some people on this forum are deluding themselves that Intel is in a much stronger position than AMD and therefore AMD will not enter a price war.
Let me just bring you back to reality. Intel has 112,000 employees world wide, AMD just 9,000. Intel has a fab business that results in a fixed cost of about $15bn a year that Intel has to pay independent of number of chips produced, AMD didn't have this lead weight.
now who do you think is better placed?
Intel must be doing very well, only recently in Dec a huge group of IT staff from all the sites fly biz class to US for a big groupie meeting! IT is doing another one in Feb again with huge group of IT staff flying again biz class to US! The way IT and some groups in Intel is spending, you'd think Intel is growing big time!
OP is looking only at spending. By that metric the rich are the poorest people on earth.
Intel is most definitely in a stronger position than AMD, thanks to revenue, profitability, and debt overhang. AMD would be foolish to enter a price war.
Remember too that years ago in 2009 AMD spun off its fabs into Global Foundries. That freed it from the financial burden of an arms race with Intel. Whenever it had an architecture opening because of Intel's missteps, it always failed to deliver in production. Now it can focus on design and outsource the manufacturing to the best vendor at the time.
Intel is years away, if ever, from coming to this conclusion, while it burns billions. Intel has nowhere near the cash reserves needed to keep business as usual, especially when doing acquisitions like Altera with <$2B in revenue.
Intel IT has never understood what their real job is - keeping everyone up so they can do their jobs. They never solicit info on what they really should be doing - which they would know if they asked their customers - intel employees.
Well here's the way I look it at @lede... AMD has already gone through a near death experience. Just 2 years ago, many had written them off as a company that wasn't going to make it. Dr. Su and her team really clamped down on expenses and cut to the bone, but did so in a way that apparently kept R&D alive. And that probably was the right move. AMD spent most of their limited money on the next generation and cut everything else to a bone.
Often times, when companies start going down, they cut in the weirdest ways, particularly american companies, like investing in non-core businesses it doesn't lead, expanding marketing budgets, which ends up just burning cash and not producing any better results.
The problem I have with Intel is that things have not hit rock bottom yet for the management team to start making hard choices and to spend wisely. and to Intel's credit it doesn't need to (yet).... that's why you still see all this bloat on absurd head scratching acquisitions, fiddling with URM, and spending several millions on marketing execs from ARM and to a lesser extent Qualcomm when reality is that no matter how much marketing you do, it won't help if you don't have a competent product/offering in those areas.
You still have tons of dead weight at intel that can hide in the bureaucracy until management needs to make those hard choices, and it could be years. As an employee that just wants to get by and rest and vest, well that's great. For a shareholder, that stinks. And that's reflected in Intel's stock price which hasn't really gone anywhere in the past decade.
AMD already had to make those tough choices, and Dr. Su seemed to have made the correct ones.
And notice it's a Dr. Su... Not a Mr. Krazanich....
Take a look Su's credentials. B.S., M.S., PH.D. from MIT...
http://www.amd.com/en-us/who-we-are/corporate-information/leadership/lisa-su
You think Su needs the protection of URM????
She can hold more than her own technical weight, as it should be.
If you are a geek, you at least can respect this leader who has the credentials.
Where's Krazanich from again?
This is @1ede, seems like some of my comments were removed during posting. Here's what I meant.
I spent some years working in AMD. Their entire IT group is just less than 100 folks while Intel IT one site alone in Malaysia is more than 300 folks with many not contributing but just flying around in biz class on a bimonthly basis and spending huge $ on corporate account.
One of biggest issue is spending. We design, manufacture, test products at far higher cost compared to others in the industry. Just look around and see the amount of high level managers who don't do much expect play politics and build their turf. At least 1/3 of management can be chopped without affecting business revenue. I spent some years working in AMD. Their entire IT group is just 300 folks with many not contributing but just flying around in biz class on a bimonthly basis and spending huge $ on corporate account. Drinking, partying, dining on company expense is the norm of the day. Be buddies with the right folks is far more important than doing what needs to be done. I do not see much will change as long as Intel commands bulk of x86 business, as someone posted, the world still needs PCs and workstations and servers. Things may change if AMD is able to step up and take up market share. However historically, AMD have never really been able to manufacture in vast volume even if the market wanted their products. ARM is good for mobile but is not really making any inroads in the PC/workstation/server market due to lack of software infrastructure. Let's see how things goes in 2017, it would be interesting to watch how things play out.
10nm will be Intel's Waterloo.
😅😃😂😂😂😁😁😀😁
Intel won't be going away anytime soon. There's so many employees it can layoff to keep to stock price afloat for a long time. This what wall street would call, unlocking shareholder value by cutting overhead cost. Or improving the bottomline through synergistic efficiencies.
TMG with 10nm ramp will be an albatross on cost and margins this and next year.