A few comments about this:
All these earnings warnings from the tech companies aren’t coming just because
all of a sudden they decided to be nice. The SEC began requiring them last
fall. Given their estimate, AMD seems to be awfully late in issuing one of any kind
and may end up in a little trouble with the SEC as a result.
Given the continuing plunge in AMD CPU prices during the quarter, and the estimated
essentially-break even report for the whole quarter, AMD is probably losing some money
at this stage.
On the other hand, AMD has stated that they nonetheless sold more CPUs in the second quarter
than they ever had before. Since their previous record was 7.3 million CPUs, they must have sold
at least that many.
AMD Isn’t the Story, Intel Is
It is very likely that CPU sales contracted further during the second quarter. Since AMD’s production at least stayed even, Intel production (and market share) appears to have dropped at least somewhat.
Just how much remains to be seen, though some Intel estimates seem to point to a drop of a few million CPUs. This would boost AMD’s marketshare a few percentage points.
However, Intel hasn’t said anything for the last month, and other indicators seem to point increasing weakness in the PC market, so any dropoff in production may be higher than that. Talk about getting rid of the PIII wouldn’t seem to make sense if Intel were still selling tons and tons of them.
On the other hand, Intel’s ASP probably got helped a bit by pricing the 1.7Ghz at just $350; they probably sold more of those than they would have otherwise.
My suspicion is Intel will be hurt more when the numbers come out than AMD.
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