AMD Prepares for January Reorganization

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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AMD is making preparations for another round of layoffs in January as part of the company’s corporate-wide reorganization. The first round of job cuts affected 15% of AMD’s workforce, but this upcoming round is reported to be much smaller in scope.

AMD took pains, both in external and internal statements, to dispute the notion that a sale is possible in the days and hours after the report. Hours after the Reuters story on Tuesday, AMD issued a carefully worded statement saying that it is “not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets at this time.”
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If you don't fix the problems with management and how the company is run in the first place then you can lay off as many people as possible but still be in some shit.

Not to mention the fact that AMD's products have been less than stellar in the past few years...especially in the CPU market where they haven't had a #1 or faster product than Intel in years.

Hell, if anything AMD needs to hire more people for R&D that'll actually make some COMPETING products.
 
the market doesn't really give a shit about #1 performance.

AMD has been mismanaged for a long fucking time. I don't really get why, other boards get it right, AMD is snakebit.

I will support the company with my dollars until they go away. They should be doing much better than they seem to be.
 
I never understood the premise that AMD doesnt make competing products, they do, just not in the scope of products that engage us as enthusiasts.
 
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JoeUser said:
Not to mention the fact that AMD's products have been less than stellar in the past few years...especially in the CPU market where they haven't had a #1 or faster product than Intel in years.

Hell, if anything AMD needs to hire more people for R&D that'll actually make some COMPETING products.
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I guess my point is, in this world, they can't compete with Intel, which is exactly why they said they weren't trying to. They couldn't spend enough on R&D even if they wanted to. They're just not going to get ahead of Intel when Intel is capable of dropping ten times more than AMD on R&D when not pressured by direct competition.

IMO, AMD needs to have some spark of genius over there or to find new untapped avenues to corner. Easy right? lol
 
Putting their competition with Intel aside, I feel that there has to be some mismanagement going on in AMD. They have given up on competing with Intel a long time ago, shifting their focus elsewhere. Yet here we are, still needing to do "reorganization".
 
Hornet said:
Putting their competition with Intel aside, I feel that there has to be some mismanagement going on in AMD. They have given up on competing with Intel a long time ago, shifting their focus elsewhere. Yet here we are, still needing to do "reorganization".
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Shifting their focus elsewhere on WHAT exactly? See...that's the problem...I don't think AMD knows where their focus is...if not on Intel then what? Notebooks? Only strong point they have there is their APU...and even then its purely GPU as the CPU part is shit compared to a lowly i3.

OK...maybe server sector then? Not enough to keep them afloat though...

GPU's? They have some good ones here, that's a fact, but compared to Nvidia in relation to performance per watt they are lacking as well.

Meh, AMD used to be my favorite...Barton, Athlon64 where the shit...what happened...
 
So why isn't AMD bigger? They had the athlon 64 and everyone always says "What happened AMD?"

Because Intel locked them out of the OEM market, thus keeping AMD a small company by comparison. Intel kept their monopoly by *force*. They sued intel for this, and intel settled.

What was intel doing? selling pentium Ds and Pentium 4s at fire sale prices to companies like dell. Giving market money to them, giving kick backs and bonus' to executives. But that's nothing

A large payout by Intel was a small price to pay for keeping their monopoly. You can't talk about AMDs financial woes without mentioning this.

This practice by intel has continued at least until 2010, when the Federal Trade comission filed a lawsuit against them. Thought they've mostly changed their ways, the cat is out of the bag and the damage is done.
 
^ Not sure about 2010. Most of the practices were stopped after the first int'l FTCs of different countries were filed and settled, particularly S. Korea (few million), Japan (few more million) and the EU (ka-ching!), a few years before that. Most of the complaints in the AMD FTC case were not addressed in the settlement, since they had little merit to begin with. The things which were addressed had already been

You also seem to forget about 3 things: 1) AMD bragged it was selling all it could manufacture (and several processor shortages during the A64's reign), 2) AMD finally added additional capacity, years too late, around the time the Core 2 was released and 3) it took far too long to release a successor to the K8, due to false starts and scrapping designs, and when the K10 (aka K8L) was released, it was far underwhelming. As a bonus, the poorly thought out purchase of ATI at a far inflated price, caused the debt which forced AMD to become fabless, with all the problems that have come from that.

So no, AMD's main problems were that it was poorly run, particularly during Ruiz's time as CEO. He and Meyer bungled the successor to the K8, and Ruiz didn't plan capacity when it could have helped.

Or maybe I'm just not understanding how a manufacturing constrained AMD was being limited by a monopoly (when AMD had upwards of 80% of retail sales), when the company bragged it sold everything it produced and "didn't need to advertise". :wonka:
 
JoeUser said:
If you don't fix the problems with management and how the company is run in the first place then you can lay off as many people as possible but still be in some shit.

Not to mention the fact that AMD's products have been less than stellar in the past few years...especially in the CPU market where they haven't had a #1 or faster product than Intel in years.

