Chips not down at AMD: Despite layoffs and financial troubles, the future still ...

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beowulf7

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I came across the following article on CNN that I thought folks in this sub-forum may be interested in reading:
Chips not down at AMD
Despite layoffs and financial troubles, the future still looks promising for the No. 2 chipmaker.

...
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What do you think? Has AMD hit rock bottom and is poised to rebound? Or will it continue to plummet? I personally hope they can once again thrive and continue giving Intel good competition.
 
I'll admit, I'm a little bit of an AMD fanboy (with regards to CPU's), and I think that they will rebound. The 9850 has had a good showing so far, and hopefully those gains will translate onto the 45nm process. Will also be interesting to see what happens with their GPU's coming this summer...
 
Well I certainly hope AMD can get back on track. I'm an AMD fan as well, but I swiched to the dark side. I have no problems staying here if AMD can't deliver a competitive product either. If/When they do have a product that is as good or better than Intel's, I will gladly switch back when my next upgrade comes along, but until that day comes, they've got their work cut out for them.
 
RamonGTP said:
Well I certainly hope AMD can get back on track. I'm an AMD fan as well, but I swiched to the dark side. I have no problems staying here if AMD can't deliver a competitive product either. If/When they do have a product that is as good or better than Intel's, I will gladly switch back when my next upgrade comes along, but until that day comes, they've got their work cut out for them.
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Will you really? I see you are running your Intel quad at 3.1 ghz. I assume you are suggesting that a Phenom at 3.1 is not competitive? What do you use your computer for then?
 
I stopped reading the article when the guy quoted an "analyst" who said that AMD executed superbly at the end of 2007. Maybe I wasn't in the same universe as that analyst, because I'm pretty sure we had a broken, late, extremely disappointing Phenom arrive sometime around there. Only now do we have the "fixed" version, with the same low IPC/high TDP as the old one. Whoopdeedo.

AMD as a company: are they undervalued? Probably. Does that mean anything for us as enthusiasts? No. lets check back with their new architecture.
 
flippin_waffles said:
Will you really? I see you are running your Intel quad at 3.1 ghz. I assume you are suggesting that a Phenom at 3.1 is not competitive? What do you use your computer for then?
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A Phenom running at 3.1GHz? Reliably? Consistantly? On air? For $200? With a matching IPC? Funny guy!

If it can't do that, it's not competitive and right now, it can't come anywhere near that. Once it CAN do that, then yes, it would be competitive. Would I switch? No, becuase i already own a quad and upgrading for the sake of having AMD but the same performace is retarded.

However, if they are competitive when I'm ready for my next upgrade, I would gladly use AMD once again.

What do I use my computer for? Several things

Gaming
Office apps
Internet
Music
Video's
Encoding
DVD Authoring
Photoshop
PDF Conversions
and I routinely have 1 or more virtual machines running to test out different software and OS' with my current project being learing the ins and outs of Windows Server 2008.
 
quadnad said:
I stopped reading the article when the guy quoted an "analyst" who said that AMD executed superbly at the end of 2007.
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:D

Nathan Brookwood is basically an AMD cheerleader, a Tom Yager with a calculator. Even while AMD was in clear free-fall at the end of 2007, he was there shaking his pom-poms. AMD even has a page on the guy and he gave an AMD keynote address.

AMD was helped at the end of 2007 by an unexpected increase in demand that benefited Intel even more. It had nothing to do with execution, and even with better than expected revenues and near high ASPs, AMD still lost over $100 million for the quarter excluding charges.

The layoffs are a start to lowering expenses, but idiotic (mis)management is still killing the company.
 
flippin_waffles said:
Will you really? I see you are running your Intel quad at 3.1 ghz. I assume you are suggesting that a Phenom at 3.1 is not competitive? What do you use your computer for then?
Click to expand...
Intel is shipping 3.2GHz quad core parts. AMD is shipping 2.5GHz quad core parts. The bulk of AMD's CPU revenues are still coming from ancient and money losing K8 parts. That is not surprising since quad core CPUs are still not mainstream.

The "ramp" to K10 is proceding snail slow, of course in part from the TLB erratum, but also because of low clock speed and other competitive disadvantages. Cutting prices to the bone is also not helping AMD financially. The K10 is a very large chip and the volumes of even the B2 stepping were small, meaning K10 probably isn't yielding well.

