AMD Reportedly Preparing Massive Layoff 286
An anonymous reader writes "AMD is preparing to lay off 20 to 30 percent of its workforce after warning of a 10 percent decline in Q3 revenues driven by the weak global economy and PC sales, according to AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldehl. The layoffs will reportedly focus on engineering and sales, and are in addition to a 10 percent headcount reduction 11 months ago. Teams of consultants from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are reportedly swarming headquarters to advise the CEO Rory Read, who took over from Dirk Meyer a little over a year ago; several senior executives, including the CFO, have recently departed."
10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, yeah.
Down 6% in Q1, down 11% in Q2, and they were expected to be down 1% in Q3... instead they were down 10%.
Meanwhile they're not competeing in servers or smartphones, the PC market is shit and it isn't looking like it's going to get any better. Laptops are the one place they're strong, and nobody is optimistic on laptop sales.
It's bleak over there, and believe it or not, they've got a pretty good idea of just how bleak it is.
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Uh, yeah.
Down 6% in Q1, down 11% in Q2, and they were expected to be down 1% in Q3... instead they were down 10%.
Meanwhile they're not competeing in servers or smartphones, the PC market is shit and it isn't looking like it's going to get any better. Laptops are the one place they're strong, and nobody is optimistic on laptop sales.
It's bleak over there, and believe it or not, they've got a pretty good idea of just how bleak it is.
Damn the decimal point.
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:4, Interesting)
They're doing it to themselves in the PC market. They spent their resources on the Fusion crap, which while nice for low power devices, leaves the rest of us who want Phenom IIIs and Radeon 9900s out in the cold.
I'm at a FX-8150, and I have no AMD upgrade path. I am at the zenith of their multi-core designs, save switching to an Opteron processor, and I don't want to, because the motherboards are absolute crap. The next time Intel comes out with a top of the line processor, they're likely to get my money over AMD, simply because AMD isn't putting anything out there to compete.
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:4, Informative)
The 8150 has many problems, but that's the first time I see anyone complain about its upgrade path. The thing is the 8150 is currently the flagship. Vishera is about to be released for the same AM3+ socket, with modest improvements. If you had an i7 3770k, you'd be complaining about the same thing, unless you went LGA 2011 (then again, if you did and got a $1000 processor, you'd be in a position to make the same complaint again). In fact, you're relatively better off than an i7 2600k owner because Vishera will probably bring a bigger performance improvement over Bulldozer than Ivy brought over Sandy (which, considering how the 8150 performs, isn't exactly impressive).
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just wish that more people bought their products for their machines, because we need them around.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know. I read the performance benchmarks on the 8150 before I bought it and I thought they were pretty good, except Win 7 doesn't hardware but a few 2D graphics calls, which is NOT AMD's fault and impacts some benchmarks.
Now that I have it , I love it. I can see all 8 cores working, I can keep it all cool (75 F) no problem and the price / performance ratio is excellent, leaving out legacy PC chips whose price is near zero. The absolute performance is also pretty excellent.. for between US $100 and $500 you can get a chip that's another 30% faster from Intel, but why bother ? I'd rather put that money into an SSD and really feel some difference for my cash.
AMD is not making its earning predictions, OK.. and their real problem is Wall Street who's punishing their stock for it. It's not like they can't make great chips at great prices.
If Bulldozer 8150 was not literally 8x's a Phenom II in terms of power, well, it's still better by a bunch and at a great price. I love my 8150 and it's blazing fast for everything I want it to do. Highly recommended.
The thing with Intel is, internally they're actually a worse corporation than even you described. Head hunters I have known almost immediately blanched at their name when I brought it up and said things like .. I do not recommend anyone work for Intel. I have seen the same remarks by the same professionals in print.
Why? For generations now, it's been stocked to the gills with corporate psychopaths. Like above, so below. The level of viciousness of the politics is out of this world . For instance, there's something called "forced ranking" where 10% of their employees with the lowest scores on their reviews are automatically fired each year.
Killing every tenth person in order to improve performance has another name- decimation.. deci-mation. It goes back to the Romans. Crassus used it to motivate the troops to capture Spartacus. The thing is even then it was considered regressive, ancient and barbaric.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) [wikipedia.org]
Obviously, people in that environment are preoccupied with one thought - "not me".
Fucking over the other guy has evolved into a fine art there. Its totally vicious.
