If in the next few months you have a problem finding an AMD processor to buy, there's a reason.
AMD executives acknowledged Thursday that they plan to let existing inventories in the reseller channel deplete, and then manufacture fewer processors than its customers demand, so as to not be stuck with excess inventory.
AMD lowered its manufacturing rates during the fourth quarter, in part to reduce its inventories in response to flat or down market demand, Rob Rivet, AMD's chief financial officer, told investors in AMD's fourth-quarter conference call Thursday afternoon. AMD reported a loss that exceeded revenue.
"We're slowing everything down quite a bit," Rivet said.
Neither Rivet nor AMD's president and chief executive Dirk Meyer indicated whether or not such manufacturing cutbacks would be across the board, or just in particular segments. Meyer alluded to a "severe industry correction in the IT supply chain, especially in notebooks," and both executives indicated that supply and demand were out of whack in the notebook segment.
Meyer, however, did confirm that AMD would deliberately not meet demand. "I was just going to put a point on that by saying you know, we think our CPU sales out of AMD will be less than consumption… our inventories will drain in Q1 – we'll clearly be manufacturing below our shipment level," he said.
That would leave the market open to Intel, which reported relatively healthy revenues for the fourth quarter, but has been been rumored to be facing its first loss in more than two decades. AMD's actions of late, where the company has dropped its microprocessor prices to match Intel's quad-core price cuts, have until now seemed to be the actions of a chip company concerned more with its market share than anything else.
Source : http://www.pcmag.com/
