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AMD lays off 1400 employees, including execs

cdr_74_premium said:
LOL. As if a company needs, or even wants, to cater to enthusiasts. Small percentage, too vocal, never satisfied (per definition), and fickle.
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Problem is that AMD does little to no mainstream advertising, so its enthusiasts and technicians that actually work with the parts that decide their fate on word of mouth.

On the enthusiast side, we are a small but vocal bunch, but we can rarely persuade people who regularly drink the intel kool-aid on primetime tv. If AMD produces something shitty, the very few people such as friends and family that we can influence choose intel due to our opinions.

On the OEM side, when you got technicians in a company bitching about how bad the product sucks, that carries up to the bean counters too, then AMD loses sales.
 
SixFootDuo said:
As much as I love AMD and wise enough to understand that competition is very important to keep companies hungry and aggressive and prices low, I could care less if AMD loses its ass over BD. Personally, sick of the lies and being told to wait 2 years, then, told to wait 2 more. Tired of all this talk about we build our cpu's "furture proof" and all that other horseshit. Why? Never seems like it works out too well. I hope they lose millions of dollars and even more people lose their jobs. I hope it gets so bad for them that they wake up and realize, oh shit, I guess we need to stop screwing around and actually build a CPU for today's enthusiasts that has blistering single tread performance when needed and multi-cores when needed, tons of cache all over the damn cpu, blah blah, a cpu that just rocks and kicks much ass. Tired of all the big words and bullshit, sick of it. Just give us a damn CPU already.
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give your act a rest already, every single post is this same crap. AMD doesn't market worth a crap, there was no "hype." Bitch and moan about something else, because nothing you say has anything to do with reality.
 
Well I hate to say it but AMD is just working on flushing the rest down the toliet. Until the stockholders demand a new board of directors, AMD is going to continue down the same downward spiral. But I am not sure there is enough little investors to cause a change in the board of directors. But the board keeps proving that they could give a careless about AMD by the CEO's they keep hiring that do nothing but tear apart the company.
 
Who's going to replace all these laid off top execs and engineers? People who are even more incompetent and even less familiar with the product line.

Good night, Irene, good night... :(

What pisses me off is that the monopoly of the high end has begun and Intel can now fire up the Retro Rocket Rectal Ramrod to every enthusiast out there, and there's nobody who can stop them.

Anybody have any KY Jelly? :)
 
Weeth said:
Who's going to replace all these laid off top execs and engineers? People who are even more incompetent and even less familiar with the product line.

Good night, Irene, good night... :(

What pisses me off is that the monopoly of the high end has begun and Intel can now fire up the Retro Rocket Rectal Ramrod to every enthusiast out there, and there's nobody who can stop them.

Anybody have any KY Jelly? :)
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While you might be right about needing the KY for enthusiast parts, at this point I'd rather take Intel's midrange over anything AMD :/
 
krakerman said:
While you might be right about needing the KY for enthusiast parts, at this point I'd rather take Intel's midrange over anything AMD :/
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Of course and I agree. But in the future what is to stop Intel from saying... well... our bottom of the line IB is now an Extreme Edition, so cough up $999? You want it, you'll pay it. Otherwise, enjoy your midrange boring CPU. Let's face it, even at current prices, high end CPUs are a complete bargain. Considering they're the heart of every non-gaming enthusiast rig, they're well underpriced. My 2600K was under $300. If it had been $600 I would have bitched and moaned and bought it anyway.

I got almost three years out of my last rig, an i7 940. That's over a thousand days. To amortize $300 I paid $0.30 a day. If three dimes fall out of my pocket I'm not going to bend over and pick them up, so what real difference does it make if it was 60 cents? I use my PC at least 12 hours a day 7 days a week. Even at 60 cents that's a nickel an hour. And I have clients that pay me up to $150 an hour for the work I do on it. (Before you think I'm a rich bastard, keep in mind that's just on the hours they give me, hardly full time).

