AMD’s Predicament
Taiwanese publication DIGITIMES has about the best analysis of some of the causes underlying AMD’s current predicament.
First of all, problems began in 2007 with the launch of the Radeon HD 2000 series. Graphics cards were delayed and underperformed.
Because of these and possibly other problems before the ATI acquisition, AMD experienced “a loss in graphics card market share across the first three quarters of the year”.
Market share went from from 23% in Q4 ‘06 to 19% Q3 ‘07. However, at the end of this time, “company executives were able mask the market share issues by pointing to increases in shipments and revenues”.
According to DIGITIMES, such masking is “fairly easy to achieve if a company is only shipping last generation products in the earlier quarter”.
AMD’s troubles continued with the launch of Barcelona, originally intended for the summer. AMD kept up the “facade of launching on schedule by refusing to publicly announce a launch date until the last minute”.
When Barcelona did launch, clock speeds were slow.
Then people started to note that Quad-Core Opteron servers were still not forthcoming from computer makers. Something was up. Shipments today appear to be limited mostly to AMD’s HPC (High-Performance Computing) customers.
Chipsets and platforms constitute “AMD’s third core business”.
Following Quad-Core Opteron, AMD launched its Spider platform. Per DIGITIMES, AMD failed to deliver samples for review prior to the launch.
Throughout 2007 “poor decisions and performance on the engineering side of AMD were the root cause of most of the company’s problems”.
On top of this, however, there seems to have been something else, a communication problem maybe between AMD and the public. Hence the current loss of credibility with the financial and technical communities.
Read more here.