Displaying items by tag: x8664

AMD is one of those companies that really need to take a long hard look at its past to get a good handle on where it is going. My first experiences with AMD go pretty far back to when they were making 2x86 CPUs on license from Intel. At the time AMD was also a pretty big player in the DSP market and could be found in many of the early two-way radios and later in Cell phones (it was cool to show that to people that were skeptical of buying AMD for the first time. Still AMD was always considered the low cost alternative to Intel, but one that came with a performance hit (it was not completely true, but that was what the market thought).

AMD has just announced that their Q2 earnings may be as much as 11% lower than expected (over Q1 2012). Originally AMD predicted a gain of 3% sequentially for this quarter, but it looks like a few things did not turn out the way they planned. AMD is mostly blaming the issue on slow channel sales in China and Europe, but also stated that they encountered a weak market which impacted their OEM sales. Both causes are over generalizations of an issue that we saw coming back in 2011; AMD has to get their products into the hands of the consumer.

On Saturday we published an editorial about some of the issues with Windows RT. These issues served to highlight why Microsoft might have chosen to build their own tablet. Although we do not agree with the decision and think that it will hurt Microsoft in the long run (with Windows RT) we cans still see how it all unfolded. As you might imagine not everyone saw things the way that we did, but what surprised me was a comment that seemed to indication that the development community was going to HAVE to write for Windows RT.

As I made my rounds this morning (checking out what the rest of the world thinks is going on in technology) I stumbled across a couple of articles that had my laughing. One of them was just more of what I have been hearing since 1997, the PC is going away. I honestly do not know how some analyst firms can even print this any longer. The PC has been a fixture in the home and work place for so long and it is such an integrated fixture in how people do work that it is very unlikely you will see the PC go away. Still we see this almost every quarter despite both many “PC” related companies posting record quarters and PC sales actually being up between 2-4%.