Reading a couple of financial news sites today, looks like AMD is having some tough times. They announce they're shutting down two fab lines and laying off 15% of their workforce. Gateway (another company that's struggling) also announced they were phasing out AMD as a supplier.

Just for contrast, when I visited AMD a couple of years ago (we were developing some technology for them) they stated that they would purchase a new fab line if one broke down because the cost of being down for the time it took to repair the line was more than the new line (millions.)

Times are tough everywhere Jeff. Here in Australia we have had :

- HIH Insurance - bankrupt
- Ansett Airlines now in receivership with the loss of 60,000 jobs
- Gateway closing shop with the loss of 1,000 jobs
- Coles/Myer with poor sales and loss of 1,000 jobs
- Daimaru closing shop with loss of 1,000 jobs

We're currently looking at 6.9% unemployment and rising especially after the Ansett Airlines collapse. The Australian economy is extremely brittle at the moment and it is only being held together by the current real estate boom.

Yeah, I'm going to be visiting Australia in the next month on a business trip. The CEO of the company I'll be working with tells me the company he left a few months ago is laying off about 25% of their workforce.

I have faith, however, that things will rebound, globally.

>I have faith, however, that things will rebound, globally.

Well that pretty much HAS to happen, if we're not looking at a new Dark Ages or something, right?

The big question is "when?"

My guess is that see things plane off this fall - Christmas season spending, though not quite as high as recent years, will prevent a few companies from spiraling further downward and start a few more back on a small upward slope. But it will be 2nd quarter of next year before things start to really return to normal, and the summer before things like the ad market rebounds.

BTW - AMD stock is in the toilet now at $9 a share. I think they're still a strong company long-term, though the $35 a share they were at a few months ago was maybe $10 high. Yeah, they're hurting, but this would probably be a great time to buy AMD stock. They're not bloated, the demand for their stuff isn't really dropping off more than the "overall demand" for the competition (CPUs and flash memories), and their technology roadmap for the next two years looks very solid.

If anyone's got a few bucks to invest (yeah, right...) I'd give it a look.

I like AMD. Hope they rebound alright. It's quite a lot of fun to watch them stick it to Intel.

If AMD goes under it will be bad for consumers.

PC sales may end up down as much as 14% this year from what I've read. That's the culprit.

The market's getting a bit saturated, it seems. There's not a lot of reasons to upgrade a 300 MHz system in a business environment where it's being used for email, word processing, and spreadsheets.

Well, not until you're contractually obligated to migrate to XP, that is.

Or if you play games at work!

I'm not financially savvy or know to claim any knowledge of world markets here, but this is my first time being in a recession in a time where I have a real job that's stable and pays well. The bad being high unemployment caused by the mass lay-offs with the slump in the market, it's nice that things in general are really cheap. I hate to sound insensitive to those thousands that are having rough times, but I really bought alot of stuff in the past two months.

With the prices of computer components almost hitting rock bottom (if they already aren't there already), I'm building another system or two to have small LAN parties.

Where I work at (Arizona Superior Courts IT), we're taking advantage of prices. We have purchased 30 Gateway desktops, and will be ordering 60 more. We also purchased another 30 Gateway laptops. We're still running NT 4 because everyone is familiar with it and still works great. All the new systems we bought are pre-loaded with NT 4, or Win98. The only reason we upgraded systems is that our databases are getting huge so we are migrating to more powerful database programs client-side. We've been trying to phase-out our ancient WANG system for the past 4 years.

I wish I can play games at work. :( Everyone here just plays solitaire.

Damn, and I just picked up an Athlon 1.4 and a new motherboard for my home system in preperation for the rash of new "Recommended 1Ghz" games hitting the market this season. I'd hate to see AMD go belly up and see the games stray back into the lair of the blackwidow (Intel) where it's either "Make games based on our chip's codeset or it'll run like shit".

In relation to what TonyM said, we're doing something similar here at work on a bit of a larger scale. We're going to be migrating to XP in the 1st quarter of 2002, so we're upgrading all of our old P-II 350's to (get this) P-III 600's. We're going to be buying roughly 3,000 new PCs from IBM over the new 6 months. Businesses just don't need any more power than that. What we get instead of faster processors are more RAM and bigger hard drives. Having a database sort 1 million records 15 seconds faster just isn't worth paying the extra $200 per PC to go from a 600 to a 1.5ghz. Besides, in a billion dollar corporation, most of the processing power is centralized on the servers now. Clients don't need all that much power compared to our home systems.

