HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD hammered by fab woes

It's all very well issuing a press release saying it's not your fault your revenues are down, but investors usually don't care. That certainly seems to be the case with AMD, which warned that it was selling fewer chips than expected thanks to ongoing failings at its manufacturing partner - GlobalFoundries.

Over the course of last week AMD's shares fell by over 17 percent, with pretty much all of that coming after the earnings forecast announcement. Investors are clearly unmoved by AMD's attempts to exculpate itself and have fled the stock. Furthermore there's no reassurance that GF is going to get its act together on the crucial Llano chip any time soon, so this may be the first of many such announcements from AMD.

While NVIDIA doesn't use GF, maybe AMD's troubles led to nervousness about chip stocks in general. The fact that Tegra doesn't appear to be the SoC inside Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet may have disappointed some NVIDIA investors too.

Amid general turmoil and uncertainty as investors tried to get their heads around the latest news on Greece, its imminent debt default, and what the rest of Europe is doing about it, markets were broadly flat over the course of the week. Intriguingly the NYSE, which features AMD, still out-performed the tech-heavy NASDAQ.

Nokia was the biggest winner in a week in which it emerged it was working on a new entry-level phone platform, and in which rival platform Android continued to experience problems. Meanwhile IBM became the second largest tech company by market cap, relegating Microsoft to third for the first time in a generation.