Nasdaq (Nasdaq: NDAQ) today announced the results of the annual re-ranking of the NASDAQ-100 Index® (Nasdaq:NDX), which will become effective prior to market open on Monday, December 24, 2018.

The following six companies will be added to the Index: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), lululemon athletica inc. (LULU), NetApp, Inc. (NTAP), United Continental Holdings, Inc. (UAL), VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN) and Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company (WLTW).

Radeon™ Software Adrenalin software to bring the latest GPU features and game optimizations to all systems powered by AMD Ryzen™ Processors with Radeon™ Graphics

“Some people may have noticed on the package some extra room,” she said with a chuckle. “There is some extra room on that package and I think you might expect we will have more than eight cores.”

Intel falls on revenue miss, weak guidance

Shares of Intel stock fell as much as 8 percent on Thursday after the company reported lower-than-expected revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter and light guidance.

Here are the numbers to follow:

• Earnings: $1.28 per share, excluding certain items, vs. $1.22 per share expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
• Revenue: $18.66 billion, vs. $19.01 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

The company said in a statement that revenue went up 9 percent year over year in the quarter, which ended Dec. 29.

The business segment that generates the most revenue for Intel, the Client Computing Group that includes PC chips, hit $9.82 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 10 percent but below the $10.01 billion consensus estimate among analysts polled by FactSet.

Intel’s Data Center Group, which includes chips for cloud providers, did $6.07 billion in revenue, below the $6.35 billion FactSet analyst estimate, while Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group revenue totaled $1.11 billion, just under the $1.12 billion estimate. Within the Data Center Group, growth from cloud fell sequentially from 50 percent to 24 percent.

With respect to guidance, Intel said it expects to post 87 cents in earnings per share, excluding certain items, on around $16 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2019. Analysts had been looking for $1.01 per share, excluding certain items, on $17.35 billion in revenue, according to Refinitiv.

And for the full fiscal year, Intel predicted $4.60 in earnings per share, excluding certain items, on about $71.5 billion in revenue. The Refinitiv consensus was earnings of $4.54 per share, excluding certain items, and revenue of $73.19 billion.

Heading into Thursday’s report analyst sentiment is mixed, with some pointing to challenges like competition from AMD. Weston Twigg, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, said in a note to clients on Tuesday that he sees increasing risk of disappointing first-quarter guidance. Uncertainty surrounding demand from Apple is among the concerns.

“With the semiconductor industry facing a number of headwinds, a including a slowing Chinese economy, soft smartphone sales, softening auto demand, slowing hyperscale demand, a lingering government shutdown, and ongoing trade war certainty, Intel has remained in a strong position relative to peers, with its own supply shortages likely insulating it from headwinds,” Twigg wrote. “However, we expect headwinds to mount in 1Q as data center demand likely continues to slow and Intel’s new Apple modem business likely declines amid soft demand.”

In the fourth quarter, Intel said that in 2019 it would begin construction on expansions of manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and abroad, and that it had reached a diversity goal for U.S. employees two years ahead of schedule. It also announced a new wave of processors for desktop computers.

Intel said it expects around $15.5 billion in capital expenditures in the 2019 fiscal year. That’s higher than the $14.26 billion FactSet estimate.

Nvidia Lowers Guidance on Weakness in Gaming, Datacenter Businesses

Jan. 28, 2019

Shares of Nvidia Corp. NVDA -14.46% fell more than 15% after the company on Monday lowered its fourth-quarter guidance following weaker-than-expected sales from its gaming and datacenter divisions.

The Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker said it expects roughly $120 million in charges in connection with excess inventory of its graphic cards and other components. Nvidia also cut its quarterly revenue guidance by $500 million at the midpoint to $2.2 billion. The consensus forecast from analysts polled by Refinitiv was revenue of $2.7 billion.

The latest quarter “was an extraordinary, unusually turbulent, and disappointing quarter,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and chief executive, in prepared remarks. Nvidia plans to report fourth-quarter and fiscal 2019 earnings on Feb. 14.

Nvidia’s updated guidance sent shares of other semiconductor companies lower, as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. fell 7% and Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. were down about 1% on Monday.

