AMD's future has limitless possibilities

[Capper]

BEFORE, , during and after the latest IDF, speculation went wild on what would happen to AMD over the next six months or so. With Intel Penryns running around aplenty, and Barcelona/Phenom still not out of the door in a competitive way, all the hacks, analysts and the related communities discussed and evaluated the options and input from various sources, more or less close to the beleauguered green company.
Prior to IDF, I also went around the Far East, chatting not just with IBM and Samsung, but also with our beloved Taiwanese key OEM partners. Here are the "speculative execution of AMD" considerations as of now:
Option 1 AMD continues as it is, comes out of the doldrums, creates internal $$$ to repay the mounting debt, and Hector Ruiz becomes the new Steve Jobs-like IT hero figure.
Option 2 IBM decides it is the time, and buys AMD as it is, lock stock and barrel. Benefits? It gains control of its own competitive X86 platform, with potential future socket compatibility with POWER7 for cross-platform shared infrastructure, sets up truly serious competition against Intel. Headaches? Well, what to do with the current management, and why should IBM bother repaying all those debts.
Option 3 Samsung comes in, figuring out it should continue where it stopped in 2001 after the Alphacide. Samsung did try to get into the worldwide 64 bit CPU market then with Alpha, and could do it now again with AMD. Will it happen? Hardly, in my mind - Uncle Sam might not look favourably to ceding the control of this technology to a Far Eastern company, and even if that hurdle is jumped, I could imagine a management revamp chaos worse than in the IBM case - the corporate cultures of these two are so different, and yes I know them both for years.
Option 4 Red China will splash the cash. No way, Jose: Uncle Sam will particularly disallow this one, to my utter dismay - the Chinese could at least bring the prices down tremendously.
Option 5 A private equity fund consortium rescues AMD at a discount and dumps most of the existing management, minus Dirk Meyer. Such funds do look closer at the dollars and cents these days after the recent financial meltdowns, and well, Far East real estate looks like a better money pouring deal to me right now. On the other hand, private funds could also be a hidden front for Intel itself to indirectly invest in AMD and keep it alive - and controlled - to avoid any monopoly problems if the greenies really collapse.
Option 6 Ever thought of ST Micro, the leading semicon house in the beloved EU? To it, an acquisition and salvage of AMD could mean that "Europe again has control of its own CPU & GPU technology", something that hasn't happened since the Transputer in the UK and Hyperstone in Germany.
Well, it's got the ca$h and the fabs - plus AMD's key fab is anyway in EU - but catastrophic future company management prospects beckon resembling a multilingual long winded soap opera? On the other case, the "heroes" who arrange the deal within ST/EU could simply be rewarded by a promotion elsewhere to jump ship before the cracks starts showing.
And so to Option 7 IBM. Hold on, I already mentioned IBM - no, this is a different scenario. Let the imagination fly.
Someone drives AMD into the ground, bankrupting it. IBM Semiconductor comes to "rescue", supported by the US Government as the only true American party able - and allowed - to do so.
They take the AMD team, fabs and IP stack, but AMD as a company disssolves, and shareholders lose whatever $$ they still have in there. Then the big "New IBM Semi" gets spun off by the parent company at a huge profit as the new No 2 PC CPU supplier and a true competitor to Intel (see Option 2).
In this case, IBM can avoid all the debts/headaches/management buyout etc, and get the best of AMD for next to nothing. And satisfy its long standing grudge against Intel since the PC days. Many an IBMer will tell you "without us, there would be no Intel today - who the hell they think they are?".

AMD's future has limitless possibilities

[screwballl]

somehow I have always distrusted inquirer... wishful thinking for some fanboys

[Jokerswild]

Reasonable scenarios I suppose. I'm not sure I care for any of them except the first. I don't really think that the Asian companies have much of a chance with the government. ST Micro might and I really don't want to see IBM take it over.

[Capper]

The INQ tosses some good stuff out there, if you step back and look at the community as a whole, they're usually no further off than any other site pushing news.

News.....well thats an awful broad term, news nowadays is about getting the scoop, not as much about reporting facts.......sadly news has basically become speculating.....not just in the tech sector, but in the news community overall.

[Jokerswild]

Yea it's getting harder to believe anything thats reported anymore. Give me the good old days when the news was reported and not the companies political views or speculative reports.