14 DAY TRIAL // AMD attended yesterday the company's annual analyst meeting, where they could not cease apologizing in front of the Wall Street experts for their 2007 screw-ups. The chipmaker promised that they will return to full form in 2008 with a revamped version of the Barcelona quad-core line, whose functionality is currently severely crippled by a design flaw.
The company entered a downwards spiral and AMD executives didn't miss the chance to state how sorry they were for missing opportunities and disappointing their loyal customers, especially those who have been hardly waiting for the first "native" quad-core processors.
However, the company is proud to have announced that they had already shipped "tens of thousands of quad-core units in the third quarter, hundreds of thousands of quad-core processors in the fourth quarter and at least twice the fourth-quarter amount in the first quarter of 2008", according to Mario Rivas, executive vice president of the Computing Products Group.
The reported figures say that there has been a 3:1 ratio in sales for Phenom to Barcelona chips. While "defective" Barcelonas are still shipping through channels for selected customers only, fixed Barcelona processors will arrive early next year and will reach a maximum of sales before the first quarter of 2008.
Hector Ruiz, AMD's chairman and chief executive officer laid the cards on the table and put it simple: "We blew it, and we're very humbled by it, and we're going to learn from it, and we're not going to do it again". Financially, AMD was in a check situation right after the ATI takeover last autumn, and since then the company continued to bleed money.
The actual checkmate came with the failure to deliver Barcelona and Phenom products out in time to compete with Intel's new-born Core 2 Quad products. Chief financial officer Bob Rivet said that 2007 was a bad year for business and considered the company's cash flow as "totally unacceptable".