- Sunday, 12 July 2009
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Intergrerty -- we've never heard of it - Doc Spinola of that ilk
AMD is "out of step with Moore’s Law"
HANS MOSESMANN is now a financial analyst at Raymond James Research and recently released an 'underperform' note to his customers as a result of briefings AMD apparently gave at SnowBIT earlier this month.
He reckons that AMD will declare a manufacturing spin off in the next few weeks – presumably this is part of its most vague and mysterious 'asset light' plan, which will also pull in fresh buckets of cash from investors.
Presuming, that is, that money is easy to find after the financial institutions royally screwed up by lending money to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back. He seems to think Abu Dhabi will bail out AMD again, soon.
More interestingly perhaps, Mosesmann thinks AMD has boxed itself into a corner because it’s promised to move to 45 nanometre technology this year.
He told his punters that AMD 'has fallen so far behind in terms of capability that the damage is irreparable'. He means that AMD won’t be able to sell its CPUs at a price which let it fund more R&D so it can catch up with Intel.
He also thinks that while insiders at AMD are happy with the launch of 65 nanometre technology, it just isn’t good enough in speed terms AMD’s 45 nanometre tech won’t give sufficient speed bumps because it’s not really got all the bits it needs, reckons the analyst.
No doubt AMD is far from happy with this man’s conclusions. The chip companies listed on Wall Street have to brief analysts whose conclusions cause share prices to rise and to fall. We’ve no idea if Mosesmann was one of the analysts who flew into CeBIT, but we do know that others, including a small army of complaisant and presumably handsomely compensated hacks, jetted in first class to be briefed by the great and the good at Chimpzilla.
We can’t figure out which is more dangerous – hacks flirting with financial analysts, or AMD refusing to answer questions non-complaisant journalists put to them. It seems that these days AMD prefers to force feed complaisant journalist geese to produce what it hopes is the finest pate de foie gras to present to its shareholders on toast.
One thing is clear – the financial analysts with their buys, their sells and their underperforms are part of a Wall Street feeding frenzy – the trades make or lose money for investors and have nothing to do with any price or performance metric apart from how well the share price does or otherwise. And if you lose on AMD, you can gain on Intel, right?
Is AMD ever going to start answering the real questions that matter about its process technology? If the last 12-18 months are anything to go by, it appears the answer is not likely, guv.
Vendors are fond of talking about their beloved 'ecosystems' but giving straight answers to straight questions by straight journalists [Eh? Ed.] appears to be the last thing they want to do. It might upset the infernal triangle of complaisant journalist, analyst and chip company that bit too much. µ
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Did you have an office bet to see how many times you could shoe-horn the word into your article? Using some french derived version of the word? That was annoying.
Now that Vista SP1 incorporates needed updates to run nvidias' Sli Hybrid, Nvidias' scores are jumping up on two feet. This leaves ATI somewhat behind, although Crossfire X is good, two Nvdias' are better.

Why Not Step Up With Nvidia by using Nvidias' Phys-X technology on ATI? Two would converge good technology & market better off.

Phys-X/Crossfire X, its game of Xes & Oes, at least according to Trisha Yearwood.
Thomas Drashek
When he says 'complaisant' he means crooked. Which explains how 'straight journalists' is not a homophobic slur but rather a literal opposition to the metaphorical 'crooked'.
I thought complaisant was supposed to be compliant not complacent.
I'm confused.
It reminded me of the bit in the movie Super Troopers where they pull over a motorist and try to use a word (I believe it was "meow" instead of "now") the most times. I found it hard to follow the meat of the article. Less grammatical wit and more sound journalism please.
Surely everyone is aware that AMD doesn't have as much money to throw around freely as Intel does, plus that's why their CPUs tend to retail cheaper than Intels.

AMD have offered consumer retail 64 bit chips for a while now, and Opterons are still popular with high-end servers and HPC....it's healthier when there's not only the one choice of manufacturer in any product area, and - I reckon anyway - history has shown many an example in technology, when business-only decisions spell disaster for the industry as a whole.

People that only think in terms of profit don't tend to know what matters in coming up with the goods in science and engineering; many of them aren't even end users or customers of what they 'advise' on.

Anyway, what CPUs were used to crunch those figures, hmmmmm? I'll bet it wasn't a calculator doing all the number analysis.
Spinning off their manufacturing arm is what AMD should have done three years ago. They are now late in the game because Samsung has already done so and AMD is not going to be a cutting edge independent foundry. So they will be cluttering up the foundry market but with nothing new to offer...

However, spinning off the fabs would cut their cap ex way down and AMD's strong suit really is IC design. This move will reflect well in quarterly business reviews.
and here was I thinking "compliant" (as in NDAs). the old "lisdexic switcheroo!"

BTW, Mike Magee, fabellent milling about!
and I LOVE the grammatical wit here. It's what makes th'Ink worth coming back to time and again, and what makes them un'Inq.

...dummies!
So what has the analyst Hans Mosesman's comments about AMD's technology got to do with the wining and dining that AMD apparently does to journalists?
Intel hasn't kept up with Moore's law in years. So AMD hasn't, bfd.
Do your homework before submitting such a stupid comment. 

Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. And Intel has kept that pace for nearly 40 years.

Proof: Tukwila. The World's First 2-Billion Transistor Microprocessor is targeted for production towards the end of 2008.

I'd say thats on par with Moore's Law.