Posted on Thursday, April 05 2007 @ 16:26 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD is in an incredibly tight cash situation, Merrill Lynch analysts claim the processor firm needs another $1 billion of equity funding
to make it through the year:
The firm said that many analysts still don't quite understand the massive scale on which AMD is going to lose money in the first half of this year, as it works to sell off its range of 90nm products in a bid to clear the way for 65nm products to launch later on in the year. The losses are likely to amount to a cash burn of around $900m by the middle of the year, said Joe Osha, who covers AMD for Lynch.
Whilst AMD will need to go and raise more money by September, it will be constrained by the fact it already raised $5bn last year to purchase ATI, and it's starting to run out of room to take on even more debt.
The good news for AMD is that Osha thinks that its 65nm Athlon X2s will be the bees knees, and could be just the thing that it needs to kick Intel back into touch in the performance sector. The bad news, product-wise, is that Lynch considers its quad-core server products to be 'beside the point', which can't be good news for the legions of benchmarketers out to prove that 'native' quad-core is the one true way.
