AMD Doesn’t Expect to Be Affected by HDD Shortages

Contrary to Intel, AMD does not believe that the tight supply of hard disk drives will affect its business this quarter as it bets on the many growth opportunities that are available to the company given its rather limited market share.

"I do not see major [HDD shortage-related] pressure in terms of the quarter. It is about executing and delivering. [...] I have been through eleven supply chain market events, battery fires, LCD shortage, memory shortage, I have seen them all,” said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD.

“This is a very resilient supply chain. In the beginning of the quarter there were a lot of hard drives supply in the channel and that kept things going pretty well; in Q1 and Q2, maybe you see some manifestations, but I would not bet against the supply chain.

“From AMD perspective, we have a lot of opportunities given the current market share," concluded the company’s CEO who was cited by Xbit Labs.

A rather more stringent problem for AMD than the current HDD shortage lies in its ability to manufacture CPUs based on the 32nm SOI technology.

Globalfoundries has been having a lot of problems with 32nm chip yields which have affected AMD’s ability to deliver enough chips into the market.

These manufacturing issues put their toll both on the company’s A-series Fusion "Llano" APUs as well as on the Opteron and FX-Series chips based on the Bulldozer arch, which together represent a large part of AMD’s processor portfolio.

Intel however isn’t in the situation as AMD, and the chip maker has sent out a press release a couple of days ago in order to announce that it has adjusted its fourth quarter revenue outlook as a result of the hard disk drive supply shortages.

According to this press release, the company is now expects its Q4 revenue to reach $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million, on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, lower than the previous expectation of $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.