To me, this is a very “I want to make more money” as opposed to “I want AMD to make more money” point of view. Several factors go into this.
First of all, how many extra employees would AMD need to satisfy the demand for (say) $3B worth of extra laptop parts? The skills needed to sell data center chips are not an exact match for those needed to sell laptop chips. So there is the expense of finding, hiring, and keeping all those new employees.
Secondly, does TSMC really have the wafers AMD would need to get those chips at laptop margins given data center margins are so much higher. So it makes no sense to AMD to move the higher end wafers into lower margins.
Third and perhaps most importantly, what about Intel. Their GPUs and APUs are not highly desirable in the data center, to the point where Intel had to pay the TSMC to be competitive at all. Intel is I believe the second largest chipmaker, so they need to keep their fab occupied, or close them down. Closing is a bad option. They’d have to lay off employees, pay severance, and lose out on years of amortizing the existing equipment. So Intel’s best wafers that a decade agi were funding the highest margin chips are not making the chips Intel can sell, in the lower margin laptop and desktop sectors. I personally believe that Intel is being too optimistic in catching up to TSMC. I no longer see that happening. That means as Intel’s customer base will continue shrinking, possibly to the point where some of their foundries will no longer be profitable. Their problems all go back to forcing a theoretically superior architecture that so far has not competed well against chiplets. Be that as it may, Intel is pushing to own the laptop sector to keep its foundries open until such time if ever when Intel finally matches AMD in the data center. We’re looking at, what, a full decade of Intel’s margins dropping, high end margin sales dropping, profits and EPS dropping, all the while promising their next product would pass AMD. But neither AMD nor TSMC is sitting on their hands, and every time either one improves, then AMD’s data center products when Intel finally ships they are no longer as good.
I have an AMD gaming laptop that still plays all the games I want. I had to wait six months for it to arrive. I feel for the laptop makers. But I can’t fault AMD for what they’ve done. The profits back me up.
One more thing that IMO shows had badly Intel has declined. When Zen first shipped, I believed Intel was 3-5 years away from catching AMD. I did not intend to sell my AMD until Intel was two years at most away from catching AMD. But my negative target fixated wife just saw another half a million dollars in retirement savings, and I sold around $57 knowing I was leaving money on the table but if I am not making my wife happy, it’s ice floe time for me. Intel’s new products are not going to catch AMD. All AMD needs to make their current products much better is to overpay TSMC for their best wafers, and AMD’s high end chips will instantly be much better (and cost a lot more). There are some price points where that can make sense for AMD. But AMD has been steadily claiming market share in the high margin data center while also not paying premium prices for TSMC’s best wafers. The chiplet approach is just significantly higher in yields, because a defect in one large CPU takes out a much higher percentage of the yield than a defect destroying a chiplet. I also believe that chiplets, being smaller, allow better air flow access to disperse heat.
I’m mostly in “safe” dividend stocks these days, to keep my wife happy. But AMD sure looked inviting at $132 recently. The only reason I didn’t was the stock to sell was too close to it’s ex-dividend date, and that’s guaranteed money.
BTW, in personal new, my new kidney is working far better than I had any reason to expect. My anticipated hemoglobin was 11 or so in a normal range of 13.5 - 18.5. Part of why I stopped posting (but not reading) here is I could no longer trust myself to write cogently. But about six weeks ago, my hemoglobin (stable in the low 11s) started rising again. Last test about two weeks ago was 13.9. I don’t think it’s been that high this century. With hemoglobin comes brain (and muscle) power, and I’m playing complex games and have insomnia again. I’m also not staying lazy and letting my dividends accumulate but slowly getting back into research and real investing. Next year my wife will need to start withdrawing from her retirement accounts; I’m three years away. Now that I have a new kidney, I could easily last more than a decade, and I would have had four hotel trips this year but the second one got cancelled because of the transplant surgery. More travel is in our future. AMD and TMF were a big part of why our retirement is so comfortable all of our savings is likely to go unused save by our heirs. So thank all of you for giving me things to consider and teaching me to learn from others about investing.