HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD continues to gain

It's been around a month and a half since AMD announced another quarter of heavy losses and decided the moment was right for long-time head honcho Hector Ruiz to improve his golf handicap, replacing him with former number two Dirk Meyer.

After that announcement, AMD shares eventually plunged to their lowest price since October 2002: $4.05, having topped $40 in early 2006. But there has been somewhat of a rally since then, with the shares having gained ten percent in the past two weeks and 55 percent since their nadir to sit at a slightly more respectable $6.29.

There isn't one single event to attribute this to, rather a drip-drip of announcements that will have provided encouragement to investors. The most significant event of this period, however, has to be the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - a dual GPU graphics card that retook the overall performance lead from arch graphics rival NVIDIA.

In the graphics world, this achievement has significance beyond the popularity of the card in question, there is a reflected glory, or ‘halo effect', on the whole range of GPUs. Or so the theory goes.

AMD's recent success with GPUs has been mirrored by its chipset business. The highly regarded 780G is in the process of being joined by the new 790GX chipset, both of which are generally considered to offer superior integrated graphics to anything Intel has to offer.

Performance wise, AMD still has a bit of catching up to do with Intel on the CPU side of things. But AMD's doing the best it can with the hand it's dealt itself and cutting the prices of its CPUs to try to claim the bang-per-buck crown for processors priced under $200.

All this, and signs that AMD is proceeding with its "asset smart" strategy of shedding some of its poorer performing assets, have presumably caused investors to think "hold on a minute" and snap up some bargain basement shares.

None of the rest of our list have gained too much in the last couple of weeks, although HP has gained on better than expected quarterly profits.

The biggest loser has been Google, whose only major announcements have been imminent ad deals with Verizon and Yahoo!.  From that, one possible assumption is that investors don't think these deals are as good an idea as Google does.

The was one bit of unpleasant news for the the tech sector: Hon Hai - the parent company of Foxconn and one of the world's biggest technology manufacturers - missed expectations with its first fall in profits for seven years.