Cray's Q4 whacked by AMD's Opteron delays

Cray is going to miss its revenue targets for the fourth quarter, the company warned Wall Street this morning before the markets opened, and it has pointed its finger (without naming names) directly at its main processor supplier, Advanced Micro Devices, as the cause of the miss. For the past several years, Cray's sales for …

[Piro]

Ugh..

Good work, AMD. Damnit - Cray, a big name, has been trying to buy a ton of your CPUs, and time and time again you can't meet the demand.

What's all this about? Seriously, are you asking to fail?

[asdf]

AMD arrogance

AMD has to be one of the most arrogant also rans to ever exist. This was especially evident in the mid 2000s when they had their one chance at Intel. Of course they blew it way overpaying for ATI due to said arrogance.

[Nater]

Yes, they really should have bit the bullet and purchased nVidia. nVidia was, and still is, way ahead of ATi (now AMD of course) in GPGPU. Considering that AMD still has some influence and cache in the HPC world, I think nVidia would have been a much better pairing in the short and the long term.

[Alan Denman]

They supply good stuff at decent cost.

I don;t see what good it does condemning those that rip us off less.

It's like saying 'let Intel have a full 100% so they can overprice way more'.

[asdf]

because

Their incompetence actually allows Intel to charge what they want to often due to AMD being slow to market and unable to compete.

[Anonymous Coward]

People need to separate GloFo from AMD

AMD no longer owns it's fabs and is at the mercy of GloFo and TSMC both of whom have had troubles moving to 32nm and 28nm respectively in 2011. It's very unfortunate that after AMD designed a good new series of Opterons, GloFo was late to deliver them. Cray supposedly got the first 10,000 units but they can use a lot more as demand is high.

TSMC also hurt AMD and Nvidia with their delayed 28nm process for GPUs. AMD is launching Radeon 7970's on Jan. 9th and more models in Feb./Mar. but Nvidia will be lucky to get Kepler out in Q1. So the Fab makers need to take the majority of blame for the chip baking issues not AMD. AMD suffers financially of course but FX sales are reported to be good along with Llano so all is not lost. Better days are ahead for AMD and those days will be soon with trinity to be released this quarter.

[Nater]

When is Cray going to see the light and switch to intel? I think the only thing keeping Cray with AMD is their significant amount of effort put into HyperTransport. I'm not certain, I haven't been keeping up lately, but I believe HT still might offer some advantages over QPI. That also might be another reason for Cray staying with Advanced Misadventures and Disasters.

Eventually Cray is going to start running parallel equipment development on QPI and then AMD's days will be numbered. It's probably already started.

I like how AMD fanboys always whine about how "intel rips people off". AMD only sells their CPUs cheaply because they have to. I remember buying Opteron 270s and paying an assload of money for them, prices equivalent to intel 2S CPUs now. AMD is a corporation just like intel, they'll charge whatever they think they can get. They're not "the nice guy".

[tpm]

Re:

Actually, as the story points out, Cray is ditching both QPI and HT in the next generation Aries interconnect and using PCI-Express 3.0 so it can switch to Intel and keep AMD if it chooses.