Maybe AMD stumbled with 8150 in some academic sense. I think I am a demanding consumer of PCs .. I build my boxes, and I sure don't feel it. If it was less than expected, which is very different than bad, well then, obviously, onward.
I'll never buy an Intel chip until they're the only chip maker on earth. Their business practices are as dirty and illegal as they come as the many lawsuits brought against them testify to. Is the Intel e3 1275 20% faster than an non-OC 8150 for another $150.00, almost twice the price of a 8150 ($169.00 Shell Shocker price this week) Fine. 20% for ethics and morality. It's what I give elsewhere in my life anyway.
Oh, and this giving works out to another $150.00 bucks in my own pocket. Now that's a decision everyone involved can feel good about....
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I dreaming? Is this a dream?
The 8150 gets trounced by the overclockable i5 2500k in just about every benchmark under the sun. The 2500k is $30 more. AMD doesn't even RANK in the upper tiers of Tom's Hardware's CPU gaming hierarchy.
To be fair, it's a card that's $30 cheaper and slightly outperforms the Sandy Bridge part in the highest levels of processing requirements (video encoding, 3D rendering, basically things that can hit 8 honest threads of use), but it gets hammered EVERYWHERE ELSE.
That's to a system builder. On the pre-built retail desktop/laptop circuit (read: the grand majority of sales), the situation is far worse, where that single thread performance gap makes the AMD parts look really bad.
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From passmark's score for high end CPUs:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html [cpubenchmark.net]
AMD FX-8140 Eight-Core
score: 7,133 $169.00
then about 20 CPUs down the ranked list :
Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz
score: 6,580 $217.99*
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Hm, so, the GP says that it slightly outperforms the i5 2500k in things that use all 8 threads, and you attempt to debunk him with... a benchmark that uses all 8 threads? In which the AMD chip beats the Intel one by a fairly minor 8%?
Seems to me like he may have a point. What's the single-threaded performance like?
Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do not think I am debunking anyone; I am conversing. When I debunk, it's much bloodier.
This sums up the other link:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8150+Eight-Core [cpubenchmark.net]
Let's say 8150 is slower , 20-30% on single threading (I am not saying it's true, I am saying people say it) than intel's chip. Is single threaded the normal use-case or is that a competitive gamer thing (obsession) where the only thing separating you from your opponent is not skill or strategy but CPU speed on a single thread.?
Mostly, in my life, I am using more than one thread. I am doing a number of things at once. The OS wants one (or more). My programs all want as many as I've got. Even people who aren't working with IDEs and rendering applications are still, say, listening to music and watching a video and all this kind of thing all at once.
Intel's chip costs more, are slower except on single threaded applications, Intel is evil. I can OC the chip easily and have a nice stable system that is just as fast for zero extra dollars on a single threaded application.
But the overall thing to not lose sight of is -the chips are stupifyingly fast . We can look at CPU bench marks all day but mostly they sit idle waiting for our I/O to hurry up.
Not arguing here. Just observing and thinking aloud.
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Current Intel employee (Score:5, Interesting)
Current employee here (I'm not an official spokesperson, this may not be the corporate line, yadda yadda) let me clarify some stuff.
The thing with Intel is, internally they're actually a worse corporation than even you described. Head hunters I have known almost immediately blanched at their name when I brought it up and said things like .. I do not recommend anyone work for Intel. I have seen the same remarks by the same professionals in print.
Why? For generations now, it's been stocked to the gills with corporate psychopaths. Like above, so below. The level of viciousness of the politics is out of this world . For instance, there's something called "forced ranking" where 10% of their employees with the lowest scores on their reviews are automatically fired each year.
Killing every tenth person in order to improve performance has another name- decimation.. deci-mation. It goes back to the Romans. Crassus used it to motivate the troops to capture Spartacus
Yes, we have problems with people who exist only to further their own career, or that somehow subsist by controlling information such that no one else can get it. The information hoarders in particular are annoying because you have to have their blessing to get stuff done. I believe that any organization with >80k employees is going to have this somewhere in their organization
We have some psychotic managers that act like 2 year olds. They put unattainable deadlines on the board and they hoard resources to do their job. I hear that this was the norm in the previous CEO's days because of the 10% layoffs of which you speak. The way it worked wasn't 10% of the worst employees, but rather entire departments would be cut for failing to meet the numbers. While I have a good manager, and several other people I know have, you may end up having one of these ancient trolls that still exist within the system. The perception is that Paul is trying to clean this stuff up, and the review process has been restructured to try to weed this out.
