Bill,

The funny thing (not) is that an analyst (JoAnne Feeney at FTN Midwest Research) upgraded AMD early today - before earnings were released. I am not exactly sure why she would that, but as a result, the stock went up about 4% to 14.60 during the day, settling at 14.28 at the end of the day.

Indeed quite dismal earnings were released, after hours price tanks to 13.80. At 5PM AMD states that they will have to look for further financing, as was reported here a couple of weeks ago, so it lifts to 14.70. Not exactly too serious, is it?

I guess my buying a Dell laptop with an AMD processor didn't help them too much. On the other hand, imagine if every yahoo searcher convinced one friend to switch over from Google. Now that would put a lot of money in someone's pocket.

AMD is a fiesty little co. that prevented Intel from doing to the hardware end that Microsoft managed to do in the sofware side which is to momopolze the planet with a crummy OS. Amd has always fought the price war and never stopped fighting for market share and because of this Intel had to dump chips and keep prices reasonable. They eventually even dropped the ball for awhile, and to the world's benefit Amd grabbed some market share until core 2 arrived. They have always been in dodo, check their history it's their natural state but they put a huge dent in Intels Margins and forced great growth in the processor biz and at a resonable price. The following charts paint a little different picture especially when you think how AMD has been unable to make money, intel could not put them out of biz. Their future is in Fusion. They will survive and I think they will someday pass Intel. HP,dell,sony etc you name em they are not gonna want this company to go out of biz and be at the mercy of Intel.. buy at 8.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion#Speed_increase

http://www.easystock.com/tkchart/tkchart.asp?stkname=AMD,INTC&prt=0&wt=3

Stocon - i like your analysis - i think you make a valid point.

AMD might be a dog of a stock but I bought an HP two years ago with their chip and it works great and cost about $500 less than the HP intel product at the time.

I concur that we all owe a tip of the hat to AMD for helping to keep hardware prices low. If Intel would have had no competition like Microsoft then we would be paying through the nose for inferior products (a la Microsoft)

I believe the extent of pressure AMD exerted on Intel is bore out in the reduction of assets over the last three years (specifically cash) from the last value line report. Competition creates better products at lower prices. IMHO we should all be rooting for AMD.

And please know this is not a commentary on Bill calling stock prices of companies as he sees them but rather my personal views about competition and the PC market.

I don't think that AMD is going anywhere. For years, until this generation of Intel 'core' processors, it's had the clear technical advantage, and has quite a lot more good will in the bank than Intel. You'll rarely find a computer geek running an Intel chip. This is evidenced by Google using AMD almost exclusively, and Sun using AMD processors for all of their non-Sparc servers.

Yes, good will isn't money, but sometimes it's worth more.

From what I've seen thus far, the main advantages that Intel has been playing over AMD have been an earlier start (thus more money in the bank), and far better control over analysts and equity market related media.

This perhaps not too different from the situation between Oracle and its competitors. The main thing Oracle seems to excel at is *stock marketing*. Larry Ellison takes a dump, and press releases fly around the world the next minute about the newest golden "egg".

They're products aren't that bad anymore, but they used to terrible.

That said, I wouldn't be a buyer of AMD or Oracle competitors (unless it looks like they'll make another acquisition...) _because_ of their comparatively poor 'stock marketing'. So, I don't necessarily disagree with Bill's positions on INTC or ORCL from a speculator's perspective.

-Matt