Intel And AMD: Let’s Fight While Our Investors Lose Their Money

Posted: April 4, 2007 at 6:00 pm

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) says its chips are better than Intel’s (INTC) and is taking out expensive full-page ads in newspapers to say so. AMD claims its Opteron model is 15% faster than the comparable Intel Xeon.

The AMD chip in question is not available to manufacturers yet, making the argument even more absurd.

The fight even extends from the current dual-core chips used in most PCs and servers now to quad-core chips. Intel has a quad-core chip out already and AMD will have one shortly.

All of this goes on as more and more Wall St. analysts predict that AMD is running low on cash and will have to raise $1 billion this year. The stock is down over 60%.

The only solace Intel can offer it shareholders is that its stock is flat. That isn’t a lot of comfort.

The massive damage done to AMD shareholders has to raise the question of whether CEO Hector Ruiz should be shown the door. Very few large cap companies can boast of such a larger destruction of shareholder value in such a short time. Fighting for market share by sacrificing margins has been a bad idea. So was buying ATI.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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