All of that to explain my point that Intel now has carte blanche with the enthusiast prosumer market. I'm expecting to hold my 2600K until the IB-E LGA2011 release in early '13. At that time do you know how much diff it will make to me if the hexacore CPU is $500 or $1000? Not a damn bit. I'm still buying it. But I will blame AMD because if they had an even remotely comparable CPU on the market, Intel would have held the price at around $500 instead of bending enthusiasts over the couch like shotguns.
 
seems like if I was really concerned about amd going under I would be building an amd box to give away for xmas.

I am giving away a few this year, and went ahead and upgraded my folks computers. I didn't buy bulldozer, but there is value in their other products.
 
Hey guys, Brian from Icrontic here. I just wanted to let you know we've added a few names to the list that we originally published, and I'm getting emails from other former AMDers confirming their own layoffs as well.

Added to the list: John Swinimer, who also said,

John Swinimer said:
Just so you know there’s only one guy left in the AMD Markham PR office to support all of AMD’s graphics PR efforts – Dave Erskine.
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The landscape at AMD has dramatically changed, almost overnight.
 
PR definitely got the biggest blows but then how effective where they in the first place? What will PR for the future look like for AMD? New hires coming? or will AMD outsource more for advertising? Outsourcing makes sense since one has more control over when to spend and not spend as needed plus change agencies to the ones doing better. Regional difference makes a one size fit all approach not very effective. Advertising in Japan would be different then in England per se.

When in the world will AMD realize the high end moves the low end? This is even applicable for ARM based systems as well. If AMD gives up servers, high end desktops, graphics, professional market and what not then forget selling the low end stuff and will eventually be so outpaced by their competitors. High end R&D pushes the low end stuff performance and sellability and gives you the most advancements and the most talk. I do think AMD marketing needs improvement, whole top to bottom solution approach and with big discounts when buying AMD combination packages.
 
The IT industry is very big. There are many ways to do business.

1. Bobcat APU series seems to be doing just fine. In fact Bobcat is the single most important reason in turning around AMD fortune because its battery runtime is very good thus reversing the trend in laptop/netbook segment.
2. Llano APU series seems reasonable
3. In fact AMD is turning in profit.

4. The key is to understand the situation reasonably well and try to find a path forward with viable scheme. It appears at least for now there are progresses, judging from recent profit.
 
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AMD will be around for a good while regardless of the massive incompetence shown in the BD project. They simply won't be around the high end enthusiast. So that takes them off my radar as I couldn't care less about those lower "who gives a damn" low and mid range segments. As for "recent profit" and "turning around fortunes" just check the stock chart. Even in the last six months the stock price is down by almost half. Yeah, that's the sign of a company making a strong comeback! :rolleyes:
 
I know the company needed to trim some fat and get refocused, but this seems a bit too much too fast. I just hope the new CEO has a plan other than "fire people to make the board happy long enough to fulfill my contract obligations".
 
DOOMHAMMA said:
Not to mention the fact that they just laid off a lot of their marketing people lol
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If I was the guy who decided to put the FX moniker on the Bulldozer CPUs I wouldn't feel very safe about my job right now.

Seriously seeing the benchmarks of these FX chips was a slap in the face for most of us, who anticipated the return of this legendary model name.
 
I'm not impressed with the new CEO not at all.
Cutting jobs is one thing but he's really not suited to this position a nobody who does not grasp the market.
 
He really just killed AMD GPU's. Sure smaller things like Trinity will be fine, but AMD is OUT of the high end graphics market after this. Its over. Expect it in the announcement on the 9th. This is amazingly sad.
 
Cali3350 said:
He really just killed AMD GPU's. Sure smaller things like Trinity will be fine, but AMD is OUT of the high end graphics market after this. Its over. Expect it in the announcement on the 9th. This is amazingly sad.
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Wait, what??? I missed that part..
 
I'd like to have hope that Read doesn't do something as stupid as killing off their mid-range to higher end desktop CPUs such as the Phenom II, Bulldozer and its successors.

I'm also hoping he doesn't kill off the graphics card division either. With their Senior Engineer, Killebrew, gone, I wonder what shape that division is in now.

