800,000,000,000. They plan to put a few 10's of Billions into their FAB and CPU business over the next couple of decades. If it pays off, great, if not, no big deal. Hence the return to full salaries and bonuses at AMD to keep attracting fresh talent.

If oil were to drop to the $20's or even $30's per barrel, AMD would be in trouble, otherwise they have nothing to worry about for decades....

Production cost of oil in Middle East is about a few dollars per barrel. It means that 30 and even 20 dollars is a bulk of money.

Are they really willing to spend tens of billions of dollars over a two-decade span without much concern over getting a return on their investment? I find that difficult to believe. If AMD's investors, flush with $1.8 trillion (!!!), are planning to spend billions on it, it's because they believe that it will recover and become profitable. Otherwise I don't think it's much more than talk.

I would like to point out that most of Abu Dhabi/ATIC's investment is in Global Foundries, not AMD itself.

Global Foundries has actual assets, its fabs and manufacturing experience, as well as prespects beyond
endless unprofitable war against Intel. That separation of GloFo's destiny from AMD's over time is what
makes it a more attractive target for speculative investment that AMD itself.

AMD would have likely preferred to keep its fabs in-house and pull ATIC billions directly into itself. The
fact is that after seperation AMD has very little in the way of assets. It has tremendous value in the
form of x86 related engineering know-how and processor designs but the value of that is locked into
the company by the cross-licensing agreement with Intel. The fact that it can't be transferred to a
third party basically makes it worthless in terms of a fungible asset.

Has this happened? Good to hear it! I haven't talked to friends over there in awhile, but that was a pretty shitty situation with pay and benefit cuts.

AMD 32 nm slips six months.

http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle. ... es_newsRSS

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Foundry startup GlobalFoundries Inc. has updated its process roadmap and rolled out a customer partnership program.

It appears that the company's roadmap has slipped for its separate 32-nm and 45-/40-nm offerings. Comparing the new roadmap to the last update, the foundry company has slightly pushed out the introduction of its 32-nm, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology based on high-k and metal gates.

That process, devised especially for Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s microprocessors, was supposed to move into ''tape out'' or ''risk production'' in the first quarter of 2010. Now, the technology is targeted for ''risk production'' in the third quarter of 2010. How that impacts AMD is unclear, although the processor maker could fall further behind Intel Corp.

This is the "old" roadmap which says: Risk production in mid 2010 (and not Q1)




Left edge = tape out; Right edge = risk production.....

Bad reading capabilities become news items...


Regards, Hans

Article updated:

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/show ... =220200094

GlobalFoundries denied its roadmap has slipped. ''Our roadmap for 32-nm SOI has not slipped,'' according to a spokesman for the company. ''Yes, the timeframe for introduction has been altered slightly compared to the roadmap we showed you in July, but that is not because of any issues with the technology. The roadmap has simply been adjusted to align with AMD's product needs.

LOL, who is GloFo's spokesman, Bill Clinton?

Yeah "slipped" from "end of Q2 to Q3 2010" for risk production. Now that's a massive delay!

When was the 45nm "risk production" supposed to start? I recall that according to AMD, the 45nm mass production started "ramping up" in H1 2008, and the first products were available in November 2008.

The funny thing is last quarter AMD was still selling a majority of 65 nm parts. At their Q2 conference
call they admitted this and predicted 65/45 nm cross-over during the current quarter. They said they
would be mostly converted to 45 nm by the end of the year.

Production start (wafer starts) of 45nm was in the very last week of H1 2008,
shipping to server OEM's started three months later in October and systems were
shipped to customers in November.

They said that wafer starts at Dresden were 100% at 45nm in April or May 2009.
Any 65nm parts sold now should be from older stocks.

Regards, Hans.