HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD shares jump 26% to highest level for 4 months

Another good week for US stocks resulted in big gains for a number of technology companies, but the clear winner was AMD, which saw its shares jump 26.2 percent last week to their highest level since early November 2008.

Most intense trading of AMD shares occurred last Wednesday, around the time AMD was trying to generate more buzz around the strength of its Opteron server processors in a virtualisation environment.

The optimism shown by investors in AMD is especially impressive given the impending launch of next generation server processors by its much larger rival Intel. At the launch of a generation of Dell enterprise products based around these Intel processors last week, HEXUS.channel got the impression a lot was expected from the Xeon 5500 family of CPUs.

Elsewhere, NVIDIA's escalation of its legal dispute with Intel doesn't seem to have done its stock any harm, while HP seems to have arrested a protracted decline in its share price.

The other notable gainers of the week were the distributors, with Ingram Micro gaining the most, possibly as a result of its new distribution deal with Dell.