Do you think there's a reason why AMD isn't shipping 3GHz+ chips? A hint: Phenom 2.6GHz will be a 140W chip. Another clue: none of the reviews of the B3 stepping got over 2.8-3GHz stable with high end air cooling, nevermind trying to put the chip through a factory-type speed validation. Almost stable, or review-stable should be good enough? :p
 
Did not AMD completely deny the rumors of a 5% layoff about a month ago, only to layoff 10% now? I seem to recall an official response somewhere...
 
pxc said:
Intel is shipping 3.2GHz quad core parts. AMD is shipping 2.5GHz quad core parts. The bulk of AMD's CPU revenues are still coming from ancient and money losing K8 parts. That is not surprising since quad core CPUs are still not mainstream.

The "ramp" to K10 is proceding snail slow, of course in part from the TLB erratum, but also because of low clock speed and other competitive disadvantages. Cutting prices to the bone is also not helping AMD financially. The K10 is a very large chip and the volumes of even the B2 stepping were small, meaning K10 probably isn't yielding well.

Do you think there's a reason why AMD isn't shipping 3GHz+ chips? A hint: Phenom 2.6GHz will be a 140W chip. Another clue: none of the reviews of the B3 stepping got over 2.8-3GHz stable with high end air cooling, nevermind trying to put the chip through a factory-type speed validation. Almost stable, or review-stable should be good enough? :p
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I'm not doubting Intel in this, but you have to admit, Intel has is very easy with their quads, although i do feel that if it's got 4 cores, it's quad core CPU.

With AMD, Core 0, Core 1, Core 2 all work at say 3 GHz, and Core 3 works at 2 GHz - sorry, but that's now a 2 GHz quad.

With Intel, they can pick and choose which dies are of the similar speed binning, stick weld them together and ship it.

Now the real question is this: what speeds will Nehalem launch at? Granted, it doesn't really need extreme clock speeds given it's anticipated increase in efficiency, but I think having native quad core is something to be considered.

Now, I don't feel AMD is fit to be an industry leader; they don't have the mentality of the industry leader yet.

I mean the lower efficiency compared to Core 2 is their fault, but there are some issues that you have to work out. The fact that Intel has more engineers definitely helps.
 
pxc said:
Intel is shipping 3.2GHz quad core parts. AMD is shipping 2.5GHz quad core parts. The bulk of AMD's CPU revenues are still coming from ancient and money losing K8 parts. That is not surprising since quad core CPUs are still not mainstream.

The "ramp" to K10 is proceding snail slow, of course in part from the TLB erratum, but also because of low clock speed and other competitive disadvantages. Cutting prices to the bone is also not helping AMD financially. The K10 is a very large chip and the volumes of even the B2 stepping were small, meaning K10 probably isn't yielding well.

Do you think there's a reason why AMD isn't shipping 3GHz+ chips? A hint: Phenom 2.6GHz will be a 140W chip. Another clue: none of the reviews of the B3 stepping got over 2.8-3GHz stable with high end air cooling, nevermind trying to put the chip through a factory-type speed validation. Almost stable, or review-stable should be good enough? :p
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I see you are running your quad at 3.1ghz as well. Is that as fast as you guys/gals feel is safe to run them? Maybe there is negetive long term effects for running them faster with higher voltage? Just askin. Or maybe it's just because it's "fast enough"?
 
I'm running my quad at 3.1GHz because any higher and I have to give it more voltage than i'm comfortable with. I've been building and overclocking PC's for a long time now so I've got a pretty good idea what is safe and what may be pushing it and I'm confidant that at my current speed and voltage are very safe. My voltage is currently set to 1.35 which is just a .1v increase over default and still within the advertised operating range of the chip.

My friends quad can do 3.4GHz at the about the same voltage mine requires to hit 3.1GHz and can do 3.6GHz at the same voltage I need 3.2GHz, so all processors are not created equal.
 
pxc said:
:D

Nathan Brookwood is basically an AMD cheerleader, a Tom Yager with a calculator. Even while AMD was in clear free-fall at the end of 2007, he was there shaking his pom-poms. AMD even has a page on the guy and he gave an AMD keynote address.

AMD was helped at the end of 2007 by an unexpected increase in demand that benefited Intel even more. It had nothing to do with execution, and even with better than expected revenues and near high ASPs, AMD still lost over $100 million for the quarter excluding charges.

The layoffs are a start to lowering expenses, but idiotic (mis)management is still killing the company.
Click to expand...

