that you are completly right. I used to be an AMDer, an I saw the stupid way this company was driven. To tell you the truth when AMD bought ATI, nobody knew what to do whith ATI based products, first they hired one person responsable for continuing buisness for ATI, after only 2 months they fired all those people because "it did not make sense to have an ATI sales/marketing expert". Company was going out of money and Hector was receiving 8 million dollars because of his "excellent" work.
Now they are going to fire more people next month... what is next?..... easy... long live to Intel.

Nine consecutive quarters of losses and they still "promise" to be profitable in 2009? Weren't they promising that before the first quarter when they told eveyone that the Phenom-(inal failure of a CPU) is going to be so much better than the Core2? The executives of this company haven't the foggiest idea on how to run this business since they don't even know what the company does. I couldn't be happier for the fortunate souls from the DTV and Handheld divisions who were so lucky to be bought out by viable companies with a future and understanding of the markets they operate in. The AMD executives keep patting themselves on the back for being able to hack off the legs and arms of the business and mooch more money for nothing from the UAE and keep blathering about how great things are going. To anyone who thinks that AMD is showing positive trends, wake up. Yes their losses in dollar values are reduced year over year, but that is because they are offset by the sale of significant assets, reductions in workforce and employee pay. In the mean time their units sold are steadily decreasing, the margins are steadily dropping to a dismal ~20% on the CPU, their product is two years behind with no capital (or workforce) to catch up. I dont even understand how you can have a -$2.30 EPS when the stock is at $2.00. That alone is a symbol that investors haven't figured out whats going on. The only reason why this company is still around is because they haven't run out of things to cut and people to beg (but they are about a quarter away from that) after which point this idiotic operation will fail. It is truly too bad that this sinking ship thought it would save itself by clinging onto a life preserver like ATI. An "investment" that they paid double the worth of when AMD was as poorly positioned as possible, and failed to capitalize on in every sense. They have failed to produce any product from utilizing ATI technology that ATI would not have produced on their own if they were a separate buisness. The only result of that venture was to cause the loss of Intel business for ATI chipsets.
AMD is only so lucky to have this recession happen so that it bogs down the competition for a while. AMD itself was in a mess a long ago and the current numbers are consistent with everything that we have already seen from its performance and have been affected only marginally by the economic downturn. The case is that everyone else will recover, AMD will not.

You fail to stress how AMD has managed to narrow their loss from 3.4Bil in 2007 to 3.1Bil in 2008! If they can keep this trend they should be back in the black ~2018! See, things aren't so bad, it's just a matter of perspective. And if you consider how they dumped most of the debt on to the foundry, it may even be quicker...

...for deciding that their customers only wanted 512K L2 per core, instead of the full 1MB.

(...And remember the whole "Chip ID" hubub a while back? It was bad Karma to follow Intel and do the same. Only experts can handle evil without getting bitten.)

It seems to me AMD really lost perspective along the way, and instead of building on the momentum the a64 had, they made a mistake by buying ATI with money they didn't have.
I think This might serve as a nice cautionary tale for any company wanting to defeat a Goliath in the market.

It's too bad for us consumers if AMD does die, but then again they had it coming.

tHIS IS SIMILAR TO bIRTHDAY pARTY While Patient IN hOSPITOL. Transisition of TV Broadcast spectrum might help, sell Computer & TV as Package. Heck even thrown in some instructions. Its Been while since Sir Bill offered solution to go ask some friends how to, it was terrible product then. Product NOT That Bad anymore, yet public fatiques at ever pounding Cost & Loss already experienced.Best Thing that AMD has ever done is Lower Cost, Get Used to it Accountants. Drashek