Intel does have a bad reputation in some of the local communities for various reasons. I hear stories of construction projects that never started, never finished, or sat around forever. I'm sure you're not wrong about your headhunter stories.
For reviews, employees are ranked in a scale against each other. You're put into one of 5 buckets, and you want to try to be in the top 3. The relative performance of each bucket is determined by the performance of you and your peers (i.e. you have to be better than your peers. If they all suck, the bar is pretty low, but if they're geniuses, you better work your ass off.). I don't think there's a set percentage for each bucket. If there's not enough people to compare you to at your site, you're compared to similar people in your hemisphere. This isn't all of it, like there's some more paperwork involved in getting feedback from coworkers and such, but at the end of the day you're in one of the buckets.
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We just had the discussion here on /. about Forced Ranking a month or so ago. I'm too lazy to look up that article but I will link this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve [wikipedia.org]
What I got from the, rather extensive thread, was that Forced Ranking has the potential to be a good tool for weeding out people that might have gotten/are lazy in an organization. However if it is constantly used, or badly implemented (which it can very easily be), it overall will create a very bad atmosphere.
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For instance, there's something called "forced ranking" where 10% of their employees with the lowest scores on their reviews are automatically fired each year.
That was considered genius when Jack Welch instituted it during his years as CEO of General Electric.
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I think both you and the parent make some good points. For you, I'd say the 8150 is definitely problematic when it comes to power consumption. I like AMD, but even with the FX-6100 at the same price point as an i3-2120, I see no reason to upgrade my Athlon II X3. It would run slightly hotter, spend slightly more power and perform about the same in most productivity workloads, since they are limited by my HDD, and perform about the same or quite worse in games. So that I'd call a complete failure on AMD's pa
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Dude, you gotta learn to use Google:
1 go to www.google.com
2 type in "forced ranking intel"
3 3 read the top 10 results in the first page.
The are :
http://american-business.org/383-forced-ranking-systems.html [american-business.org]
http://www.faceintel.com/discharge.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZT57xSrPJ5YC&pg=PA172&lpg=PA172&dq=intel+forced+ranking&source=bl&ots=BWTYfQm01x&sig=O61ae4i3pKexc_C5-yyCf5hVXdw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=j5d5UIyhM83ryAHc4oHACw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=int [google.com]
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Minus one for not using lmgtfy.com to save space.
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IGPs built on chip kills OCing ability
and yet:it goes to 8.8 GHZ and perhaps 9 GHZ:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-bulldozer,15853.html [tomshardware.com]
So there's more to the story than the simple statements you're making.
I know there are people out there who feel the way you do, but there are people just as knowledgeable who feel the opposite also and who can match you point by point. I freely and cheerfully admit it seems you're more technically savvy than me on CPUs, however, that doesn't make what you're saying correct or
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I've got a seven-year-old laptop - it's good enough to surf the web (even Google streetview) and watch HD videos. I was planning to buy a new laptop, but needed a new phone. A latest-model smartphone can do all the internet related things a laptop can do, as well as 3D graphics with texture-mapping (still blows me away - what used to be the exclusive domain of a SGI Extreme is now done by a mobile phone).
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If they lay off engineering and sales, they may just as well do that.
Engineering: create product to sell
Sales: sell product engineering creates
How about axing middle management instead?
How about laying off the consultants instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about laying off the consultants instead?
I'm serious. Consultants are nothing but leeches, and they will almost always give you advice on how you can make your company just like every other company in your industry. I yearn for the days when companies looked for ways to set themselves apart, to stand out from the crowd, instead of trying desperately to follow lockstep in line with everyone else. Other companies have massive layoffs, so hey, let's do it too!
Especially the engineers. You need engineers to keep doing what you do. This really bodes badly for AMD, because without engineers, they're basically slitting their company's wrists. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.
But hey, it's their funeral, so whatever gets the stock price up a little bit so that they can cash out their options, right?
Re:How about laying off the consultants instead? (Score:5, Informative)
Early retirement - the perfect recipe for short term savings and long term loss of institutional knowledge!!
Loss? What Loss?! (Score:5, Funny)
Early retirement - the perfect recipe for short term savings and long term loss of institutional knowledge!!
But, but, its all documented! So even kids right out of school can replace the laid-off engineers when demand comes back.
Sheesh! It's not like they're VP's or something equally irreplaceable!
