14 DAY TRIAL // Sometime during this week Intel's CEO Paul Otellini and AMD CEO Hector Ruiz will be reporting quarterly earnings. From a year ago - when Intel reported a huge drop in profits and a management overhaul - the current situation is much, much better as the second generation of Core processors first halted the losing streak then began to win back its lost share of the market. Wall Street analysts expect Intel to report a 28% rise in profits compared to the last year, as the company seems to have passed over the greatest obstacles already.
Hector Ruiz however has no reasons to be happy, as his company struggled to compete with the much bigger Intel during a fierce price war, and that without a single chip that could take the competition head-on. Little has gone as expected for AMD and the CEO will have to explain to analysts and stockholders why his company lost 85 cents a share, which would be down an amazingly 570% from last year. Both companies however can be thankful to a steady PC market, even if their hopes that Microsoft Windows Vista will hugely raise PC purchases were for nothing.
Intel successfully introduced several new processors on the market, all based on the new and improved Core architecture. As one good thing leads to another, Intel choose to build its quad core processors using a much simpler and quicker method than AMD. Those moves and a few price reductions drove AMD to the very brink of despair as it still has no quad core processors and its only chance to compete is to slash prices for the dual core ones. The success of the Opteron family keeps AMD on the floating line on the server CPU market, while Dell and Toshiba are using AMD chips for desktops and notebooks.
Barcelona is the chip AMD waits for, but it will still be some time before it is ready. Then and only then, it may help AMD regain some of its lost market shares. With no new desktop processors expected to come until the end of the year, and new mobile ones not until the half of 2008, AMD will have to wait at least a few more months until it will start generating revenues again.