AMD (s AMD) ditched its fabs to stay alive, but apparently that isn’t doing the trick. Today the chipmaker announced that its revenues from continuing operations for the fourth quarter ending Dec. 27, 2008 will be approximately 25 percent lower than third-quarter revenue of $1.585 billion. The company blamed weak demand across all markets. Indeed, PCs didn’t even rank among the top 10 purchases during the post-Thanksgiving Day shopping period in the U.S., despite big discounts. I think the entire PC ecosystem is feeling the strain of the weak economy; the hot items this season so far are lower-priced netbooks. Too bad AMD thought they were a joke. Now the joke’s on them! (Just kidding guys!)
To be fair to AMD, I’m pretty sure their lack of interest in netbooks was just feigned to cover the fact that they didn’t have the ability to make a profit in that segment. AMD makes some nice low power stuff, but the real beauty of Atom is not its low power but its low cost to manufacture. The irony is that AMD is turning the tide on Nvidia in the GPU game by coming up with a product line that is much less expensive to manufacture. This is especially noteworthy given that both the ATI and Nvidia product lines are all fabbed by a 3rd party, TSMC. Focusing on manufacturing considerations when the actual doing is left to someone else is unusually circumspect for corporate management. By the way, that decision was made by ATI well before they were acquired. As is often the case, that merger may have been backwards — I’m thinking the ATI guys should have been put in charge of AMD and not the other way around.
Om,
Compared to the rest of the semiconductor industry, AMD is doing average — a lot of people, including the analog guys, are expecting 15-30% drops in sequential revenue. DRAM is in free fall, and NAND is just behind. It’ll be interesting to see how Intel’s results come in.