Very interesting if true. First the smoke and mirrors with product releases, and now perhaps financials? Intel may be ruthless to competitors, but Intel does show extreme loyalty to its stockholders; an area where AMD has left much to be desired which is evidenced by AMD's sub $5 stock price.

http://www.overclockers.com/tips01360/

You're kidding yourself if you think most companies don't play these kinds of accounting games when they have to take a loss. Once upon a time I worked for Tyco International (a company that definitely knows how to lose money), and this kind of stuff happened all the time. Whenever a company has a acquisition or a contract on which it loses a tremendous amount of money it is usually dubbed a "legacy project" and steps are taken to spread the losses out over several quarters instead of taking a huge hit in the quarter the loss was actually incurred. This is very common for companies that deal with construction projects.

As for adding the revenue gained from the sale of equipment to the gross margin, this makes perfect sense. Every company does this. Depreciation is applied to all company assets so that it can be claimed on the tax return as a capital loss. If assets are sold for a higher price than their depreciated value on the company's asset list then the difference is taken as a profit. Pretty standard stuff.

The author of this article is trying to make it sound like a big conspiracy but really this is nothing unusual.

Since you asked, I think that is incredibly boring and couldn't care less.

Technology Coordinator this thread is very trollish


back to your bridge!!!!

Someone is foaming at the mouth.

The "press bias" bit is especially good. Apparently, the OP hasn't read a magazine or visited a tech website since 2006.

While normally I treat Ed's articles with the same large grain of salt that I reserve for Fuad's, Theo's or Charley's articles, I do think that that in this case he makes some valid points. Whether anyone listens may be the issue, every bit as much of an issue as was Worldcom or Enron, or Bear Stearns. One can only do 'creative accounting' for so long, then there is nothing left to account for. What does AMD use next quarter? Another write-down on ATI? Seems impractical as ATI may very well be making money. Sell another FAB? How many do they really have left?

When does their next financial report come out? End of this week? Patiently waiting...

I only hope that they don't take ATI down with them....

Is this for real? AMD...smoke and mirrors? Playing fast and loose surviving off marketing hype and feeding false specs to review writers?

1) AMD has almost no marketing at all
2) they are very very very close mouthed about any technical details or performance comparisons even comparing current AMD hardware against upcoming, let alone comparisons against competition
3)No takes AMD's performance estimates at face value. Not the tech journalists, the hardware manufactures, or any consumer semi-knowledgable in the hardware world.

There have been countless times that AMD has released performance stats, power consumption and overall price/performance ratio only to be ignored, taken out of context or straight out sabotaged.

Intel didn't make a chip that possessed any kind of worthwhile design advancements for a 6-7 year period (1999/2000 being the PIII series launch releasing the P4 in the end of 2000 up until the release of the core 2 series in the end of 2006)

How has Intel always managed to keep such a huge market share regardless of quality, performance, or even progress? Marketing smoke and mirrors and strong-arming vendors.

AMD began stomping intel going alll the way back to the PIII/thunderbird days in 99/2000. Thus began the megahertz war. Throughout which AMD was consistent in being the better chip. While intel went from 1.3ghz - 3.6 ghz. AMD needed only to go from 1.2ghz -2.2ghz in the same time frame, staying on the same socket design, with the only major changes being die shrinks and cache increases with higher clocks and lower power consumption.

Intel's only brief lead was in releasing the 800mhz FSB flavor of the P4, which enjoyed minor performance gains in the 4 or 5 months between it's release and the release of the Athlon 64 line. But the overclocked bartons still stomped the 800mhz fsb p4's.

But what was Intels delightful claim about Netburst....oh yes "netburst will scale to 10ghz" It topped out at...3.6? hmmm seems to be a small margin of error there.

It took a 5.2ghz clocked P4 to tottally out perform a stock AMD 2.6ghz FX-55.