It should be noted that what you describe is the textbook definition of a contrarian in the stock market world. The idea is that you cheerlead a stock that NO ONE ELSE wants to cheerlead in the hopes that you're buying the stock at an unreasonably low price. You don't make much money for very long if you hop on bandwagons in the financial world. Inevitably, one is sometimes wrong in these (educated?) guesses.
 
rbrychckn said:
It should be noted that what you describe is the textbook definition of a contrarian in the stock market world. The idea is that you cheerlead a stock that NO ONE ELSE wants to cheerlead in the hopes that you're buying the stock at an unreasonably low price. You don't make much money for very long if you hop on bandwagons in the financial world. Inevitably, one is sometimes wrong in these (educated?) guesses.
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What he's describing is someone who pisses on you and tells you its raining.
 
JackAshley said:
Did not AMD completely deny the rumors of a 5% layoff about a month ago, only to layoff 10% now? I seem to recall an official response somewhere...
Click to expand...

I honestly think they were stabbing in the dark with that rumor, AMD classically denies it (people think just because they deny something their automatically guilty), but then they were right. If you ask nvidia about the existence of a chip called GT200, their going to deny the existence of said chip and information to go with it, or not comment, that doesn't necessarily mean GT200 exists or ever will exist.

We knew AMD was going to be laying off people, i could see it from a mile away, I wouldn't know the logistics of said lay off and be able to say 5% or 10% with any accuracy, but the signs were clear as day.
 
rbrychckn said:
It should be noted that what you describe is the textbook definition of a contrarian in the stock market world. The idea is that you cheerlead a stock that NO ONE ELSE wants to cheerlead in the hopes that you're buying the stock at an unreasonably low price.
Click to expand...
The problem is that all the suckers he convinced to buy AMD during the free fall have lost at least half his or her money. That makes Nathan Brookwood less of a contrarian and more of a guy who's not very good at his job. :p AMD was and is still to a very large extent fundamentally broken. Clinging on to some weird notion that AMD is undervalued* ignores several realities.

* AMD's net worth, besides way overvalued intangibles is close to zero and possibly negative now. Over the course of AMD's entire existence, the total sum of earnings has not made a net positive. There is an inevitability, but most here will not like it.
 
Does everyone now agree that AMD's purchase of ATI was either a bad idea or at the least, overpriced?
 
beowulf7 said:
Does everyone now agree that AMD's purchase of ATI was either a bad idea or at the least, overpriced?
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I never liked it, and in hindsight it was even worse than I imagined. Both companies could have survived on their own, but together with massive debt and very tough competition on both the CPU and GPU fronts, it's hard not to see a grim future.
I am somewhat confident that the ATI guys can make a comeback (or at least could have if they aren't butchered with these and future layoffs) , but I don't see the same thing for AMD CPUs. They continue to make questionable (actually bonehead) moves like "native" quad cores and it seems they have no interest in multi-threading capability in a single core, which will put them even further behind Intel.
 
Mat3 said:
I never liked it, and in hindsight it was even worse than I imagined. Both companies could have survived on their own, but together with massive debt and very tough competition on both the CPU and GPU fronts, it's hard not to see a grim future.
I am somewhat confident that the ATI guys can make a comeback (or at least could have if they aren't butchered with these and future layoffs) , but I don't see the same thing for AMD CPUs. They continue to make questionable (actually bonehead) moves like "native" quad cores and it seems they have no interest in multi-threading capability in a single core, which will put them even further behind Intel.
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I never liked it either. Then again, I was an AMD fanboy and an NVidia fanboy, so that AMD/ATI merger put me at odds w/ myself. :D

Wouldn't that be something else if ATI becomes the profitable part of AMD and shareholders demand divesting it into 2 companies. :eek:
 
beowulf7 said:
I never liked it either. Then again, I was an AMD fanboy and an NVidia fanboy, so that AMD/ATI merger put me at odds w/ myself. :D

Wouldn't that be something else if ATI becomes the profitable part of AMD and shareholders demand divesting it into 2 companies. :eek:
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I disagree that AMD buying ATi was a bad thing -- it may have been overpriced, and the purchase probably couldn't have happened at a worse time (this is all the fault of AMD really), but to be honest it has given AMD complete control over its own platform now (something Intel has had and has capitalized on for a very long time now).
 
quadnad said:
I disagree that AMD buying ATi was a bad thing -- it may have been overpriced, and the purchase probably couldn't have happened at a worse time (this is all the fault of AMD really), but to be honest it has given AMD complete control over its own platform now (something Intel has had and has capitalized on for a very long time now).
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I agree, but it was always a long term thing. They would only really take advantage of the merger, in time. The problem is that, by paying what they did for ATI and increasing their debt, they may not survive to see that day. And that's why I believe they did overpay for ATI.
 