3. Profit!
Consultants are not the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
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So far center. The world just moved right.
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I agree. Well said.
Re:Consultants are not the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the kind of consultant you are talking about and the kind of consultant referred to in the summary are the same kind of consultant:
Teams of consultants from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are reportedly swarming headquarters to advise the CEO Rory Read...
These are the kind of consultants that tell the CEO that he doesn't need those expensive engineers with health benefits and unemployment insurance. For a reasonable fee (that will end up costing AMD even more money in the long run), these consultants will be able to bring in some of their company's other consultants and not have to worry about silly little things like benefits, thus reducing costs. For the next financial quarter or two--certainly long enough to cash out your stock options and find another job at a company that will pay you more because of your success here--it's win-win!
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Forget the consultants, how about ditching the CEO and his $15 million in compensation?
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Consultants are nothing but leeches, and they will almost always give you advice on how you can make your company just like every other company in your industry. I yearn for the days when companies looked for ways to set themselves apart, to stand out from the crowd, instead of trying desperately to follow lockstep in line with everyone else. Other companies have massive layoffs, so hey, let's do it too!
Thank you for articulating that though for me so clearly. I've always hated consultants, and their stupid, homogenizing action.
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They are setting up the company for a takeover... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.
I'll take that bet. I'm pretty sure they are doing the opposite: laying off all the junior engineers, support engineers, and the sales and marketing force in preparation for having some larger company (with their own army of overseas junior engineer worker-bees) take over. The consultants are there to negociate the headcount on behalf of the purchasers, they have nothing to do with the current management or the current product line. The consultants are like the home inspectors that a you hire when you are buying a house...
My guess is that larger company is probably one of Samsung or Qualcomm, secondary guess would be Apple or Microsoft. Both Samsung and Qualcomm have been hiring AMD (ex ATI) folks left and right for the last few months and if they can pick up AMD for a song, they will probably do it. What any of these companies don't need are a bunch of 2-5 year engineers, supporting engineers, nor sales or marketing employees as a purchasing company, they are likely to just abandon all the current (and planned) product lines. The only thing the want is the core engineering assets (GPU designers and high-speed CPU physical design group) and the patents to deploy in their own product lines. The consultants job is to figure out who those folks are. All the bulldozer architects and APU stuff will probably go in the dumper as soon as the deal is closed.
Put a fork in it. AMD as we know it is probably done.
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Except that anyone buying AMD won't be getting any of their x86 stuff because there's a lot of cross-licensing with Intel that won't get transferred on a sale.
Anyone who buys AMD at this point will only be getting their GPU division, unless by some miracle the purchaser works out a licensing deal with Intel for x86 stuff. Fat chance.
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Third level education typically does not specialise in, and rarely even features, independent thought beyond certain strict boundaries. Essentially its a brain factory. So as the first generation of entrepreneurs moves on and retires, the people who take their place are Properly Qualified and Of The Highest Standard, but they don't know how an entrepreneur thinks, don't like taking risks, and got where they are by doing things according to the book. Consultants don't force CEOs to obey them, the CEOs always
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Exactly. They should be doubling-down on a new high-end processor design, not shedding employees that know their shit. They appear to be making the same mistakes that HP and friends have made in times past ("Hey, do we even need a PC division?"), which usually happens when you have the wrong people in high places. The company becomes a pump-and-dump, with each new CEO talking about turning things around and not succeeding, while accepting golden parachutes, with slight stock increases followed by larger and
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Re:How about laying off the consultants instead? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember 10-15 years ago when the AMD chips beat the Intel chips, and forced Intel out of their complacency? With AMD gone where is Intel's motivation to keep the desktop going? Not to mention the graphics part.
You don't have to go back that far. In 2005 I bought an Athlon and it outperformed comparable Pentium 4 Hyperthreading chips. At that time Intel kept upping the clock speed but there was no corresponding increase in performance. My Athlon which was 2.2 ghz (i think) outperformed Pentium 4 HT 3.0 ghz.
It wasn't until Intel came out with the Core2Duo that they began to push AMD aside.
Re:How about laying off the consultants instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel was, up until that point, still fighting the MegaHurtz war. This is in spite of the fact that the war had already ended a few years back when the AthlonXP line was easily beating higher clocked P4s. Intel's only answer was MOAR MHZ!!!1, spreading FUD about the performance ratings assigned to the AMD chips, and silly branding schemes that made me smack my head every time someone insisted they wanted a Centrino processor.