I have found another article where Read again stating that he wants to focus on "low power, cloud computing, and emerging markets." I'm having high hopes that whatever he announces in four days would be good not only for the company, but for the consumers themselves.

My friend and I are looking forward to Graphics Core Next (GCN) cards (7900-series) next year. If that's the last high-end card coming out of AMD and they move towards integrated parts for their Fusion Llano and Trinity APUs, then AMD has not only seceded the market to Intel but Nvidia as well.

Again, it would be a very, very stupid and idiotic move of Read to do this to consumers just so he can save AMD money and put it back into profitability.
 
Ive been building AMD systems for so many years not because they were the fastest but because they offered best value per dollar in my opinion. I would really hate to see AMD drop out of the midrange / highend CPU/GPU...
 
There is another side affect here. If AMD leaves the high end desktop, the market will shrink fast due to lack of competition and interest. And, I think it would be a pretty safe bet that Trinity's penetration :)p) will gain big from it.
 
Director of planning. Why are people still asking why he got axed?
Did anything Amd did the last year or so looked planned?
 
I agree, the AMD offerings (pre- BD) were/are pretty good. My wife has a new PhII x4 and my son has a slightly older Ph II x3 rig. Really good values for the performance. Not the fastest by quite a bit, but doesn't really need to be. Myself and my daughter have Intel Q core rigs.
But, as far as these layoffs go, I fear it isn't the last we shall see in a very short time to come.
I've seen this trend before. It does not bode well. I predict AMD will either dissolve (sell it's IP off till none is left) or more likely, be bought out by the end of 2012. This new CEO is going to do what he can to inflate the value of AMD as much as legally possible, and get the most broccoli for the sale of the company for stockholders. An exit CEO.

Yes. I hope I'm wrong.
 
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I just dont see AMD imploding or going away. Bulldozer was a flop but theyre still making a lot of money on GPU's, Llano and servers. Somebody said it before, this is like Ford coming out with a new Mustang and it looks like crap and no faster than an Accord so they fire the development and PR team. Would you expect Ford to just dissolve and go out of business? Hell no. AMD wont either.

Their marketing department did a shitty job in general. They did virtually zero advertising except a few snippets here and there in magazines like PC Gamer or Maximum PC. As a result, every Tom, Dick and Harry can sing the Intel jingle on demand but think AMD is just "and" misspelled.

There is still a lot of life left in AMD and a good restructuring could definitely turn things around. I dont think theyll ever be king of the mountain cause at this point, Intel is more than 10 times their size so theyll spend more on office parties than AMD can spend on R&D but they are still more than capable of coming up with good processors that offer a viable alternative to Intel procs.

I mean think about it, how big of what AMD does is enthusiast, desktop processors?
 
Note to all: Please take this quote from the front page of this site and feel free to slap... er... bring to the attention of every deluded AMD fanboy:

http://hardocp.com/article/2011/11/03/amd_fx8150_multigpu_gameplay_performance_review/8

In every game we played so far between the AMD FX-8150 and Intel 2500K, not once did the AMD FX-8150 come out on top with a dual or triple-GPU configuration. Even when performance was "similar," the Intel CPU still held a certain percentage of performance advantage, over the AMD CPU. Given these results, we saw no need to include the i7 2600K. When we look at pricing, things all start to fall in place. Currently, the Intel i5 2500K can be had for $214.99 online. The AMD FX-8150 is currently more expensive at $279.99 online. That extra $65 will get you twice the cores, but it won't make up for Bulldozers low gameplay performance. Save your money, get an Intel i5 and overclock it for a better experience.

All of our gameplay testing has brought us to this single conclusion, if you are serious about gaming on the PC, and or you have a dual-GPU or better configuration, you will simply have a better gameplay experience with an Intel i5 or i7 CPU. Currently, when it comes to Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge, Intel simply has the better platform for high-end gaming.
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This says it all. There's nothing more to say. The war is over. FX lost. However many people Read fired, it wasn't anywhere near enough to obtain redemption from this debacle. Good night. :p
 
Aside from AMD_Gamer, who out there is saying Bulldozer was anything but a big bucket of fail. Pretty much everybody agrees its a steaming dog turd. But its also not the end of the world or the company. Like I said, Bulldozer to AMD is like the F150 to Ford. They have a lot of other products that makes them BILLIONS of dollars. They can recover from this.
 
big bucket of fail and steaming turd are complete and utter hyperbole.

