AMD's value on the stock market dropped to around $5 billion. To put this in perspective, that's $400 million less than the firm paid for ATI in July 2006. Chip giant Intel on the other hand is worth $162 billion - 32 times as much as AMD.
Even worse for AMD is that its partner-cum-archrival, Nvidia, has a market cap of around $19 billion, which makes it almost four times as valuable as the struggling platform company.
It’s fair to say things haven’t been going well for AMD since the middle of last year, as its two major rivals launched products that remain largely uncontested even today. Neither the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 nor the GeForce 8800 GTX have been truly surpassed in terms of performance yet and it’s not going to happen until next year.
There are no two ways about it: the Phenom launch was a disappointment. This was largely down to the fact that the company found an erratum in the L3 cache Translation Lookup Buffer, which could cause serious system instabilities in certain scenarios and it prevented the company from launching a 2.4GHz Phenom CPU at the eleventh. AMD issued a TLB fix to motherboard manufacturers to implement into their BIOSes and when the results for the TLB fix came out, it wasn’t pretty.
This wasn’t all that disappointed us about the Phenom launch though, as AMD also prevented all but a select few publications from running their own independent benchmarks on the new CPUs before the launch. I don’t think there was any malice in that choice personally, but it didn’t really help AMD’s street cred when, come launch day, reviews were few and far between.
