Monday, December 10th 2007
AMD Worth Less than it Paid for ATI
More bad news for AMD I'm afraid, this time it's in terms of company value. AMD's share price dropped to its lowest for more than four years last week, leaving the company with a total value of $5 billion US - that's $400 million less than it paid for ATI a year and a half ago. To put things into perspective, AMD's main rival Intel is worth $162 billion, which is more than 32 times more than AMD. Meanwhile, graphics card competitor NVIDIA is worth almost four times as much as AMD with a company value of $19 billion. These are tough times for AMD, and it will be hoping its Phenom processors and its HD 3000 series of graphics cards can get it out of trouble, although the former has not been particularly well received so far.
Source:
bit-tech.net
79 Comments on AMD Worth Less than it Paid for ATI
intel has no 4cores on 1 die cpu, so reverse engineering, I think not, Intels Nathalem or whatever may be native, so THAT with inbuilt mem controller may have a wee bit of reverse engineering in from AMD
AMD didnt invent quad core, lols, they just implimented the technologically superior method of getting all on one die, not 2 strapped together, reguardless of performance in its infancy, its till superior technology. most of what u said was a bit weak tbh
no diff than saying ddr3 is technologically superior to ddr2, but not all ddr3 is better than ddr2, catch my drift?
Wile E is always right. *worship*
AMD puts all their money into inventing this stuff, then Intel, nVidia, IBM and VIA copy their hard work. Patents and copyrights, AMD. Come on now!
That's not to say that AMD hasn't taken Intel's technology and improved it. Afterall, AMD started as a company that designed a processor to almost exactly emulate an Intel processor.
ATI, for some reason or another, has always been very quick to jump on new technology, and try to get it out the door before anyone else does. It's a double edged sword. If the technology isn't up to snuff in other departments, it makes them look bad. If it becomes the next big thing, they've got a step up.
Problem being, though, is that ATI don't have a "niche" market like nVidia does. ATI has never been about having the biggest/fastest VGA adapter, they were always more about IQ than anything else. Even still, their cards handle HD capabilities better than nVidia's do - why ATI doesn't market on that point specifically, I have no idea.
As for technologically advanced . . . take for instance the usage of the ATI GPU's for the F@H project.
As of right now, ATI's downfall will be because of poor marketing on AMD's part, and having a sinking ball and chain that will pull a lot of their funding.
I'm not a big AMD fan, but I don't want to see the company fail, either.
The best way to compare the state of ATi now and before the merger is ATi's website. It was so groovy in red before, and now it's merely a sub-site in AMD's website with the same colour scheme. Yuck. I'm an Intel user, I go to ATi.com and I'm presented with a link to AMD processors? makes little sense. From what I see, NVidia is going to gobble down ATi in the same way it gobbled doen 3DFX, exactly 10 years ago. As for AMD, they'll be sold to some rich Dubai based firm which will keep it as rudementary as VIA keeps S3 Graphics. Bad decision making has made once two brilliant companies in to whores.
I've noticed a little something, though . . . it seems to me that recently (within the last couple of years) AMD has been going more after those assets that are proven to be strong developers of processor architecture. Just this last week there was a news story of hiring Mike Uhler, a month or two before that was someone else (can't remember the name off the top of my head), and small things here and there going all the way back to ATI (who at the time were known for having extremelly accurate and efficient GPUs) . . .
. . . makes me think AMD might have something big on the drawing board that they're keeping very hush-hush about.
Anticipating an onslaught by the AMD Barcelona/Agena, Intel was well prepared with the Yorkfield which sold a few units even before the Agena in the first production batch.
What I foresee: AMD could be working on something really big, and it's going to tell the buyer "look dude, I'm selling you the best thing in the market, I don't care what Intel has to offer". A cousin of mine works at the AMD RnD and Flash memory unit located in Bangalore, India. He says that his bosses are really secretive about things and he did feed me with his story about AMD working on a desktop processor that has 4 x86 cores + 508 stream processors (4 core, 512 thread, 2.2 GHz), which I mention with a schematic diagram in one of my other posts. Sure, this invites laughs but I don't care.
BTW . . . so, our assumptions that AMD is up to something might be correct?
i really hope that they can pull it together (either through fantastic innovation or a complete overhaul of their business/marketing practises). what i would hate to see happen, is that if the 'unspeakable' happens and AMD goes into administration, instead of some 'business angel' rescuing the company and putting them back onto the path to success, that the company gets bought by a company which then takes all the 'good' parts and sell off the rest (the 'rest' of the company invariably dies!). a similiar thing happened with Rover in the UK when BMW bought the company. BMW took Land Rover and the New Mini and then dumped the rest of the company. the company collapsed. a dire situation - lets hope it doesnt happen.
for the record i hated rover's cars, but thats not the point:
many people lost theyre job and the manufacturing sector of the west midlands took a severe kick to the nads
... and there's me thinking you started with an Intel CPU like myself. You learn something knew everyday.