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This blog is usually not a place for commentary. I think most people are interested less in my opinion about stocks than in getting some daily information about what’s going on with which to make up their own minds about investments.

I’ll make an exception in the current case, because I penned an article in Barron’s print magazine back in early February talking positively about shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) after spending some time talking with executives from the company and others.

Today, the stock was started by Goldman Sachs’s Toshiya Hari with a Sell rating, and an $11 price target. The report has pushed down the shares by 94 cents, or almost 7%, to $13.23.

It seems that behooves me to say just a bit.

My colleague Teresa Rivashas a nice summary of the Goldman argument, and Barron’s positive view in contrast. The gist is that Hari is right about all the risks, which have always been there. But the stock is not priced expensively, as Hari implies, if one believes the company can take significant market share back from Intel (INTC) and possibly Nvidia (NVDA).

In hours of conversation with CEO Lisa Su, CTO Mark Papermaster, and other executives, I did get a sense of a company with a more sober sense of purpose than in past days. I think the seriousness with which management recognizes both the opportunities and the risks is a meaningful factor. The company is aware that in past AMD fumbled leads it obtained. It is committed as an organization not to do so again.

I also came away impressed with commentary about Su and others from a variety of team members. Forrest Norrod, who runs AMD’s server-chip effort, was hired by Su the week after he retired from Dell, where he had just led the roll-out of Intel’s “Haswell” processors in the latest Dell servers. “Her being CEO was probably the thing that made me decide to join AMD more than anything else,” Norrod told me in a phone conversation. Norrod had already become acquainted with Su as a customer at Dell. “She had impressed me the preceding two or three years with her intelligence and drive,” said Norrod.

Mostly, she impressed him by cancelling chips then in development that were supposed to be the follow-on to AMD’s “Bulldozer” parts, which are generally regarded as a big failure. “She made the correct decision to pull the plug, and make investments in a new core to make AMD competitive again."

“I give her a lot of credit for making that decision."

AMD’s server chip, code-named Naples, is not out yet. The key question, once it ships, is whether Norrod and the team can keep churning out competitive chips, which is where AMD has failed in past, with things like Bulldozer.

When I asked Norrod about his, he told me he sees a difference in how the company is organized now, in technology and product design.

“I would not have joined if they hadn’t both committed to Zen but also had an architecture for a roadmap beyond Zen,” says Norrod:

I think it is different now from before. In a couple of ways. First off, I think we have a great long-term roadmap and we are committed to an investment that is multigenerational, with the right architects, and the investment necessary to ensure we have a competitive roadmap, and that match Intel or perhaps exceed them over the next five to six years, which is the horizon we need, and that we are committed to continuing on. I would not have joined if they hand’t both committed to Zen, but also had an architecture for a roadmap beyond Zen. That’s where AMD struggled in the last decade. It had great initial execution, and then a muddled roadmap. They lost their way, they didn’t have the attention on architecture, and the execution they needed. Now, one thing they have done, and it seems small thing, but it's important, is they have cordoned off and protected their core technology development, to make sure it maintains the right cadence. Then, they have teams to deploy chips using that core. You don’t want to have the tail wag the dog. You don’t want to have core development, and have product tied too closely, because you run the risk of other things diverting your core investment. That’s one thing that happened back in the day. You ran into a bump or two on a product, and if your core team and that product team are the same, you run the risk of derailing the follow-ons.

That’s the big question for AMD, in my mind: not whether they can regain market share now, but whether they can maintain innovation for years. “Zen-Plus-Plus,” as Papermaster calls it.

We shall see. For the moment, I’m feeling more bullish than Goldman’s Hari.