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Sunday, April 29, 2007

Would an extra cash help AMD?

Did AMD loose market share due to unavailablity of cash? This is a tough question to answer. Before answering such a question, lets look at how AMD got in trouble in the first place:
1. AMD got too comfortable with their original 2003 Opteron processor for too long. The cow got old and it is dying; stop milking it!
2. AMD underestimated how quick and hard Intel would come back swining. But AMD never used the HT to its full advantage. The legacy FSB did not punish Intel strategy very much.
3. AMD tried to do too much too quick: Planned for a quick market share gain and did not really plan it very well. Amd in the process, it did screwed its partners, the channel.
4. It signed Dell at a time when it needed the cash the most. If you ask Dell suppliers, you would know that Dell gets its profit from squeezing them. Very bad move!
5. Got too arrogant and thought that it can move to a new process technology, a new 300 millimeter wafer fab, and a new architecture at the same time it is supplying the same old chips.

So, could the extra cash have helped? Not really! AMD thought it needed the cash to upgrade the fabs and move into new architecture but forgot that upgrading the process technology and constructing a new fab would take years to ROI; a time they do not have. AMD should have focused on either moving to the new process or the new architecture. Little tweaks of the Opteron on a new process technology could have helped them bring a competitor to the Clovertown and Kentsfield and stop the market share loss.

AMD celebrated too quick and got drunk at the wheel and the result was a crash and loss of all market share gained in a year in just one Q. It saw success after success in getting big OEMs to adopt their procs and was blinded by that to the point where they signed customers without knowing that IBMers and HPers are looking for their best interest first, and so was Dell. These guys signed up AMD because they had a superior technology 2003-2005.

As long as your product is superior, you win! That is a very important lesson they should have learned from the Opteron success. AMD's strategy of trying to break the monopoly too fast was the wrong one. They should have taken slow but sure steps. Breaking a monopoly takes time. I hope they learned that lesson at least! One more thing they should learn: In business, your enemies are sometimes your best frieds. If it was not Opteron, there would be a C2D.

My advice: settle your case with Intel and stop the distracting yourself; focus on superiority, you have the talent! And by the way, Intel is not the only competitor you have!

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is great info to know.

3:58 AM

 

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