It's tempting to include AMD among Gartner Dataquest chief analyst Garry Smith's chip industry "familiar names" who won't be here in six years' time. Smith's comments were reported this week in a Silicon Strategies report. His gloomy conclusion: that the current industry recession is like no other, and that it's going to bring about some major changes. Not to put too fine a point on it, some well-known companies are going to snuff it.
The industry is certainly in hard times. It's currently shuffling through its eighth consecutive recessionary quarter, making this the longest downturn it has ever experienced. Stocks are down, sales are down, profits are down if you're lucky - losses are up if you're not.
And there's no doubt AMD is having a particularly tough time of it. This week it adjusted its Q3 sales forecast downward, having twice revised its Q2 sales expectations. It's in its fifth loss-making quarter and doesn't expect to get back into the black until sometime next year. But if it can't get its sales forecasts right, how can we trust its earnings estimates?
It doesn't look like we can trust its shipping schedules either. Clawhammer, the Athlon implementation of AMD's 64-bit x86 implementation, was due to ship at the tail end of this year. Now it won't appear until three months after that, in Q1, and, as this very organ reported this week, isn't likely to make it into machines people can buy - become revenue generators, in other words - until the second half of the year.
News source: The Inquirer - Will Hammer be too late to save AMD?
