14 DAY TRIAL // Following the company's proverbial bad luck, AMD has received another full-blown hit on the stock exchange market. The company's shares fell to a 52-week low on Wednesday immediately after IT analysts made it clear that AMD won't be able to deliver the Barcelonas on time.
The company's nightmare started when they have publicly admitted that there are hardware bugs in both Phenoms and Barcelonas. Moreover, the company stated that the Barcelona series of processors won't be publicly available until next year and AMD will continue shipping the processors to specific customers only.
These somber predictions made AMD's shares fall 52-week low. The company's value is frightfully low, being estimated at $5 billion. On the other side, the Intel competition has reached a 52-week high, with a company value of over $162 billion.
After the third-quarter earnings had been issued, AMD expected to deliver hundreds of thousands of Barcelona and Phenom chips, and were afraid they would run out of stock before satisfying the market. Company officials still believe they can maintain that pace, only that there will be a slight delay in the process. Research notes from two different analysts say otherwise. AMD have found themselves with no further support.
Brian Piccioni, analyst at BMO Capital Markets, talked to big vendor representatives including Sun Microsystems, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, to see whether they could get Barcelona processors for their server architectures. "The unanimous answer was, 'No, you cannot'", Piccioni said. "There doesn't seem to be product available to customers."
The sad clich? that was floating on the web and compared AMD and Intel with David and Goliath, respectively has now become appropriate. Only that no matter how lucky or daring David would be, he does not stand a chance in front of a 32 times bigger Goliath.
AMD shares ended the day down 34 cents, or 3.7 percent, at US$8.91. They hit an intra-day low of $8.83.