Hell, if anything AMD needs to hire more people for R&D that'll actually make some COMPETING products.
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lolwut? amd/ati handily shit on nvidia during the gtx4XX series, was still in the lead during the gtx5XX series, and is beat by a negligible margin by the gtx6XX series in terms of performance/watt.
 
pxc said:
^ Not sure about 2010. Most of the practices were stopped after the first int'l FTCs of different countries were filed and settled, particularly S. Korea (few million), Japan (few more million) and the EU (ka-ching!), a few years before that. Most of the complaints in the AMD FTC case were not addressed in the settlement, since they had little merit to begin with. The things which were addressed had already been

You also seem to forget about 3 things: 1) AMD bragged it was selling all it could manufacture (and several processor shortages during the A64's reign), 2) AMD finally added additional capacity, years too late, around the time the Core 2 was released and 3) it took far too long to release a successor to the K8, due to false starts and scrapping designs, and when the K10 (aka K8L) was released, it was far underwhelming. As a bonus, the poorly thought out purchase of ATI at a far inflated price, caused the debt which forced AMD to become fabless, with all the problems that have come from that.

So no, AMD's main problems were that it was poorly run, particularly during Ruiz's time as CEO. He and Meyer bungled the successor to the K8, and Ruiz didn't plan capacity when it could have helped.

Or maybe I'm just not understanding how a manufacturing constrained AMD was being limited by a monopoly (when AMD had upwards of 80% of retail sales), when the company bragged it sold everything it produced and "didn't need to advertise". :wonka:
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It's true AMD was indeed saying "it's so awesome we can't keep up." But that shortage was a relatively short window over the last 10+ years. This isn't really a new development.

I wouldn't say AMDs ills are entirely on Intel's shoulders. However, Intel isn't innocent in the matter and shoulders some of that blame.

The reason AMD couldn't call up Joe Fab and say give me more capacity is due to the agreement they had with Intel, not because of something management did. Intel said if you want to keep playing in the X86 market, you have to make your own chips. They were however allowed to expand production 20% or so from chartered if I remember correctly.

AMD should have remedied that when they had the 64bit instruction set to bargain with. Though I understand they were trying to get traction with microsoft, they failed to capitalize on their success.

But again, I mentioned the Athlon 64 days, but this goes back to the 486. There was an overall arc of intel monopolizing the market. I don't see how that's exactly a controversial opinion, since they've lost a good deal of lawsuits. And if you've ever seen how those corporate trials drag out, they aren't easy to win unless someone is obviously at fault. (They aren't even easy to END, much less win when you factor in appeals.)

According to reports I read Intel did continue a few of the, lets call them "suspect" practices at least until late 2009/2010. I believe that was the investigation by the New York AG.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Wasn't that more because Intel messed up rather than AMD being outstanding?
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You could say the same for Bulldozer :p

Remember when SemiAccurate said that Kaveri was going to be ‘reevaluated’ and slipped to 2014? It looks like the chip failed the evaluation, and took all the big AMD cores with it.
It is really sad to say, but it looks like the big AMD core line that went Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, Excavator, has been revised to Bulldozer, Piledriver, the end. Word has reached our ears that pretty much the entirety of the AMD big core line was a casualty of the last round of layoffs. It looks like it is game over in that whole segment for the green team.
AMD recently announced that they are getting in to the ARM server business, something that has been in the works since about 13.29 seconds after the Dirking. At that time, AMD didn’t have the resources to do two x86 cores and an ARM core, and they don’t now. Any informed onlooker could tell you how this scenario was going to play out, but most expected the middle line Bobcat/Jaguar cores to be the casualty. Instead, the bigger cores are now…. err…. this.
There really aren’t any good words to describe the current situation, AMD abandoned their cores that had one competitor, albeit that one is Intel, for an unproven market. Worse yet, that market has lots of competitors, many of which are already on the market that AMD won’t be in until 2014. Still worse yet, AMD is jumping in with an undifferentiated core and a less flexible but possibly more efficient interconnect. This author for one thinks that killing the big cores for ARM is not just ill conceived, it is suicidal. That said, given the board’s track record, this impending implosion is better than par for their course.S|A
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http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/19/amd-kills-off-big-cores-kaveri-steamroller-and-excavator/

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/29509-almost-75-percent-of-amds-cpu-sales-were-apus

It's been quite a while since AMD had anything particularly worth bragging about on the CPU front, but the latest sales figures show that Trinity desktop and mobile APUs mean business.

Mercury Research's latest report says that Trinity APUs make up for almost 75 percent of AMD's CPU sales. The report focuses on Q3 2013 and says low-end Bobcat chips were the most popular APU.

In fact, as much as 39 percent of AMD's Q3 sales were Bobcat Zacate products. A-Series Trinity APUs made up for 26.1 while A-Series Llano made up for 7.4 percent.

When it comes to the rest, AMD's non-APU processors sold slightly higher than 25 percent. Interestingly, the older K10/K10.5 architecture outsold Bulldozers by quite a margin, almost two times.
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So it looks like the Bulldozer design may have outright killed their desktop/server business while their APUs are selling well, but with low margins and not enough to keep both sides of the boat afloat. AMD needs to stick to making kickass APUs if they wish to survive and call it quits on the desktop side altogether. If you're to believe Charlie's rumors, that looks to be the case.

I wouldn't share his sentiment that that's what may kill the company. On the contrary. I think AMD's dead no matter what but pulling out of the desktop/Opteron side until they can improve K10 or come up with a better and more efficient architecture is absolutely necessary. Bulldozer/Piledriver and Steamroller would have been far too big, and when you're behind in fab process pursuing that only bleeds them dry by cutting into margins.
 
Chip maker stops innovation on chips.Chip maker gives up on trying to make better chips.Chip maker stops making chips.Chip maker gone
 
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