"Despite positive earnings pre-announcements, the overall tone from companies remains relatively muted and cautious," said Doug Freedman, an analyst for Broadpoint AmTech.

Last October, Doug Grose was given a daunting task–turning the semiconductor manufacturing operations of AMD into a service that would also serve other chip designers. Now it looks like his job may effectively double.

The 50-page report from research firm Objective Analysis said that Braidwood's flash memory is less expensive to install because it resides directly on the motherboard and will offer all the same benefits of an SSD at a lower cost.

A new super central processing unit (CPU), jointly developed by Japan's big chipmakers and funded by the Tokyo government, is coming up to challenge Intel.