AMD claims Intel is slashing prices

Some of it was interesting. Henri Richard said that AMD was being cautious for its outlook in Q2 because "historically it's the most difficult quarter for our industry". He said that AMD is seeing Intel producing a lot of low end products and making drastic price cuts on products people don't want to buy.

He said that channel/OEMs reported improved availability of Intel's chipsets and that AMD hade seen a lot of activity from Intel at the low end. AMD, he said, runs a very lean channel with inventory of four or five weeks.

As for product mix, Richard said that server chip sales continued to be the leader for AMD followed by notebook chips. He said: "Clearly servers is the engine for growth with triple digit growth year on year." AMD, he said, had a very robust January and February. Its average selling price (ASP) continued to increase in the quarter, particularly in the notebook segment. The quarter finished as strongly as AMD expected.

Hector Ruiz said that in Q1 the only market that was weaker than anyone expected was Europe. The US market was very strong but, he claimed, Western Europe seemed to have not completely covered from a glut of inventory carried over from Q4, "frankly from our competitor". Dirk Meyer, now COO of AMD, said that in Q1 "in aggregate", AMD was not capacity restrained. There were, however, occasions when demand for AMD "leading edge products" caused capacity restraints.

AMD was very tight lipped about its second source plans for Chartered Semiconductor. Meyer said the firm's plan was to use Chartered and get product during the third quarter. He wouldn't say what percentage Chartered will produce.

Meyer acknowleded that Intel's future roadmap has got a lot of attention. "The competition is aggressively trying to follow the lead we've established," he said. But AMD wasn't complacent because Intel is a good company. He said customers had the benefit of seeing both roadmaps and are still keen on AMD. There was still a large part of the market with "huge opportunities" for growth in that market. µ

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