Semiconductor & Technology Specialist, Ingenuity

William Keating

Dr. William Keating is a highly experienced senior executive with over 25 years experience in the IT/Semiconductor Industry. The majority of Dr. Keating's career was spent at Intel Corporation where he held senior leadership positions in Europe, the US and Asia from 1992 through 2014. He served as Intel's IT Director for APAC, China & Japan from 2005 through 2014 when he was based in Hong Kong and was responsible for the IT systems (Infrastructure, Networks, Data Centres, ERP, Sales & Marketing systems, Business Intelligence etc. ) for all of Intel's offices & factories through the region. From 1998 through 2005, he was the founder & director of an internal IT Consulting Organisation (IT Flex Services), a 500-person team which remains a core part of the Intel IT Organisation to this day. Dr. Keating's first 6 years at Intel were spent in charge of the Factory Automation Systems (Robotics, Databases, Networks, Servers, Clients etc.) supporting Intel's then state-of-the-art 200mm factory network. Since leaving Intel in 2014, Dr Keating established his own Technology Research & Consulting Company (www.ingenuity.hk) where he focuses on the products, roadmaps & technologies of companies such as Intel, AMD, Samsung, Apple, Micron- as well as the key equipment suppliers to those companies e.g. ASML, AMAT, Canon, Nikon etc. Dr. Keating specializes in niche topics of high significance within the semiconductor industry. These include the future of Moore's Law and in particular the significance of Lithography in maintaining Moore's Law (EUV, SDA, NanoImprint), the role & growth of the GPU in specialised applications such as Deep Learning (Neural Networks) for Voice, Image & Pattern recognition at companies such as Facebook, Google & Baidu. He also holds regular discussions on the future of memory, in particular the rise of 3D NAND and the emergence of new memory technologies such as 3D Xpoint.

Semiconductor & Technology Specialist

AMD. Market Share Gains Across The Board As Intel Vows To Fight To Protect Its Position

NVIDIA's $6.9 Billion Mellanox Band-Aid Is A Strategic Misstep

Starboard Value. The Game Changing Activist Investor That Doesn't Take No For An Answer.

AMD. Just Remember, Rome Wasn't Built In A Day

AMD's Rome Will Rule An Empire. A Server Empire.

AMD Reiterates Market Share Progress In Bullish Update at Credit Suisse TMT Conference

Ingenuity

Our focus is exclusively on in-depth research & consulting in the broader semiconductor industry. We focus on the key players, namely Intel, Micron, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, NVIDIA, AMD, TSMC & Global Foundries - as well as some of the lesser known, but nonetheless critical, companies such as ASML (for EUV), Mellanox, Cavium, Xilinx etc. We specialise in their products, roadmaps, process technologies, competitive advantages & threats etc. We also help our clients understand the implications of new and emerging technologies, e.g. 3D X-Point, 3D NAND, Carbon Nanotubes, Autonomous Driving, Graphene, Silicon Photonics, Wafer-Level Optics, Artificial Intelligence, FPGA, GPU, ASIC etc. 

Semiconductor Analysis & Research

Equity Bottom-Up

Advanced Micro Devices / Equity Bottom-Up

<a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/entities/19009" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="entities:19009:1">Advanced Micro Devices </a>reported earnings of $1.42 billion for fourth quarter 2018, up 6% YoY, narrowly missing consensus estimates by $20 million. For 2018 as a whole, AMD grew revenues by 23% to $6.48 billion. On the conference call, CEO Lisa Su claimed that the company exited the year having met its long-stated interim goal of 5% server market share. Furthermore, she reiterated her company's intention to double that market share within four to six quarters.
On the earnings call, the company revealed that combined data center CPU and GPU sales for the quarter amounted to mid-teens percentage of overall revenue, roughly equally split between the two. This implies that data center GPU revenues were in the order of $105 million, amounting to ~20% of <a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/entities/5891" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="entities:5891:1">Nvidia</a>'s recently announced guidance miss for the quarter. 
Paradoxically, AMD's ambitions in the data center will remain largely unthwarted by the current semiconductor downturn, their market share gains will come at the expense of <a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/entities/16764" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="entities:16764:1">Intel</a> and NVIDIA. Our original Opteron thesis remains intact and reinforced by the unexpectedly strong data center GPU market share gains against NVIDIA.

Advanced Micro Devices reported earnings of $1.42 billion for fourth quarter 2018, up 6% YoY, narrowly missing consensus estimates by $20 million. For 2018 as a whole, AMD grew revenues by 23% to $6.48 billion. On the conference call, CEO Lisa Su claimed that the company exited the year having met its long-stated interim goal of 5% server market share. Furthermore, she reiterated her company's intention to double that market share within four to six quarters.
On the earnings call, the company revealed that combined data center CPU and GPU sales for the quarter amounted to mid-teens percentage of overall revenue, roughly equally split between the two. This implies that data center GPU revenues were in the order of $105 million, amounting to ~20% of Nvidia's recently announced guidance miss for the quarter. 
Paradoxically, AMD's ambitions in the data center will remain largely unthwarted by the current semiconductor downturn, their market share gains will come at the expense of Intel and NVIDIA. Our original Opteron thesis remains intact and reinforced by the unexpectedly strong data center GPU market share gains against NVIDIA. 

AMD. Our Opteron Thesis Is Intact & Reinforced After Q4 2018 Earnings