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AMD passes Intel in market cap

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151–160 of 221 posts

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#151
post #51

So I'm very much in camp AMD. But, market cap has proven over and over again to be kind of bogus. E.g. do we really think Tesla is actually worth more than the rest of the top 10 or so automakers?

The top ten automakers have huge amounts of debt and pension liabilities. Tesla has neither. None of them are making profitable EVs at scale. Tesla has been hitting their goal of growing at 50% per year for a decade and plans to continue until they are making 20 million cars a year in 2030. Their gross margin on cars is the highest in the industry. The next 5 years are critical for the existing players and many will…

> None of them are making profitable EVs at scale.

Is the f150 lightning not profitable for Ford? I looked just now and can't find any information (maybe have to wait until next fiscal year?). Their costs for that line are lower than most other automakers because they share so many parts and design elements with the ICE f150.

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#152
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> People already see some value in Teslas self-driving technology. And that value will continue to go up for a long time. Up to the point where you tell your car "Hey, go get me a pizza". You are aware that real self driving(L5) is not possible without some AI breakthroughs, right? All the promises you see from Elon are just pure BS. Your tesla has issues seeing a big truck straight in front of the driver lane so yo…

> Tesla software/user experience is not significantly better than a dumb car with carplay or just an ipad fixed on boar That's only part of it. It also includes the prestige and social cache. Once upon a time, apple was the same. Me, i don't care, but all the fancy ppl around me, the multi generational wealthy and boomers, can't get enough Teslas. That desire for luxury may wax like apple... or the coming recession m…

> Tesla software/user experience is not significantly better than a dumb car with carplay or just an ipad fixed on boar

I'd say it's much worse. Putting all the controls including a/c on the tablet is an extremely bad idea.

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#153
post #35

This could give Intel room to maneuver. I suspect they were going to have a quarterly loss, or close to, no matter what so jammed as much future/high potential loss into that single quarter as they could as well. Now that they appear not to have a dominant position (Samsung sells more chips! AMD is worth more!) this will blunt some opposition to the juicy handouts just passed by the US Congress and may cause some opp…

I wouldn’t ascribe this quarter’s woes to some grand machinations. Intel’s situation really does seem that bad and they’re years from recovering (if they do)

Standard practice in a turnaround is that if a loss is unavoidable anyway, you might as well make it as bad as possible (i.e. jam future bad news into it).

But as you point out I am not privy to Intel's actual practice here and haven't bothered to read the 10-Q.

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#154
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to lose in the short term, year after year, and hope that a black swan event puts you back into a winning position.

Unless China's clearly stated policy that recognizes Taiwan as a part of China changes, it isn't really a black swan event. It's more like an increasingly active volcano. It might not blow up tomorrow, but if you deliberately built a house on its edges, it would be hard to sympathize with you when it finally does go kaput.

How does one appease quarter-to-quarter returns chasing investors with that?

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#155
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve been hearing that for at least 4 years at this point. Along with scenarios where Volkswagen or Ford is going to teach Tesla how things really work. I’m not persuaded. First, my understanding is that Tesla has a night and day lead in battery sourcing. Second, Tesla doesn’t have the legacy costs that the others do. Also, at this point, Tesla is still selling cars faster than they can build them. Even if demand we…

> First, my understanding is that Tesla has a night and day lead in battery sourcing. They have a factory where Panasonic employees come in and make batteries for them (a little glib, but not that far off), but aside from that they really don't have some secret sauce that we know about. They are putting CATL batteries in their cars just like everyone else and they don't have any mining or refining operational unlike…

Even aside from all of that, I was just reacting to the overly simplified “well by definition they’re worth what the market says they are so there’s nothing to discuss beyond it”.

The stock market is routinely “mistaken” and stocks get overhyped and then crash down later (or vice versa). It’s not some omniscient deity that’s never wrong (except in a very literal and impractical way of looking at it).

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#156
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The top ten automakers have huge amounts of debt They have huge amounts of debt because they run huge financing departments and therefore also have a huge number of assets on the balance sheet. > Their gross margin on cars is the highest in the industry. They have a completely different sales model, so it's apples to oranges. Most OEMs wholesale cars to dealers, of course those margins will be smaller. > Tesla has…

> Base rate fallacy, extrapolated into infinity, sure. You only need to extrapolate Tesla's existing revenue and growth out for five years to make them the biggest automaker in history, though. Clearly, yes, it's going to stop somewhere. But a first principles argument like yours is running out of room. It made sense a few years back when they were still popular-but-tiny. At this point, the median expectation pretty…

Are you being serious? Based on what? They are still a tiny tiny player in the auto industry, if we ignore the market cap.

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#157

Intel was once known for its memory. Then it became known for its CPUs. I expect that they will pivot at least once more, this time to something which will supersede GPUs for ML workloads. This is, of course, very uncertain which is reflected in the size of my long position

>Intel was once known for its memory. Then it became known for its CPUs

As Andy Grove once succinctly put it: "Only the paranoid survive"

Re: AMD passes Intel in market cap

#158

Call me crazy but I think long term (10 years +) the Intel strategy of fabricating chips domestically is the correct choice. There's a ton of geopolitical pressure in this direction. The US simply doesn't want to be dependent on Taiwan for chips, for obvious reasons. Intel knows this and is trying to become the TSMC of the west. And frankly they're the only ones that can pull it off. I'd be surprised if 10 years from…

You may very well be right, but it's a bit much to say that's Intel's explicit strategy. In the past 12 years the main thing Intel has done is make poor long term choices: going big on mobile too late, SSDs taking off but not for Intel, whatever is gong on with 10nm.

Saying they're committed to fabricating in the US while they are, for the first time, relying on other companies to make chips for them over seas... right now their domestic fabrication may internally be viewed as a blunder.

Sure it could pan out for them but it's a crap shoot. Maybe those blunders were just all bad leadership which Intel has recovered from, only time will tell.

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