AMD Reports 2014 Fourth Quarter and Annual Results

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AMD today announced revenue for the fourth quarter of 2014 of $1.24 billion, operating loss of $330 million and net loss of $364 million, or $0.47 per share. Non-GAAP1 operating income was $36 million, non-GAAP1 net income of $2 million and breakeven non-GAAP1 earnings per share.
 
I'm Intel for life they let everyone go from AMD don't know how they can survive.
 
Comixbooks said:
I'm Intel for life they let everyone go from AMD don't know how they can survive.
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Comixbooks said:
I'm Intel for life they let everyone go from AMD don't know how they can survive.
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I don't get it. Why be one or the other? Yes, Intel has the highend advantage. But that's not to say that the AMD CPUs are bad, they aren't. I run them in my machine due to cost. But then again you have the graphic card side of the house which I think does a damned good job at keeping up with their main competitor. So why be for strictly one brand over the other?
 
AMD CPUs are bad, they aren't. I run them in my machine due to cost.
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There is very little cost savings these days if you consider performance and understand that what AMD calls a module is what Intel calls an HT core.
 
carlbme said:
I don't get it. Why be one or the other? Yes, Intel has the highend advantage. But that's not to say that the AMD CPUs are bad, they aren't. I run them in my machine due to cost. But then again you have the graphic card side of the house which I think does a damned good job at keeping up with their main competitor. So why be for strictly one brand over the other?
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Cause Intel and Nvidia is for cool people and AMD/GPU AMD is for neckbeard smelly basement people :p
 
We need AMD in the game, if Intel didn't have any competitors who knows what prices would be....
 
Incramus said:
We need AMD in the game, if Intel didn't have any competitors who knows what prices would be....
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I think these days Intel is completely ignoring what AMD is doing and going about their tic/tock plan keeping the prices pretty much fixed.
 
drescherjm said:
I think these days Intel is completely ignoring what AMD is doing and going about their tic/tock plan keeping the prices pretty much fixed.
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No, I don't think you understand.
If AMD were to drop out of the market, Intel would skyrocket prices, I've seen it happen in the past.

You know you want a $200 processor to now cost $800.
Does anyone remember circa 2006, when AMD was on top, and they sold the FX-60 for $1200? ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
No, I don't think you understand.
If AMD were to drop out of the market, Intel would skyrocket prices, I've seen it happen in the past.
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I certainly remember when CPUs were $1500 and when I paid $2500 for a basic desktop at work.
 
This is just to lower stock prices for investors to buy more. Everyone knows that once 2016 hits, AMD is going to release Keller's zen and then intel will probably file for bankruptcy.

Plus, the mighty 390x is about to get released and then nvidia will probably be bought out by AMD.
 
Red Falcon said:
No, I don't think you understand.
If AMD were to drop out of the market, Intel would skyrocket prices, I've seen it happen in the past.

You know you want a $200 processor to now cost $800.
Does anyone remember circa 2006, when AMD was on top, and they sold the FX-60 for $1200? ;)
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+ REP
 
Apparently the market was expecting worse.

AMD stock is up 5.4% today after this announcement.
 
Stocks were $2.24 just yesterday, at $2.34 now. Of course they are down from $2.46 just a week ago? I'm in for some shares.
 
fixedmy7970 said:
This is just to lower stock prices for investors to buy more. Everyone knows that once 2016 hits, AMD is going to release Keller's zen and then intel will probably file for bankruptcy.

Plus, the mighty 390x is about to get released and then nvidia will probably be bought out by AMD.
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More seriously though, AMD has good IP and good people, what they lack is cash to make the huge investments Intel does.

I was hoping their console wins this gen would help in that regard, but apparently not (or at least not enough)

A buyout of AMD wouldn't be a bad thing. A big player like Samsung - for instance - could pull it off.

They have the cash to infuse in development, could use the chip background in their own products, and they even have good fabs!

A marriage made in heaven.
 