Nvidia said weaker economic conditions, especially in China, hurt consumer demand for its gaming graphics cards. Sales of its high-end graphics processors were also lower than expected, likely due to customers waiting for prices to fall and as they gain more familiarity with innovative features in new products, Nvidia said.

For its business producing chips used in data centers, the company said it didn’t close as many deals as it expected in the last month of the quarter. Nvidia said it has a solid market position in powering artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, which has a large addressable market.

Intel also fell short of analysts’ expectations on revenue from its data-center group in its latest quarter. Bob Swan, Intel’s finance chief and interim chief executive, said last week customers are slowing purchases of server chips and that that slowdown will likely last through the current and next quarter.

TSMC (2330) Nanke 14 Factory today (28th) reported the use of substandard chemical raw materials, causing paralysis of tens of thousands of wafer production. In this regard, TSMC confirmed and pointed out the detailed quantity and damage caused. Subsequent statistics and processing are underway and will not change the financial forecast for this quarter.

TSMC's Fab 14 B plant in Nanke has a problem with wafer quality defects today, mainly because TSMC imports a batch of substandard chemical materials, which causes wafers to be defective in the production process, but the problem is in the production process. It is impossible to check out that the number of wafers affected by the film has exceeded 10,000 pieces, and the production line has been temporarily suspended. Since 14 customers cover NVIDIA, MEDIATEK, Huawei Hisilicon and other heavyweight customers, the market is concerned about whether the operation is affected. .

Q4 2018 Results

• Revenue of $1.42 billion was up 6 percent year-over-year primarily driven by the Computing and Graphics segment. Revenue was down 14 percent compared to the prior quarter as a result of lower revenue in the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment. Third quarter 2018 included approximately $125 million of IP-related revenue.
• Gross margin was 38 percent compared to 34 percent a year ago and 40 percent in the prior quarter. Fourth quarter gross margin included a $45 million charge related to older technology licenses that are no longer being used. Non-GAAP gross margin was 41 percent compared to 34 percent a year ago and 40 percent in the prior quarter. Gross margin improvements were primarily driven by Ryzen and EPYC processor sales.
• Operating income was $28 million compared to an operating loss of $2 million a year ago and operating income of $150 million in the prior quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $109 million compared to $19 million a year ago and $186 million in the prior quarter. The year-over-year improvement was primarily due to the ramp of higher margin products in the Computing and Graphics segment. The decrease compared to the prior quarter was primarily due to seasonally lower Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment revenue and the absence of IP-related revenue, partially offset by the benefit of new Ryzen, EPYC and Radeon products.
• Net income was $38 million compared to a net loss of $19 million a year ago and net income of $102 million in the prior quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $87 million compared to $8 million a year ago and $150 million in the prior quarter.
• Diluted earnings per share was $0.04 compared to a loss per share of $0.02 a year ago and diluted earnings per share of $0.09 in the prior quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, diluted earnings per share was $0.08 compared to $0.01 a year ago and $0.13 in the prior quarter.
• Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were $1.16 billion at the end of the quarter as compared to $1.06 billion at the end of the prior quarter.
• Free cash flow was $79 million for the quarter.

Quarterly Financial Segment Summary

• Computing and Graphics segment revenue was $986 million, up 9 percent year-over-year and 5 percent compared to the prior quarter driven by strong sales of Ryzen processors.
  • Operating income was $115 million compared to $33 million a year ago and $100 million in the prior quarter. The year-over-year improvement was primarily driven by the ramp of Ryzen processors. The improvement compared to the prior quarter was primarily driven by Ryzen processors and datacenter GPUs, which more than offset the benefit of IP-related revenue in the third quarter of 2018.
  • Client processor average selling price (ASP) was up year-over-year and sequentially driven by Ryzen processor sales.
  • GPU ASP was up year-over-year and sequentially primarily due to higher datacenter GPU sales.
• Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment revenue was $433 million, flat year-over-year. Revenue declined 39 percent compared to the prior quarter driven by seasonally lower semi-custom sales, partially offset by strong EPYC datacenter processor sales.
  • Operating loss was $6 million compared to an operating loss of $13 million a year ago and operating income of $86 million in the prior quarter. The year-over-year improvement was primarily due to higher EPYC datacenter processor revenue partially offset by lower semi-custom sales and server-related investments. The decrease compared to the prior quarter was due to seasonally lower semi-custom sales, partially offset by higher EPYC datacenter processor revenue.
• All Other operating loss was $81 million compared to operating losses of $22 million year-over-year and $36 million in the prior quarter, primarily due to the $45 million charge related to older technology licenses.

