Analysis - HEXUS.sharewatch: Q2 earnings week for Intel and AMD

[HEXUS]

Intel announces its Q2 earnings on Tuesday and AMD does the same on Thursday amid more ATI writedowns.

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[drunkenmaster]

ITs a very difficult situation to get into really because, frankly the 8 day changes, and the 1 month changes don't mean squat at the moment. If you take the monthly changes for the last year you'll see (almost) everyone down massively. Nvidia were at $40 end of last year, now $12, AMD i think got up to $12-14 or something and are down just under $5 now. Intel are down, everyones down. THe economy credit crunch and recession talk around the globe(well america and uk) in the last year, banks getting into trouble and needing to be bailed out has caused the drops(amongst many other reasons). So the value of ATi then and now isn't really comparable, it didn't go down because they were bought. However, AMD almost certainly wouldn't get the funding, capital and loans right now, to buy AMD so in that sense they bought at the perfect time, as in, before they couldn't.

But whats the situation now? Well it would seem companies like dell are having fairly large numbers of Nvidia notebooks fail and deciding to ship out AMD replacements(being the rumour). Dell have also gone from near zero ATi options a year/two ago to having a pretty massive ATi pressence. How does this help, well, now AMD own ATi, now if Dell want ATi cards, and more of them, its good for AMD aswell as ATi. But if Dell want even better deals on ATi cards, what do AMD offer them, decent price on ATi cards, but massive deals on a spider platform.

This is where Ruiz was 100% correct, its about a platform, a good, cheap, competitive platform that can be sold as a package to make it easier to sell and easier to use. ATi had a semi rough time last year, but all the delays were in basically, avoiding the hell out of the 65nm process as it sucks, which Nvidia didn't take notice of and waded in to their own demise. This generation they will lose every single price point, and single card speed(in a few days anyway).

AMD are actually pretty well set, as of right now, to make some big deals all over the place for whole platforms benefiting ATi and AMD sides with big sales, the two separately wouldn't be in the same strong position, and if AMD didn't buy ATi exactly when they did, they simply would not be able to afford them now.

With rumours abound at just how far Nvidia's latest problem might spread(ie, entire g84/86 series, and a chance of desktop problems and possibly other lines), the next few months could see multiple more $100-200million 1 off hits that Nvidia will be taking. But its not the money in sending out replacements that will hurt nvidia most, its the reputation hit, and with that lost sales to the likes of Dell, and what will hurt Nvidia the most, is every sale lost because people don't trust their cards will go to ATi.