Red Falcon said:
No, I don't think you understand.
If AMD were to drop out of the market, Intel would skyrocket prices, I've seen it happen in the past.

You know you want a $200 processor to now cost $800.
Does anyone remember circa 2006, when AMD was on top, and they sold the FX-60 for $1200? ;)
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People keep forgeting that there´s ARM now. Intel hasn´t seen AMD as competition in years. They are keeping an eye on qualcomm, samsung, probably nvidia and maybe even mediatek.

Intel dominates the desktop and server market but ARM is shortening the gap fast. I think ARM has a better chance to build a "desktop class" SoC than can keep up with intel than AMD ever will.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374566 said:
More seriously though, AMD has good IP and good people, what they lack is cash to make the huge investments Intel does.

I was hoping their console wins this gen would help in that regard, but apparently not (or at least not enough)

A buyout of AMD wouldn't be a bad thing. A big player like Samsung - for instance - could pull it off.

They have the cash to infuse in development, could use the chip background in their own products, and they even have good fabs!

A marriage made in heaven.
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Apple could do it too, heck even nvidia.

But there´s that little thing called Non Transferable x86 License.
 
Stoly said:
Apple could do it too, heck even nvidia.

But there´s that little thing called Non Transferable x86 License.
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lets assume they buy AMD's outstanding stock. That doesn't mean they have to absorb the company into their own. it can operate as a subsidiary, with its x86 license intact, and at the same time assist Samsung with its home brew ARM efforts and graphics chips, making them less dependent on the likes of Qualcomm.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374621 said:
lets assume they buy AMD's outstanding stock. That doesn't mean they have to absorb the company into their own. it can operate as a subsidiary, with its x86 license intact, and at the same time assist Samsung with its home brew ARM efforts and graphics chips, making them less dependent on the likes of Qualcomm.
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Unless - that is - there are some rather draconian terms in that license, I am not familiar with.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374626 said:
Unless - that is - there are some rather draconian terms in that license, I am not familiar with.
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In trying to read up on this, I came across this article which provides a very interesting historical perspective on Intel and AMD's legal history.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374648 said:
In trying to read up on this, I came across this article which provides a very interesting historical perspective on Intel and AMD's legal history.
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Essentially, through most of Intel's history, rather than competing on the merits of their products, they preferred to try to shut out competition by suing everyone and everything out of existence, often being rebuked by the courts and fined, but in the grand scheme of things they saw those fines as a "cost of business" to keep the lawsuits going.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374656 said:
Essentially, through most of Intel's history, rather than competing on the merits of their products, they preferred to try to shut out competition by suing everyone and everything out of existence, often being rebuked by the courts and fined, but in the grand scheme of things they saw those fines as a "cost of business" to keep the lawsuits going.
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This legal article really is not flattering to Intel.

In an e-mail to Intel’s CEO in 2005, Michael Dell wrote, “None of the current benchmarks and reviews say that Intel based systems are better than AMD. We are losing the hearts, minds and wallets of our best customers.” Intel was quick to address Dell’s concerns. Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, replied, “[W]e are transferring over $1B per year to Dell for meet comp efforts. This [should be] more than sufficient to compensate for the competitive issues.” Soon after, Dell’s CEO Kevin Rollins announced that Dell had “made no plans to begin using” AMD chips, which Otellini described as “the best friend money can buy.”
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Red Falcon said:
No, I don't think you understand.
If AMD were to drop out of the market, Intel would skyrocket prices, I've seen it happen in the past.
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"I'm not an economist, but..."

It's funny that somehow the price elasticity of demand doesn't apply to CPUs in this kind of view. It only takes a very passing exposure to ASPs to know that simply isn't the case. The market is still price sensitive even as interest in AMD CPUs drops like a rock across all PC and server segments.

Why Intel would price itself out of its primary business isn't logical, and even as a solitary x86 vendor it would still need to price products at a rate that promotes upgrades. The volume of products needed to sustain cutting edge manufacturing, currently about 3 years ahead of its competition, doesn't allow for a (failed) IBM model of insane prices @ low volume. And it's never been a strategy Intel pursued for volume products. Suggesting it is simply FUD.