Current Outlook
For the first quarter of 2019, AMD expects revenue to be approximately $1.25 billion, plus or minus $50 million, a decrease of approximately 12 percent sequentially and 24 percent year-over-year. The sequential decrease is expected to be primarily driven by continued softness in the graphics channel and seasonality across the business. The year-over-year decrease is expected to be primarily driven by lower graphics sales due to excess channel inventory, the absence of blockchain-related GPU revenue and lower memory sales. In addition, semi-custom revenue is expected to be lower year-over-year while Ryzen, EPYC and Radeon datacenter GPU product sales are expected to increase. AMD expects non-GAAP gross margin to be approximately 41 percent in the first quarter of 2019. In addition, the Company expects to record a $60 million IP licensing gain which will be a benefit to operating income and recorded on the licensing gain line of the P&L.

For full year 2019, AMD expects high single digit percentage revenue growth driven by Ryzen, EPYC and Radeon datacenter GPU product sales as the Company ramps 7nm products throughout the year. AMD expects non-GAAP gross margin to be greater than 41 percent for 2019.

AMD President and CEO Lisa Su said the company continued to grow significantly revenue for a second straight year.

"Importantly, we more than doubled our EPYC processor shipments sequentially and delivered record GPU datacenter revenue in the quarter," she said in a statement.

Su said she expects 2019 to be another strong year because of AMD's competitive product portfolio.

AMD forecasts 2019 sales to grow in the "high single digit percentage" range. Wall Street had forecast 2019 sales of $6.88 billion, which would represent year-over-year revenue growth of 6 percent.

AMD also expects adjust gross margin to be more than 41 percent for the full year.

For the first quarter, however, AMD said it expects sales of $1.25 billion. Analysts had projected first-quarter sales to be $1.47 billion, according to a Refinitiv consensus estimate.

The semiconductor company said its projected 24 year-over-year decline in first-quarter sales will be "primarily driven by lower graphics sales due to excess channel inventory, the absence of blockchain-related GPU revenue and lower memory sales."

AMD stock gains after Intel CEO announcement suggests 'an opening for AMD'

Jan 31, 2019

Intel Corp. shares are down 2.5% in Thursday morning trading, while Advanced Micro Devices Inc. shares are up nearly 5%, after Intel announced that it was promoting its interim chief executive, Bob Swan, to the top spot on a permanent basis. He had been Intel's chief financial officer since 2016.

"The initial reaction" in the stocks suggests that Swan's appointment "could open up a window for AMD to be more competitive on the server and GPU technology roadmap," wrote Mizuho's Vijay Rakesh, given that Swan isn't a "technologist." "wish: Intel has stumbled lately with its 14-nanometer and 10-nanometer roadmap, Rakesh said. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers said in a note to clients that "we think many investors were hoping Intel would name an outside CEO."

Opinion: AMD has won Wall Street’s trust, and its stock is showing the results

Jan 31, 2019

CEO Lisa Su’s ability to live up to her word leads to belief in a forecast that is heavily weighted to the second half

. . .

This stock, up 155% from its low, has more room to run, technician says

31 Jan 2019

An earnings beat had the chipmaker's shares soaring nearly 20 percent on Wednesday, its 10th one-day double-digit move in a year. Its stock gained 1 percent in Thursday's premarket. Prior to that move, AMD had plummeted 44 percent from its September highs.

Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Jaffray, says its trading pattern over the last four months has made a bullish case for the stock.

"From my perspective, it looks like a great downtrend reversal in the making," Johnson said Wednesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

. . .

