HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD and Intel up, NVIDIA down

There wasn't a ton of movement among our shares last week, but as market researchers are getting increasingly bullish about the semiconductor sector it's interesting to observe that the two big CPU companies both registered small gains, while most others declined.

AMD has been talking up its Opteron processors recently and Intel has been managing expectations following the announcement a couple of weeks ago of an alliance with Nokia.

NVIDIA, meanwhile, has been talking up GPU computing (for a change), but may have had its share price damaged by unsubstantiated rumours that Apple is going to stop using NVIDIA chips.

Elsewhere, most of our list more or less followed the market down, with a sell-off last Thursday accounting for most of it, and the Dow doing slightly better than the NASDAQ for a change.

The latter half of July sees some earnings announcements from big tech players like Intel and Microsoft, so we'll get a better idea if the bottom of the market has indeed been reached and whether there are grounds for optimism.