Now lets see, the core 2 chips, are based off the p6 series (pentium - pentium 3) So intel pretty much admits that the 6 year span of netburs was just them putting out crap that would have been better off never existing. But intel prefers to phrase it as "having the performance king laying around for 7 years without knowing it"

Hmm what other smoke and mirror magic has intel worked.

after the conroe was released intel said

There is no reason for an on-die memory controller. They attempted it and came to the conclusion that it created to many problems with little benifit for the increased production cost and in turn an increased cost to the consumer

In reality, they attempted an IMC for what was supposed to follow the PIII series, years of research and development, hundreds of millions spent and it was scrapped after numerous failed production runs. Intel thought it was a good idea 10 years ago. They just couldn't make it work. Still can't make it work, 5 years after AMD did it. So in reality, it's not a good idea until intel can make it too.

The same can be said for native dual-core and quad-core chips. Intel couldn't get 2 cores on a single die so they did two seperate cores in a single package, then upon getting 2 cores on one die, couldn't get 4 cores to work thus the two dual-cores in a single package for their "quad-core" chips. Note that they have been working on the IMC, and native quad core's while telling the world, there's no good reason to do it.

But the best of all. Their biggest con, 64bit? Who needs it?

They had to license the 64bit extenstions from AMD to get in the 64bit game. Once they got there, no one wanted them. Intel is horrible when it comes to 64bit computing.

So three years after the 64bit desktops come out from AMD, 11 years after the first 64bit processor was made by the Alpha team who also worked on the AMD barton's and 939 opterons.

Intel says who needs it?

It had nothing to do with their server chips not being reconized as 64bit compatible despite the claim of it being so. It had nothing to do with Opterons stomping the Xeons. Nothing to do with AMD performace gaining an addition 15-20% in 64bit applications.

They just thought it was silly. Microsoft was silly for making 64bit OS's, all those software developers were just wasting everyones time adding 64bit support to little things like 3D studio max, Cinema 4D, maya and softimage., file compression, video/audio encoding and of course The game developers. All just silly.

Because Core 2 does best in 32bit Xp, just like the PIII chips it's based off of. They will shoddily support 64bit software. So the motherboard makers can sell boards with 4, 8 or 16gig supported RAM capacity. Even though only 2gigs is addressable in 32bit.

Then of course Intel never really seems to get benchmarked in 64bit, despite supporting, thus niether does AMD because how would that be fair? Intel chips are reviewed against completly unbalanced AMD chips. But they'll boast about the $1500 intel quad having a 15-30% performance gain over an $180 AMD dual core, or the $1800 intel quad's 20-30% gain over the $200 AMD quad in real world benches.

But they never seemed to focus to much on AMD's $60 chips having 25-30% better memory performance over the $1500+ intel chips.

The fact that intels synthetic mathmatic benches are so high only because of the huge cache sizes which have no actual performance benifit in real world computing as rendering/encoding/photo editing requires a minimum of 80 or 90 megs cache.

AMD bought ATI 2 years ago, they doubled their company workload, and by golly they have a pair of video cards out that stomp the competitions and they do it at 1/4 - 1/2 the price.

Of course there is going to be an adjustment period. But hey, i guess intel and nvidia are just knocking 25% -60% off their prices after AMD/ATI launches because it's fashionable.

nice rant iocedmyself.

much more interesting than the original article you posted in reply to :-)

i concur, amd is still kickin ^^

+1 iocedmyself

PREACH IT iocedmyself

I agree with you. If AMD spent HALF as much money as INTEL on marketing. Then AMD wouldn't have to relie on "Word of Mouth" to sell their chips (they forget word of mouth spreads all the good and the bad about something).

People who know NOTHING about computers know the name INTEL. It's a household name.

And iocedmyself, I could almost here the church organ playing "that song" in the background, AMD fanboys getting worked up and someone who's not Familiar with the Gospel of AMD looking confused.

wow i had a vision - i saw sugar plums and intel buying ati!
i dreamed of spider renamed scorpion and the all intel gaming platform with nehalem and triple 4870's running 50k 3dmark

it flashed before my eyes when i saw the tech c post - what if? what if amd sold ati who would buy it? intel!

i really hate nvidia! i never forgave them for my x975 systems with out sli