We’ll note in opening that the Inquirer reports that rumors of AMD reverse hyperthreading are just fantasies.
AMD stock price is now down 40% from what it was four months ago, and outside of a Dell announcement and perhaps continued increases in the server market the next few quarters, there doesn’t seem to be any other good news likely to show up the rest of the year, and plenty of bad.
With all the current and soon-to-be price cuts, AMD will be doing very, very well to keep revenues where they are and keep in the black the rest of the year.
In a few short months, AMD has gone from momentum to hoping for just nomentum, and avoid retromentum.
It probably won’t hit the rest of the world for a while, but the questions that are bound to be eventually asked is:
Let me put it this way, if AMD had 65nm K8L processors available this month rather than a year from this month, I don’t think we see the price cuts from AMD we’re going to see in a couple weeks.
It seems to me AMD was trying to build up a head of steam and look like an irresistable force, but now it looks like that image is unraveling now, and going to go completely to hell in the months to come. It’s hard to keep talking about momentum when your product goes from leading-edge to trailing-edge, and really, how much can you talk about 4-way server marketshare before someone realizes there’s just not too many of them?
Given what we know about the roadmaps through 2008, I just don’t see how AMD can reach its target of 30% marketshare by 2008 with trailing-edge products. Indeed, if Intel is more-or-less accurate about a) getting to 45nm by the beginning of 2008 and b) licking the power leakage problems, they’re likely to extend their lead, and I don’t even see how they’re going to hang on to the marketshare they have now by then.
And if that holds true, I don’t see how Hector Ruiz remains president of the company two years from now. If the message about momentum shrivels so easily, odds are somebody’s going to shoot the messenger.
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