INTEL hit with a slew of downgrades

As I predicted, INTEL fell more after AMD's super report, it's now at near $21. As of now, it has been downgraded by 9 analysts. Finally, people have realized INTEL is in trouble. My prediction is AMD will exit 2006 with about 40% market share (run rate), as FAb36 ramps up and Chartered enters production. AMD CEO Dr. Ruiz indicated that by the end of 2006, FAB36 and FAB30 will have the same level of production. INTEL will start to see losses by the end of 2007. I expect large layoffs in INTEL in 2007. In 2008, INTEL may have to sell FABs to pay AMD damages for anti-trust violations.

The wishful analysts believe as INTEL is getting better, it will regain market. This is 100% wrong. Most people of the world, especially in the 3rd world such as India, still don't know AMD, more and more people are discovering AMD and its lead every day, the message is spreading via word of mouth. Unless INTEL can really leap ahead and overtake AMD in a significant way, AMD's market acceptance will keep growing exponentially. From forseeable INTEL roadmap, we don't see any INTEL product that can surpass AMD in 2 years. Instead, we expect AMD to substantially widen its lead and put INTEL further behind:

1) The new process developed with IBM can further improve performance by 40%. I expect all chips from FAB36 are made with this process. AMD is cutting prices across the board now, indicating release of higher speed CPUs are imminent.

2) AMD is working to use the Z-RAM technology to increase cache size by up to 5 times on the same die area. This technology is for SOI only, a process AMD spent years doing and INTEL has not yet mastered.

3) AMD's socket AM2 processors will be soon available, this is an improved core with support for DDR2 and virtualization.

4) Socket F Opterons will soon be available, this 1207 pin chip will feature multiple memory controllers and quad-core support.

5) Further architecture enhancement will allow Opteron to do glueless 32 way SMP.

6) Dual core Turion 64 will be available in mid 2006.