They have been working hard at getting the opteron recognized by the business comunity. Since they are also the largest market for desktop systems as well, that seems smart to me.
As I stated before, sometimes being at the top isn't about being smart, but about being the less stupid of those trying. AMD's engineers are fairly smart. AMD's management isn't. Luckily for AMD, Intel seems to have the same problem, just on a larger scale.
IIRC, they did try then, but for some reason ( sabotage by Intel is the most common speculation) they had to deal with a shareholer's revolt.
I highly doubt that it was sabotage. In my experience, shareholders are stupid. They don't know a quarter as much as they think they do. Most of them are only in it for the money, not for the business itself. So anyone who bows down to shareholder pressure instead of doing what is right for the company is bad for the company. Going public is one of the worst things that a company can do, but if they do it, they have to be prepared to do what's right, not what looks good to the shareholders for the next quarter, or else the company suffers badly. Because shareholders will almost always want the company to do bad things. That's not sabotage, that's simply being a publicly traded company.
I did mean white room, and assembely people, who require a lot of training, before they can work on chips. It's not like they could go and grab anyone off the steets of Dresden.
Sorry, thought you meant R&D skills. If it's in the interest of improving production, as you're specifying now, then it's good. Obviously, since they're setting up new FAB space, they must be doing this, even if I haven't caught any actual names in the news yet. But I still stand that right now if it's in the interest of R&D, it's bad for them because it's the wrong time.
What the JFTC found was that Intel had severly limited, or reduced Amd's ability to sell chips in Japan.
Right. In
Japan, according to
Japanese law. AMD's suit isn't in Japan. The US has
very different laws in that regard. Mostly because the US is a very different culture.
If the lawsuite hinders or diseudes Intel from using those tactics elseware, Amd may find itself in a better marketing environment.
1) It won't, because, again, that was Japan and this is the US. The practices that were found to be illegal in Japan
are allowed in the US. The
only way that AMD can win the case is if they can actually prove something much more serious than that. (And so far, according to their own documents, they can't.)
2)
Marketing is AMD's second biggest flaw. (Production being their first.) If AMD actually marketted their product for a change then they wouldn't even be in their position. Intel may make mediocre chips right now, but they market (especially to OEMs) well.
I said initiated by Intel, not executed by Intel. If Mikey wont do it for them, well a hefty down payment to a company to supply them with the chipset chips they seem to be running out of, seems like a likely senario.
Seems like a ludicrous conspiracy scenario. And you know why? Because Intel
wants AMD around. AMD is what protects Intel from an awful lot of monopoly proceedings. Oh, sure, Intel wants AMD to fall on their face and do badly, but they still want AMD to be around, at a nice small market share. So Intel isn't going to do anything like that to make AMD go away.
A much more realistic scenario, again would be the likes of IBM or VIA, competitors in markets that AMD is in, swallowing up a weakened AMD ... should AMD ever grow weak enough to be swallowed up. In fact VIA has even been on a buyout kick in the last few years.
But again, Intel doesn't want to eat up AMD because then they'd be an undeniable monopoly. And Intel doesn't want AMD to vanish for the same reason, since almost all of AMD's market share would instantly go to Intel. As weird as it sounds, Intel needs AMD. VIA and Transmeta aren't doing a good enough job as competition. DEC got eaten, and their CPU killed off. Cyrix got eaten. The IBM/Apple side is a questionable defense at best. Intel needs AMD if they want to keep their head out of the government's anti-monopoly noose.