Mat3 said:
I never liked it, and in hindsight it was even worse than I imagined. Both companies could have survived on their own, but together with massive debt and very tough competition on both the CPU and GPU fronts, it's hard not to see a grim future.
I am somewhat confident that the ATI guys can make a comeback (or at least could have if they aren't butchered with these and future layoffs) , but I don't see the same thing for AMD CPUs. They continue to make questionable (actually bonehead) moves like "native" quad cores and it seems they have no interest in multi-threading capability in a single core, which will put them even further behind Intel.
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actually with Larrabee coming... AMD needed to be able to control its full platform ....buying Ati was essential and a long term payout type thing....

you guys think way way too much in the short term....
 
For those who are saying ATI naysayers are too nearsighted, it's been almost 2 years since AMD's acquisition of ATI. How much more patience is reasonable?

I think the purchase made AMD lose focus of their bread-and-butter business: multicore CPUs. While AMD was stalling out, Intel put it in 6th gear and blew past AMD. :(
 
beowulf7 said:
For those who are saying ATI naysayers are too nearsighted, it's been almost 2 years since AMD's acquisition of ATI. How much more patience is reasonable?

I think the purchase made AMD lose focus of their bread-and-butter business: multicore CPUs. While AMD was stalling out, Intel put it in 6th gear and blew past AMD. :(
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Both the 690G and 780G have been fantastic products, both benefiting from the additional engineering talent in ATi as well as the overall ability to control 100% of the platform. R600 was an uncontrolled disaster that was under development long before AMD took over ATi, and they couldn't have known the state of that product.

AMD was not caught out because they bought ATi, they were caught out because they had no successor to the K8 lined up soon enough to do anything to counter Conroe. This stuff doesn't just happen overnight, it takes years to develop CPU architectures, and there are a number of articles around (good one on Anantech if I remember correctly) detailing just what AMD was doing.
 
I don't think AMD will have any problems recovering. Intel was in a much worse position with the drawn-out Netburst nightmare. If it were AMD that released an underperforming, overheating, power hungry beast like that, I'm not sure they'd have survived.

AMD has always been on the "right track" with their designs. When Intel were messing around with the horrible Netburst architecture, AMD continued to develop their Athlon architecture..

Now Intel has had to do a complete 180 to imitate AMD by going back to a chip essentially based on the P6, scrapping five years of research in the process. True, some bits and pieces did benefit the Core architecture too, but most of the research was about compensating for the horribly inefficient Netburst architecture or to push it to ever increasing clockspeeds to match AMD's much lower-clocked chips.

Even if AMD's CPUs don't offer that great performance today, they aren't completely "wrong" like Netburst. AMD doesn't have to do this 180 degree turn, they just need to tweak their existing technology, which must be easier and cheaper.
 
JimmiG said:
I don't think AMD will have any problems recovering. Intel was in a much worse position with the drawn-out Netburst nightmare.
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Your perspective of each is way off. Intel was and still is raking in bucket-loads of cash. If Netburst was wrong, it wasn't exactly as bad as AMD's "right track."

AMD is heavily in debt, bleeding money and again losing market share across all segments, with its efforts to recover having misfired. Sure some parts are very cheap, but even those prices are doing nothing to gain market share or pull AMD out of heavy losses. If you knew how close AMD is to a death spiral due to the complex loans terms it has out, you would not believe it. AMD will have to do something radical in the next several months in order to secure more financing and take on even more debt.

AMD coasted on K8 far too long, having wasted time (it could not afford) on 2 designs it cancelled before K10. This is not the same as it was before, as many people try to write off AMD's horrible current situation.

BTW, if you want to compare Core 2 and Nehalem to the Pentium 3, you may want to look closely at K6, K7 and K8/K10. :p The ones you expect to be closest probably aren't.
 
pxc said:
BTW, if you want to compare Core 2 and Nehalem to the Pentium 3, you may want to look closely at K6, K7 and K8/K10. :p The ones you expect to be closest probably aren't.
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I don't think Jimmi was denying that, in fact, I *think* he alluded to it. Definately have a point about the fact that Intel was still making money off netburst. It's also important to note that Netburst, starting with the Northwood C had AMD beat until the K8 arrived. AMD was sitting pretty until Core 2.

Here's another important difference. Intel never "missed" a product cycle. Netburst had the performance crown for a while, and in certain tasks like encoding, never really lost it until dual cores became available. With Core 2, they have the performance crown in every catagory since it's inception and are still looking strong, where as AMD completely fumbled the Barcelona launch and basically "missed" an entire product cycle.
 
