Nvidia: AMD can't afford to compete

Posted at: 10:25am 1st May 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

According to Nvidia’s chief scientist, David Kirk, AMD needs to fund four projects to survive, but doesn’t have the money for even one

It’s not often that a company says what it really thinks about its nearest competitor, but Nvidia’s chief scientist David Kirk has revealed his thoughts about the future of AMD in a revealing interview over at Bit-Tech.

‘AMD has been declining because it hasn’t built a competitive graphics architecture for almost two years now,’ said Kirk, adding that ‘They have to do four things to survive, but I don’t think they have enough money to do one thing.’

According to Kirk, the four projects AMD needs to complete to survive are building new fabs to compete in the CPU business with Intel, designing its next-generation CPU and GPU architectures and getting its Fusion (integrated CPU and GPU) architecture working. ‘They have to do these four multi-billion dollar projects,’ says Kirk, but ‘they’re currently losing half a billion dollars per quarter and they owe eight billion dollars.’

According to Kirk, AMD’s ‘market cap is about three billion.’ As such, he says that ‘it’s hard to see where the future is in that picture. Really speaking, they’re going to have to pull not one, but several rabbits out of the hat.’

This is a damning picture of AMD, but then it does come from one of the company’s competitors in the graphics business. Is it really all doom and gloom at the AMD? To find out, we recently discussed the company’s financial situation with the guys at AMD themselves – look out for the full story later today.

Check out Bit-Tech for the full interview, in which David Kirk also discusses Larrabee, ray tracing and CPUs vs GPUs.