Analysts or hired guns?

AMD had a financial analyst meeting yesterday, it's good stuff. AMD is doing a glueless 32P Opteron in 2007, coupled with quad-core, that will be 128 way computing. Unless a quick solution is found, IBM mainframe is pretty much dead. Right now, Newisys's Horus chip can push Opteron to 32P, and with dual core, you get 64 way. But the Horus chip is not going to be cheap. Glueless 32P sounds like Alpha EV7/EV8 for the masses. Judging from Paxville and Dempsey and AMD's accelaration, INTEL has no hope of catching up by 2012.

Also in the news, SUN and AMD signed a deal to sell Japan a huge supercomputer with over 10,000 Opteron cores. It turns out the machine is based on 8 way Galaxy servers, which made the deal much more interesting. SUN is also working on a storage system based on Opteron and SUN's ZFS, now that is really cool.

AMD CFO Mr. Rivet projects its operating margin to increase from current level to 18% to 24% in 2006.

Surprisingly, SG Cowen's Jack Romaine claims he knows better, and alleges that AMD's operating marging will be 10%, down from 13%. Looking at Jack Romaine's score card on AMD, he got a score of 0 stars on 19 analysis. I wonder why the financial industry keeps this kind of zero accuracy lame analysts on the payroll and shoot air onto places like Forbes. Maybe some of them are on INTEL's or INTEL fund's payroll.