HEXUS.sharewatch: Big week for tech stocks led by AMD

It was a pretty good week for tech companies last week, with every single one of our list showing an increase. Some of this is attributable to an overall rise of, on average, around four percent in US markets, but some companies have performed well in excess of that.

The big riser is AMD, which saw the value of its stock rise by no less that 19.9 percent last week. Yes, the stock was at a historical low and thus it might have been overdue a bounce, but 20 percent is something else.

Some of this may be due to the dust settling on the shock replacement of long-time CEO Hector Ruiz with former number two Dirk Meyer. Immediately after AMD combined this news with the announcement of another big quarterly loss and the intention to sell off its handheld and TV arms, AMD's share price plummeted. Maybe investors figure they overreacted a bit and AMD's shares aren't bad value right now.

The only product news to come out of AMD in the past week has been the launch of its latest integrated graphics - the 790GX - but perhaps the launch of its newest top-end discrete GPU - the Radeon HD 4870 X2 - tomorrow is what's got investors interested.

Another stock to hit double figure growth was Microsoft, which launched the latest version of its SQL Server software. Of more importance, however, may have been a rumour that Microsoft was going to buy back $20 billion of its own stock, with the price/earnings ratio at a historical low.

Avnet stock was rewarded for good quarterly earnings and Intel got some decent publicity around its forthcoming Larrabee discrete graphics offering. Apple recovered from a recent dip, which was possibly caused by speculation around CEO Steve Jobs' health.