While I obviously missed the portion of time "in the past" when "Intel would skyrocket prices" for all but the smallest niche products*, as far back as I can remember actually working in the PC business (@ a custom builder in the late 1980s), Intel has priced mainstream CPUs at around $130, with the low end of current products around $80-$90. Given inflation, the price trend has always been downward, regardless of the fact AMD has been lagging behind Intel for all but a couple of years in its entire existence.

The lesson we should take from AMD's current position is that horrible management can doom any company, regardless of how fanatical some of its users are. ;) Some people couldn't imagine buying a competitor's 3D card after 3dfx imploded, but yet they went on. /cheesy Titanic My Heart Will Go On music playing

* what's the difference between a $999 AMD desktop processor and a $999 Intel desktop processor? 99.999% of people don't care because they wouldn't buy either one.
 
pxc said:
"I'm not an economist, but..."

It's funny that somehow the price elasticity of demand doesn't apply to CPUs in this kind of view. It only takes a very passing exposure to ASPs to know that simply isn't the case. The market is still price sensitive even as interest in AMD CPUs drops like a rock across all PC and server segments.

Why Intel would price itself out of its primary business isn't logical, and even as a solitary x86 vendor it would still need to price products at a rate that promotes upgrades. The volume of products needed to sustain cutting edge manufacturing, currently about 3 years ahead of its competition, doesn't allow for a (failed) IBM model of insane prices @ low volume. And it's never been a strategy Intel pursued for volume products. Suggesting it is simply FUD.

While I obviously missed the portion of time "in the past" when "Intel would skyrocket prices" for all but the smallest niche products*, as far back as I can remember actually working in the PC business (@ a custom builder in the late 1980s), Intel has priced mainstream CPUs at around $130, with the low end of current products around $80-$90. Given inflation, the price trend has always been downward, regardless of the fact AMD has been lagging behind Intel for all but a couple of years in its entire existence.

The lesson we should take from AMD's current position is that horrible management can doom any company, regardless of how fanatical some of its users are. ;) Some people couldn't imagine buying a competitor's 3D card after 3dfx imploded, but yet they went on. /cheesy Titanic My Heart Will Go On music playing

* what's the difference between a $999 AMD desktop processor and a $999 Intel desktop processor? 99.999% of people don't care because they wouldn't buy either one.
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You are - of course - correct.

The worst of this has already happened though. AMD is no longer competetive across really any part of the CPU market, so if they were to disappear tomorrow, it probably wouldn't have much of an impact on CPU pricing.

Without competition in the high end, we already have $1000 Extreme Edition CPU's, whereas the top CPU's during the era when both AMD and Intel were constantly leapfrogging each other were much cheaper.

In the rest of the market Intel keeps prices within reach for their core market (as mentioned, price elasticity) but they have very little incentive to drive improvement, which is why we have seen lackluster improvements every generation for the last almost 10 years.

The damage is already done. If AMD were to take itself out of the x86 market, I don't think it would get any worse for desktop CPU customers.
 
cvinh said:
Stocks were $2.24 just yesterday, at $2.34 now. Of course they are down from $2.46 just a week ago? I'm in for some shares.
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AMD has become a so-so stock that isn't expected to do much in the next year. Most analysts have it as a hold stock especially with AMD expecting another 15% drop in revenue. It is not good when a company says don't expect much in the next year.

Hopefully the two new custom chip contracts will help but AMD is eventually going to run out of loan/influx capital unless they make some profit.

I don't see AMD's board allowing status quo when it comes to earnings and will push to either find a way they can be profitable in the markets they are in, find new markets, or start selling off tech/divisions a la Sony. Unfortunately AMD is limited in what they have to sell.