The Athlons/Phenoms are also closer to the Pentium 3 and this is a good thing! Netburst was Wrong(TM) from the start. Intel bet everything on the Netburst architecture scaling to beyond 5 GHz to compensate for the horrible IPC. When they hit a brick wall well before 4 GHz, it was only the small design team responsible for the Pentium-M that saved them. The Netburst architecture had no right to exist with such an elegant and efficient architecture readily available. If there had been no Pentium-M to base their new CPUs off, Intel would've had a much harder time completely rearranging their roadmap and performing this 180 degree turn as quickly and sucessfully as they did.

AMD has no secret weapon like the Pentium-M, but on the other hand, their current architecture isn't completely backwards either. They don't need to switch to a completely different design philosophy to turn competetive again, they just need to tweak their existing tech a bit.

If they run out of money before they have a chance to do this, it's more a matter of poor management than lack of good technology. If Intel could feed off the abyssmal Netburst architecture for years, AMD should be able to survive on the slightly inferior Phenom for the time being, provided they play their cards right. So far, they haven't, unfortunately.
 
JimmiG said:
If they run out of money before they have a chance to do this, it's more a matter of poor management than lack of good technology. If Intel could feed off the abyssmal Netburst architecture for years, AMD should be able to survive on the slightly inferior Phenom for the time being, provided they play their cards right. So far, they haven't, unfortunately.
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You try to make a distinction between Netburst and Phenom, yet in reality they are almost in exactly the same position. Architecturally they are massively different of course, but they also share many similarities in that they are both running at high TDPs without much potential for scaling, and are also much slower than the competition.
 
quadnad said:
I stopped reading the article when the guy quoted an "analyst" who said that AMD executed superbly at the end of 2007. Maybe I wasn't in the same universe as that analyst, because I'm pretty sure we had a broken, late, extremely disappointing Phenom arrive sometime around there. Only now do we have the "fixed" version, with the same low IPC/high TDP as the old one. Whoopdeedo.

AMD as a company: are they undervalued? Probably. Does that mean anything for us as enthusiasts? No. lets check back with their new architecture.
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As did I.

There are many on Wallstreet with a warped view of reality these days.AMD should have done this ages ago.
 
Likely very very little.I would imagine many there are polishing up there interview skills right now.
 
If we were going to start comparing Core 2 Duo with Pentium 3, we should also start condemning hard drive makers going from that slow IDE connection to Serial ATA connections when we know Serial connections was more archaic than the IBM PS/2 connections which came before USB became mainstream.
 
beowulf7 said:
I never liked it either. Then again, I was an AMD fanboy and an NVidia fanboy, so that AMD/ATI merger put me at odds w/ myself. :D
Click to expand...
+1
between that and intel's kick ass core 2 tech ive since switch boats. I've liked never ATI, especially their drivers and bloated installation packages. For the longest time though I was a big AMD fanboy.

my quad core is the first intel ive owned since the infamous 300a celeron days, and I am very happy with it.
 
It's happening ... :( Below is a copy-and-paste from the CNN article.

AMD shows tech chief the door

By Scott Moritz

Heads have started to roll at AMD (AMD), as technology chief Phil Hester resigned with no replacement planned, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The news comes less than a week after the chipmaker announced a 15% sequential sales shortfall and plans to cut 10% of its staff due to weak demand across all its business segments.

AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Analysts point to a slowing economy and a critical delay of AMD’s quad-core Barcelona chip for the server market as two major reasons for the company’s current woes.

AMD, which has already pulled Hester’s bio from its Web site, called Hester the top executive “responsible for setting the architectural and product strategies and plans for AMD’s microprocessor business.”

The company is in a brutal battle with rival Intel (INTC) and has been on the losing end recently due to misfirings like the Barcelona glitch. AMD follows Intel’s earnings report Tuesday with its full first-quarter report on Thursday.

AMD shares were down a nickel to $6.22 in midday trading Friday.
 
Hopefully this is a start to a new beginning instead of the beginning of the end for AMD.
 
Professor Ruiz: Good news everyone! We're heading towards a death spiral.

I wonder if Orton will come back after ATI gets sold off/is repossessed.
 
AMD just needs to hang in a little longer. Once intel releases larrabee, it's not only going to be fighting AMD, but it will be fighting NVIDIA as well. I think that NVIDIA and AMD both know that they aren't going to do the best on their own against intel, you'll see them be a little more friendly with eachother.

Larrabee is going to make intel a competitor with everyone else even where they shouldn't be. I think that this kind of war would be good for AMD. Let NVIDIA and Intel duke it out while AMD comes from the rear and fills the void.

Nothing brings people together like a common enemy. Specially when that common enemy is a big brutal dickhead.
 
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