AMD slashes $880M from value of division

[Zxian]

As a result, the company plans to write down the value of their goodwill, or intangible assets such as reputation, and take charges of $880 million in the latest quarter, which ended June 28.

AMD had previously written down ATI's overall value by $1.6 billion in January, in a staggering reassessment that indicated the perception of ATI in the market had slipped dramatically.

Taken together, AMD has effectively said that ATI is now worth 44 percent less as a company than when AMD bought it.

Link

Ouch....

[CoffeeFiend]

Very ouch indeed!

The problem is, AMD isn't really beating Intel anymore on the low end like they used to (until the Athlon XP), nor beating Intel with a better product (like the Athlon64 vs Netburst junk), nor really beating them on a performance/$ (when you look at "mainstream" dual/quad core chips), nor do they have the most performing/fastest chip, and Intel is even eating their lunch in the server space with the latest Xeons... So basically nobody's buying their products anymore, so then they resort to slashing prices (lowering profits even more), and then Intel follows them on the price drop, so they're still no better off...

And to make things worse, Intel is going to release Nehalem within a year or so, that performs even better than Core 2 Duo's, better performance/watt overall, and all that. It finally has a hypertransport-like bus (no more FSB): QuickPath (aka CSI), has on-die memory controllers much like their AMD counterparts (triple channel DDR3 actually), loads of cache (L3 too now), brings back hyperthreading (8 logical cores), etc. That can't be good for AMD either.

We need AMD around though. We can't have a one company monopoly.

Edited July 11, 2008 by crahak

[shahed26]

I totally agree with crahak, AMD have made few mistakes, but now its costing them, ATI was better without AMD for sure.

We need AMD otherwise we will hardly see price drops on intels cpu or any new technology.

Intel were always dominent in CPU market, they hardly released any speed upgrades or anything new back in the early days. Then came 3DNOW from AMD and then Athlon which suprisingly gave AMD a very good market share, and popularity, and thats where the race for the best CPU war began.

We need AMD or else we can start thinking of early INTEL days when they hardly released anything new, because there was no competition

Edited July 11, 2008 by shahed26

[cluberti]

I have to agree. Intel really didn't seem to care much about the low-end desktop and even mobile CPU market (mobile P4 anyone? blech) until AMD started pushing them around with good product. Intel fought back with pretty good products that were technically equivalent to their AMD counterparts, and with their heft they fought AMD off really well. If AMD becomes a non-competitor, I loathe to think what will happen to the non-server CPU market again. If history repeats itself, Intel will suck again. (...and maybe AMD sticks it out and repeat that history too? who knows...) It'd be too bad too, AMD makes pretty good products.

[DigeratiPrime]

AMD has been and still is the best value IMO for processors imo. Only reason to go Intel is if you don't mind paying extra for marginal increases in performance. I just bought my first Intel CPU in years btw mainly because they are way ahead in fab process (45nm) and the motherboards used in the current Shuttle boxes have problems.