With that being said I bought back all the shares I sold a year ago for about 1/2 the price. The stock at this point can only go one way. :D

Curious to see what the 3XX cards will do with AMD's market share along with Carrizo.
 
Stoly said:
People keep forgeting that there´s ARM now. Intel hasn´t seen AMD as competition in years. They are keeping an eye on qualcomm, samsung, probably nvidia and maybe even mediatek.

Intel dominates the desktop and server market but ARM is shortening the gap fast. I think ARM has a better chance to build a "desktop class" SoC than can keep up with intel than AMD ever will.
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I sorta agree with the ARM thing. Intel is also constrained by the fact that the PC industry is dominated by low-cost computer purchase with the largest part of higher end components with larger margins ending up in business computing equipment (workstations, servers, rendering farms, and that kinda junk) which is easy to forget. If processor prices rise significantly in response to a vanishing AMD, then low cost computing and a large volume of sales shift away from inexpensive devices to phones and tablets that are ARM-based as both categories of hardware are perfectly suitable to fill every computing need from communications to entertainment at a very low cost. It's only been in recent times that x86 platforms have gotten price competitive with emerging stuff like $100 Windows tablets.
 
AMD isn't going anywhere. Worst thing to happen is AMD gets bought; I'm sure Samsung would like AMD's gpu tech so they don't have to pay Qualcomm for their gpus

And lets not forget Nintendo recently contracted AMD for their latest console, and the last time I checked, the Wii was the number one selling console.

Those game console sales will definitely keep AMD afloat through 2015. And then Keller Time! break it down!
 
pxc said:
regardless of the fact AMD has been lagging behind Intel for all but a couple of years in its entire existence.
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Not sure I entirely agree here.

AM286 and AM386 chips vastly outperformed their Intel counterparts, but Intel used sleazy lawsuits to try to keep them out of the marketplace (sue rather than compete).

Their 486's weren't bad, but the 586 series fell behind pentium, and K2 and K3 didn't improve things that much.

Athlon and Duron charged out of the gate and traded blows leapfrogging the P3's up until the P3 couldn't handle much above 1 ghz, and P4, netburst and the rambus fiasco left AMD with a solid performance crown until the introduction of the C2D in 2006.

This would ahve been enough to cement AMD as competition with Intel, if not for the fact that their success was limited by Intel using illegal unfair market tactics, like sabotaging their market dominating compiler on AMD CPU's so that they performed worse, and paying bribes to the major system integrators to keep AMD out.

Their $1.25 billion settlement to AMD for this was a drop in the bucket compared to the damage it actually did, and ensured that AMD ever since have not had the financial means to keep up with Intel.

between the fact that they spent money buying ATI, and the fact that they were never able to capitalize broadly on their successes in CPU's from 2000-2006 due to Intel's illegal practices, they simply did not have the cash to reinvest in R&D. Phenom was lackluster, Phenom II was too little too late and bulldozer and on suffered significantly from lack of development resources and were an absolute disaster.

Some of this can be blamed on AMD strategy (Was buying ATI a good or bad idea?) but most of the blame lies IMHO with Intel and theit "sue everyone and everything that competes with us, and where that doesn't work, lie cheat, bribe and steal" approach.

AMD had a real opportunity to upset the CPU market and make it truly long term competitive, but Intel squashed it with sleazy and illegal practices, and were rewarded for that by cementing their CPU market dominance.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374566 said:
More seriously though, AMD has good IP and good people, what they lack is cash to make the huge investments Intel does.

A buyout of AMD wouldn't be a bad thing. A big player like Samsung - for instance - could pull it off.
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Qualcomm keeps coming up as a potential buyer (since 2011) in the AMD takeover chatter along with Apple, Oracle, and Samsung. But none of those companies would really have anything to gain by getting AMD. Dell has also come up but I don't see it.

Qualcomm already poached AMD execs and bought their handheld graphics division. Unless Qualcomm wants a shortcut into the server market AMD offers little to Qualcomm. Apple has no need for AMD, Apple does its own SoC's, especially since AMD continues to be unprofitable in the markets it is in. The amount of money it would take to get competitive with Intel or take market share from NV is not a worthy investment/gamble.