The Lsv2-series features high throughput, low latency, and directly mapped local NVMe storage. The Lsv2 VMs run on the AMD EPYCTM 7551 processor with an all core boost of 2.55GHz. The Lsv2-series VMs offer various configurations from 8 to 80 vCPUs with simultaneous multi-threading. Each VM features 8 GiB of memory and one 1.92TB NVMe SSD M.2 device per 8 vCPUs, with up to 19.2TB (10 x 1.92TB) available on the 80vCPU L80s v2.

Nvidia earnings: One more shoe to drop for beleaguered chip maker

Feb 11, 2019

Nvidia Corp. has one more shoe to drop, namely its view of 2019, following a quarter where the chip maker cut its outlook twice, and analysts have been busy lowering their expectations leading up to earnings.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker recently cut its outlook for the second time in three months
, citing weakness in China and slow gaming chip and data-center sales. Back in November, Nvidia cut its outlook for the fourth quarter during its previous earnings report, citing excess inventory of its midrange Pascal-architecture gaming chipsets, the older generation to the company’s recently released Turing-architecture line of chips.

“Looking forward, we are confident in our strategies and growth drivers,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a statement following the last outlook cut.

Now, it is time for Huang and Nvidia to look forward on the record, with a 2019 forecast that will prove their fourth-quarter issues were temporary, or the unfortunate opposite. Oversupply and inventory issues along with trade war concerns with China have battered the outlooks of many chip makers even as the industry in 2018 topped annual global sales of one trillion chips for the first time.

The largest chip makers, including Intel Corp., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., and Texas Instruments Inc. have predicted a cautious start to 2019, while Qualcomm Inc.’s forecast outlook range bookended Wall Street estimates and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. proved to be an outlier, offering the most bullish 2019 outlook so far. Analysts on average expect Nvidia to collect $11.41 billion in revenue in the just-begun fiscal year, according to FactSet.

Earnings: Of the 28 analysts surveyed by FactSet, Nvidia on average is expected to post adjusted earnings of 65 cents a share, compared with $1.57 a share reported in the year-ago quarter. The current estimate is down from $1.85 a share expected at the beginning of the quarter. Estimize calls for earnings of 99 cents a share.

Revenue: Wall Street expects revenue of $2.27 billion from Nvidia, according to 29 analysts polled by FactSet. That’s down from $3.42 billion Wall Street had forecast at the beginning of the quarter. In the year-ago period, Nvidia reported revenue of $2.91 billion. Nvidia now predicts revenue of $2.16 billion to $2.24 billion. Estimize expects revenue of $2.44 billion.

Nvidia’s revenue is broken down into five segments: Gaming, data center, professional visualization, automotive and “OEM & IP,” or original equipment manufacturers and intellectual property. Analysts on average expect third-quarter gaming revenue to drop more than 40% to $1.01 billion from the year-ago quarter, data-center sales to rise 14% to $688.6 million, professional visualization sales to rise 18% to $300 million, auto sales to rise 33% to $175.9 million and OEM & IP revenue to decline 27% to $131.5 million.

Should Nvidia’s sales meet current Wall Street expectations, the chip maker’s calendar 2018 revenue is looking at a 23% gain to $11.63 billion.

What analysts are saying:

Nvidia’s stock took some heat from the analyst community following the last outlook cut. In his double downgrade of Nvidia to an underperform from a buy, Needham analyst Rajvindra Gill said the continuing deceleration of the Chinese economy will curb end demand for the company’s core products in gaming and data center.

“While Nvidia does not break out its specific Chinese gaming exposure, desktop gaming is hugely popular in China and a big market for Nvidia,” Gill said. “Deteriorating conditions in the Chinese economy have adversely affected purchases of graphics cards, particularly high-end RTX GPUs.”

On the data-center side, while a slowdown in purchases from U.S. companies like Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Alphabet Inc. is driven mostly by digesting overbought inventory, it’s a different story for Chinese cloud companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, Gill said.

“The deceleration in the Chinese economy has hurt hyperscaler infrastructure spending and in turn GPU purchases,” Gill said. “We will have to monitor if we see a return to normalized cloud purchases by the Chinese and U.S. hyperscalers.”

