AMD
reached its lowest share price for more than four years last week and, as a
result, its market value dropped to around US$5 billion - that's $400 million
less than it paid for ATI in July 2006. Intel, AMD's major competitor in the CPU
business, has been on a roll for the past 18 months and is now worth around
US$162 billion, which makes the chip giant more than 32 times the size of AMD in
monetary terms. 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.