Most articles on potential buyout suitors also state it most likely will be an end to AMD's high end CPU's and GPU's. Especially if Oracle bought them.

The biggest issue with someone buying AMD is the cross-license with Intel. The license doesn't transfer when AMD is sold and Intel could be an expensive problem for the new buyer.

I agree with Motley that it is more likely Intel or NV would buy AMD but there is zero reason to. Both are currently starving AMD so why spend the cash to buy them. Unless Qualcomm really needs the boost from AMD to enter the server market I would expect AMD will continue on without being sold like it did in 2011.

AMD needs to fix their bleeding and make profits to be more attractive. On their current path any buyer would just pick-off the profitable divisions and close the others.
 
The non transferable x86 license would have to be revisited before anyone could purchase AMD.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041374872 said:
AM286 and AM386 chips vastly outperformed their Intel counterparts, but Intel used sleazy lawsuits to try to keep them out of the marketplace (sue rather than compete).
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Not really. You're ignoring the time period those products were released. The same misconception comes up every time. :p

AMD's AM286 chip was licensed from Intel, only manufacturing it as a second source like several other 80286 licensees. AMD designed exactly 0% of the AM286 (AMD makes no claim of designing it, and in its history points to the AM386 as the first, and K5 as the first it wholly designed in-house). There was nothing magical about it or that AMD released faster versions (Harris Semiconductor and others also did). The higher speed 286 chips came out years after the 386DX was released, and were intended to be lower cost alternatives to the 386DX. The 16MHz versions came out in the late 1988 to mid 1989 time frame, around the same time as the lower cost 386SX. While 16 bit code speed was often the same as on a 386SX, fine for most DOS users, it was a dead end given Windows 3.0's release 1.5-1.0 years later.

The AM386 isn't anything to brag about. It was released TWO whole years after the i486, and was a hybrid between a 286 and 386 chip. It was buggy and seriously I can't think of any customers who placed repeat orders for the AM386 chips back in the early 1990s. Like the AM286 before it, in certain situations it could work fine for users, but it also had a limited life because applications were beginning to take advantage of the integrated FPU in the 486, and adding on a separate FPU was expensive and not usual. The AM486 was a rehash of the AM386 with a slow FPU tacked on and the AM5x86 ("486 class") was an inefficient, late mess.

The "sleazy lawsuit" had to do with the cross-license agreement both companies had. AMD designed a 386 compatible CPU using portions of the licensed Intel 286 chip. Intel claimed AMD could not do that because AMD had not participated in the "cross" part of the agreement. While the judge agreed that AMD had provided nothing of value to Intel as it was supposed to in order to uphold its side of the agreement, he allowed AMD to release the chip (in 1992, 1 year after AMD had it ready), but must pay Intel royalties for infringing. There was no delay in releasing the faster speed 286 chips. Maybe that part is just imaginary sleazy. :p
 
If anyone takes over AMD, they will not get the x86 part, people seem for forget what the lincense says:

http://corporate.findlaw.com/contra...agreement-advanced-micro-devices-inc-and.html

3.2. Intel License to AMD.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement,
Intel hereby grants to AMD a non-exclusive, non-transferable ***** worldwide license, without the right to sublicense, under Intel's Patents to: (a) make, use, sell (directly or indirectly), offer to sell, import and otherwise dispose of all AMD Licensed Products; (b) make, have made, use and/or import any equipment and practice any method or process for the manufacture, use and/or sale of AMD Licensed Products; and (c) have made ***** AMD Licensed Products by another manufacturer for supply solely to AMD for use, import, sale, offer for sale or disposition by AMD pursuant to the license granted above in Section 3.2(a). - See more at: http://corporate.findlaw.com/contra...cro-devices-inc-and.html#sthash.a9JRy2Oq.dpuf

The devil is in the details.
 
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