Judge: Advanced Micro Devices must face securities fraud lawsuit (Llano related)

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pxc

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I guess the lawsuit never went away.

(Reuters) - U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices must face claims that it committed securities fraud by hiding problems with the 2011 launch of a new computer processor that eventually led to a $100 million writedown, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled.
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The lawsuit said Advance Micro's then-Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert told analysts on an April 2011 conference call that problems with chip production for the Llano were in the past, and that the company would have ample product for a launch in the second quarter.

Advanced Micro officials continued to state that there were no problems with supply, concealing the fact that it was only shipping Llanos to top-tier computer manufacturers because of supply constraints, the lawsuit said.
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Not surprising as supplies of Llano chips in the retail bound channel and to system makers were in short supply for months. Lying about it probably wasn't a good idea.

Advanced Micro's shares fell nearly 74 percent from a peak of $8.35 in March 2012 to a low of $2.18 in October 2012 when the market learned the extent of the problems with the Llano launch, the lawsuit said.
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If this is the main reason they're suing, I don't think Llano was the primary problem even if it was the primary mainstream product. Demand for all of AMD's CPUs were dropping due to issues with overall competitiveness, leading to the stock price collapse. The effects of market makers pumping and dumping probably didn't help either. But at least those market maker made some money out of the wallets of starry eyed individual investors. lol
 
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pxc said:
If this is the main reason they're suing, I don't think Llano was the primary problem even if it was the primary mainstream product. Demand for all of AMD's CPUs were dropping due to issues with overall competitiveness, leading to the stock price collapse.
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Recall that Llano was on the same process tech that eventually berthed Bulldozer. Any delays on Llano due to process issues therefore would likely delay Bulldozer. Covering-up the fact that the big two CPU architectures the company was riding on were on the way to ruin was not doing them any favors, and is the main reason for this lawsuit.

I'm pretty sure that with their limited resources AMD can't afford more than a couple independent processor teams, so likely the same guys getting tied-up fixing the Llano delays were supposed to be working on Bulldozer.

This is why both chips were late, while Bobcat was released before all of them, and was such a surprise for Intel that they had to create the Celeron 847, and sell it for peanuts.
 
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yeah this is not going anywhere as the spoken word in corporate America is = to bullshit it is what is actually down on paper is what counts

and this is false

"sales of the Llano were delayed because of problems at the company's chip manufacturing plant, the lawsuit said." at the time the fab amd used was owned completely by globalfoundries.

Essentially GF kicked them in the balls and they had to adjust by the time that adjustment was over there was no demand as the demand ship sailed.
 
Yeah, I'll totally agree that Llano was never important as a product, so I wonder how they're going to go about insinuating that it's lateness impacted shareholders. It was a test product that was supposed to be out early and make Trinity easier.

For Llano mobile, the GPU performance was substantial, but the CPU performance pretty much sucked, and battery life was not as good as Intel. It took Trinity one year later to finally make high-end (35w) APUs attractive on the notebook scene, meanwhile Brazos alone had been saving AMD's bacon by letting OEMs avoid the Llano embarrassment.

Of course, I'm not sure how they will go about this. Even if you could lay blame here, which product was first to be late?
 
The complaint is regarding the veracity of information given to shareholders. Basically was AMD providing information publically to shareholders that they knew was incorrect internally, and whether or not this was deliberate.
 
limitedaccess said:
The complaint is regarding the veracity of information given to shareholders. Basically was AMD providing information publically to shareholders that they knew was incorrect internally, and whether or not this was deliberate.
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Correct. This is the issue that needs to be determined. You can do a LOT of things and get away with it, but lying to the shareholders is NOT one of them.
 
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