AMD - abandon chip? - FT.com You cannot blame Thomas Seifert for thinking there might be better opportunities for him outside of Advanced Micro Devices. It is hard to think of a company that faces greater structural challenges than AMD, which Mr Seifert served as chief financial officer and, briefly, as interim chief executive. The announcement of his departure still spooked investors, sending the shares down a tenth on Tuesday. AMD, to oversimplify only slightly, is a company without a niche. It competes primarily in microprocessors for PCs, where it is in second place after Intel, which has well over 80 per cent of the market. Five years ago, the conventional wisdom held, with some reason, that Intel needed AMD to have a certain degree of success so that Intel would not attract the ire of regulators and customers by becoming a pseudo-monopolist. The conventional wisdom now holds that the PC, if not dead, is on its way to being a secondary or tertiary computing medium, after the smartphone and the tablet. As such, Intel has all manner of competitors in making microprocessors, such as mobile specialists Qualcomm and Broadcom. Many use Arm Holdings" architecture. Arm-based chips may soon appear in mass-market PCs and servers, upsetting Intel's core businesses. AMD cannot depend on being the default alternative to Intel for much longer. AMD has tried to make room for itself by specialising in specific areas such as graphics processing chips and low-power products. But it is tough to beat Intel, even when you pick your battles: for example, Intel has gained share in CPUs with integrated graphics capacity in both of the past two quarters, according to Deutsche Bank. Is this surprising, when Intel outspends AMD on research and development by seven to one? The reaction to Mr Seifert's departure looks overdone but - especially given that AMD's valuation is not at a discount to Intel's - it looks like worries about AMD's dwindling strategic options have if anything been underplayed.