It's not that bad.
 
No I think that pretty much sums it up. We waited for over 3 years for this thing to drop and when it finally does, not only is it slower than Intel's year old lineup but it is slower than its 3 year old line up of Phenoms in a lot of benchmarks and only barely edges them out in others despite using twice the juice and costing $100 more! I cant think of too many things other than turd and fail that would describe that......and Im an AMD fanboy!! :eek:
 
it's not that bad, I know it isn't, there is information that confirms it isn't.

It's pretty much irrelevant to the gaming enthusiast community. Big Whoop.

phenom 1 was a worse than this, it didn't matter what you did, it never beat intel.
 
After lots of $$$ & years of R & D, to release that non-selling POS Dozer is why those people are on the unemployment line. Gotta recoupe the losses & employees pay the price. What a sham & a shame.
 
AMD has been consistently showing higher profits every quarter now. BD FX is disappointing, no question there, but really I don't think phenom was a big money maker anyways. Most there profits from what I hear have been because of their Fusion line, which I think is pretty good.

Also, bulldozer might still make a decent server chip where the FPU calculations can be done on GPUs. We need to wait for interlagos reviews to see, but if it's competitive there, it really hasn't been a failure at all.
 
I wonder if they can salvage Bulldozer, like they did with the Phenom 1 line.

I dont have the engineering knowledge but is the Bulldozer architecture sound enough to build on and revamp and maybe come out with some better performing processors in the future or should the whole thing just be scrapped and go back to the drawing board?
 
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MacLeod said:
I wonder if they can salvage Bulldozer, like they did with the Phenom 1 line.

I have the engineering knowledge but is the Bulldozer architecture sound enough to build on and revamp and maybe come out with some better performing processors in the future or should the whole thing just be scrapped and go back to the drawing board?
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At this point I would welcome a Phenom III rather than another Bulldozer. Take the K10.5 architecture, revamp the int, fpu's, and cache, and it just might be decent...all without being the money dump that is bulldozer.
 
jober1 said:
Also, bulldozer might still make a decent server chip where the FPU calculations can be done on GPUs. We need to wait for interlagos reviews to see, but if it's competitive there, it really hasn't been a failure at all.
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This.

From what I understand, BD was designed from the ground up with servers in mind, and then simply ported to the desktop PC like a console port gets ported to the PC.
 
so people got laid off, its called down sizing.

all companies these days hire efficiency experts. These guys usually tell management they can do with out x amount of people and then a bunch of people get canned.

it has nothing to do with Amd going downhill. They are still posting profits. So as long as they keep posting profits they will be around. That or they will accept an offer to be purchased by someone else.

Truth is Intel has the major advantage, they have the lion share of the market, so their cpu's and products are more widely programmed for and accepted.
 
MacLeod said:
No I think that pretty much sums it up. We waited for over 3 years for this thing to drop and when it finally does, not only is it slower than Intel's year old lineup but it is slower than its 3 year old line up of Phenoms in a lot of benchmarks and only barely edges them out in others despite using twice the juice and costing $100 more! I cant think of too many things other than turd and fail that would describe that......and Im an AMD fanboy!! :eek:
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Its REALLY not that bad. Its extremely powerful in multithreaded tests and who cares about single threaded. I won't argue its an overall disappointment or that its overpriced but its really not as bad as most are crying.

I own one and here is the bottom line. My games play great and it uses less power then my AMD x4 925. (232watts from AMD 925 and 209watts for my FX4100) I certainly recommend people buy i5-2500k or on tighter budget AMD 955 BE C3 for $104-115 versus $129 for FX4100 ( i got mine for $109) I just got one to play with for my own curiosity.
 
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