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the fourth quarter ended Jan. 27, 2019, of $2.21 billion, down 24 percent from $2.91 billion a year earlier, and down 31 percent from $3.18 billion in the previous quarter.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.92, down 48 percent from $1.78 a year ago and down 53 percent from $1.97 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.80, down 53 percent from $1.72 a year earlier and down 57 percent from $1.84 in the previous quarter.

For fiscal 2019, revenue was $11.72 billion, up 21 percent from $9.71 billion a year earlier. GAAP earnings per diluted share were $6.63, up 38 percent from $4.82 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $6.64, up 35 percent from $4.92 a year earlier.

NVIDIA’s outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2020 is as follows:

• Revenue is expected to be $2.20 billion, plus or minus 2 percent.
• GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 58.8 percent and 59.0 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points.
• GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $930 million and $755 million, respectively.
• GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are both expected to be income of approximately $20 million.
• GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are both expected to be 10 percent, plus or minus 1 percent, excluding any discrete items. GAAP discrete items include excess tax benefits or deficiencies related to stock-based compensation, which are expected to generate variability on a quarter by quarter basis.

For fiscal 2020, revenue is expected to be flat to down slightly.

For full year 2019, AMD expects high single digit percentage revenue growth driven by Ryzen, EPYC and Radeon datacenter GPU product sales as the Company ramps 7nm products throughout the year. AMD expects non-GAAP gross margin to be greater than 41 percent for 2019.

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) today announced customer sample availability of its OCP NIC 3.0 adapter solutions supporting the full range of data rates and interfaces from 1GbE to 200GbE. The portfolio includes a wide selection of Ethernet adapter cards with 1-, 2- and 4-port configurations, allowing the industry to easily build high-performance server systems and effectively scale network capacity to meet the demands of high bandwidth applications such as machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), network function virtualization (NFV), and all flash arrays (AFA).

Based on proven NetXtreme® E-Series Ethernet controllers, the OCP NIC 3.0 adapters provide superior performance and efficiency utilizing a unique set of highly optimized hardware acceleration engines. 100GbE and 200GbE adapters are powered by Broadcom’s state-of-the-art Thor multi-host controller that has the industry’s best performing 56G PAM-4 SerDes and PCIe 4.0 interface. Broadcom offers the most advanced and complete portfolio of OCP NIC 3.0 adapters, enabling data center operators and cloud providers to easily and cost-effectively scale computing and storage resources and adapt to constantly changing requirements.

“The OCP NIC 3.0 definition is just one example of the power of collaboration to establish open server platforms in the industry, and we welcome the availability of the new Broadcom OCP NIC 3.0 solutions to the ecosystem,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president and CTO of the Datacenter Ecosystems & Application Engineering at AMD. “With the first PCIe 4.0 products from AMD expected to arrive this year, the ability to support the highest speed NICs from Broadcom in an OCP design will be welcomed by customers of AMD EPYC processors.”

AMD Stock Soars After Analyst Says It Won Google Cloud-Gaming Deal

March 19, 2019

Morgan Stanley is telling its clients that Advanced Micro Devices (ticker: AMD) technology will be used in Google’s upcoming cloud-gaming offering.

On Tuesday, the firm’s analyst Joseph Moore expressed surprise that AMD was able to succeed with its graphics technology, which he has said is less appealing than comparable technology available elsewhere.

“AMD announced that it is working with Google’s ‘Project Stream,” which we believe will be the basis for Google’s cloud gaming initiative,” he wrote, referring to an earlier disclosure by the semiconductor company. “The surprise, though, is that AMD has had success despite a less competitive graphics portfolio.”

Project Stream was Google’s beta test of a streaming technology that lets users play games on any Chrome browser. AMD had said that its technology was used by Project Stream.

AMD stock was up 5.5% to $24.53 on Tuesday after the analyst’s report.

The gaming site Kotaku reported on Monday that Google will reveal a gaming streaming platform soon. Google is slated to announce its vision for gaming later Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference.

AMD declined to comment. Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Moore reaffirmed his Underweight weighting for AMD stock and a $17 price target for the shares. He said cloud gaming is a decent opportunity for the chip maker, but not enough to turn around its graphics business.