Wow.. "a bit of a larger scale"?! Heh..that's huge with 3000 PCs.

We would have liked to just upgrade parts of our existing PCs, but we "leased" our current machines from IBM. It has been a real hassle really since technically, we don't "own" them. Our lease expires sometime whithin the next 2 months, they and are in the process of going back to IBM. We opted this time to just purchase PCs outright now.

We tend to be backwards here, instead of having to centralize processing power, we put most of the burden on client machines. I don't know why. It really is cumbersome when a new patch or software needs to be installed. We have to basically touch every machine.

Businesses tend to stay away from AMD. All our systems run on INTEL. During my 3 year stint at CompUSA awhile back, all our large business sales wanted INTEL proccessing power. Most consumers OTOH mostly just looked at price tags and/or raw CPU speed numbers. The average sales person at a retail store doesn't really care what you buy, as long as you purchase an extended warranty or service agreement. That's were the money is. The actual profit margin for a retail box is nill.

Personally, I like AMD because of price, but...with INTEL feeling the crunch as well, prices between the two manufacturers are negligible.

I like AMD as a better value too. It's not just the price of the CPU either. DDR memory is cheaper then going RDRAM. You'll be able to pick up an nForce motherboard with intedrated ethernet, really good sound and video for like $120. That's a great value even if you don't use the integrated video.

Anyone have an idea when the nForce boards will be available? Who would be the first mobo manufacturers to produce them?

They seem like a hot item for quick inexpensive PC boxes for LAN games.

An article I read recently said MSI would probably be first with an nForce board. They're not too far off. October was the last thing I saw quoted. I believe Anandtech has one of the first reviews and it measures up well against the new VIA KT266A board.

Here's the links for the nForce and KT266A reviews...thanks, Lee!

nForce

and then for balance,

KT266A

--Dave

I wouldn't be in such a hurry to rush out and buy an nForce board. Anandtech ran some benchmarks on it and the video performance was very poor compared to a standalone AGP video card.

Well, yeah. I just read that. Thanks for the link. Also with Nvidia breaking into the chipset market, I'd wait for the reviews and test when they are actually available mainstream. Mostly for stability and compatibility reasons.

I really just want to build a couple cheap quick systems. I'll have to weigh price and performance between nForce's "all-in-one" boards and buying seperate peripherals with a "generic" board.

If the price range for the nForce board really is $120, that's a pretty damn good deal. I hope the price is not going to be dictated by how much the mass public will believe nvidia's "hype".

I read somewhere that the price may be closer to $175.00. Not so much because of the hype, but that manufacturers said something about the cost of integrating sound/audio/ethernet. If that's the case, screw it.

Oops..meant "VIDEO/audio/ethernet". heh :)

I'm interested because of the design. I'm not convinced that VIA has ironed out all their North/Southbridge issues yet on their motherboards. I'm guessing that if the nForce isn't as fast, it may end up being more stable and require less patching.

I won't be using the MX on there for graphics. I have a GeForce2 GTS already and that'll go on there if I go nForce. The big thing I saw in that review is the audio. It sounds as good as SB Live! but uses 20 some percent less machine to do that. I'll take that savings over my current Live! and save that money.

--Dave

Yeah I saw the sound card bit as well. I was shocked as I am an SB Live! user.

Yeah, the nForce APU (same as the audio for the Xbox) is competitive with any top of the line sound card out there. Well, maybe not the Audigy, but I just started reading the review at Tomshardware.com. You're still getting $100 sound integrated for free (well, sorta).

Brad Grenz

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Quote:

I'm interested because of the design. I'm not convinced that VIA has ironed out all their North/Southbridge issues yet on their motherboards.

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Because it's essentially the same stuff they've built for Xbox and that CANNOT have bugs or it will cause an entire product line to fail miserably. If it wasn't based on their work there, I wouldn't doubt a first try is tough to stomach.

--Dave

I think you wrote CANNOT when what you really meant was MUST NOT. ;-)

You would focus on that. :P

--Dave