I really resent Intel for "cheating" their way back into first place.
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It's bullshit. The Isreali division of Intel were making a version called Pentium M, and that turned into Core
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Intel has long had a group Israel, in fact, the two major design teams are in Oregon and Israel, and they alternate new core micro-archiectures every generation (which is a two-year tick/tock cycle, so each design time works on a new core design on a four-year cycle).
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The Pentium M was competitive. It wasn't in the high-end market, but it had better performance per Watt than anything AMD had to offer. It took them a really long time to produce anything competitive for laptops - laptop sales had overtaken desktops by the time they did, and they missed out on the period when it was the fastest growing segment.
Intel had the advantage that they had a lot of chips under development. I strongly suspect that the Israeli team that was working on the low-power version of th
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Intel sold a lot of low-power P3s. I don't think those guys were off the radar at all. Intel would have to be massively lame to not keep a few irons in the fire since they are so massively massive. Itanic failed and Intel didn't crater. P4 failed (eventually) and Intel didn't crater. AMD, on the other hand, has to bet the farm, because they don't have so many engineers. And now they're getting rid of some...
That tears it (Score:5, Funny)
Short term shareholder value (Score:4, Informative)
What do you do when you are trying to maximize short term shareholder value in a distribution based business?
Cut R&D, get rid of sales staff for new markets...
Hit your profit goal, sell stock, get bonus by the time the company goes under you're long gone with your friends at McKinney.
Usually it takes 3 years in hardware for a R&D cut to show in sales figures... Mark it down also mark down the current CEO will be chilling on his new island by that time
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AMD is in the mess they're in right now because their previous R&D didn't pan out. Bulldozer turned out to be a failure and AMD's competitor to the Atom, while better in most regards, is in a low margin segment of the market so even if they did take most of the sales there, it wouldn't help their profit all that much.
What the hell are they supposed to do at this point? The only part of the company that's doing well by any standards is their graphics division (formerly ATI) but that's not going to be eno
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Servers (Score:5, Interesting)
And virtually all through Q3 I've been trying to get my hands on 4 Opterons 16-core (model 6272 I think).
Only last week Newegg finally received some of the new revised version but were out of stock for months.
Either they overcommitted to OEMs or they simply did not provision enough for people like me. If they were quicker to get the revision out I am sure they could have made up for that 10% drop.
I do understand this article is referring to desktop CPU's but the Opterons are still a part of their bottom line.
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Either they overcommitted to OEMs or they simply did not provision enough for people like me. If they were quicker to get the revision out I am sure they could have made up for that 10% drop.
I am an engineer at Intel. I work on core design and engineering of Intel's latest-and-greatest products, and have seen extensive internal reverse engineering work done on AMD products.
It's incredibly hard to just produce "more" of a new product when the process engineering side is not functioning stably, as we believe
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Odd. We've been rolling out dual and quad Opteron 6272 servers steadily for the past six months. No problems with supply, and they mop the floor with Intel systems on price/performance.
But we don't buy from Newegg; we go through three vendors Supermicro recommended.
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I should note I live in Canada. While that doesn't mean I cannot order from US shops, I do have a tendency to only search businesses that have some form of operation within Canada to avoid duties/import fee's.
I did find the odd Canadian online shop that only had 1 or two in stock (or on order). My primary "goto" is NCIX [ncix.com]. They still do not have 12/16 core in stock.
I am not in any immediate hurry to get them, it's actually worked out to my benefit by holding off as now I have access to the latest revision. :-
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Byte the bullet & make ARM chips (Score:2)
Have a foot in both x86 and ARM.
Re:Byte the bullet & make ARM chips (Score:5, Informative)
Have a foot in both x86 and ARM.
You arent very well informed. AMD doesn't fab processors, so cannot possibly fab ARM processors. AMD is like ARM now and only designs processors, but unlike ARM they do not license the design out (probably they cannot, thanks to IP deals with Intel.)
AMD spun off their fab business in 2009, which is named Global Foundries, divesting their last shares in the company earlier this year.
Pussies (Score:5, Insightful)
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Management is probably not that good at determining who should go - especially as in this case it it not so much down to the individuals talent and contribution, rather it is more about his mission and his section and division's mission Managers don't normally do that - they are hired and trained to make tactical decisions.
Also add in the fact managers (at least the middle management) are equally eligible for layoff but are unlikely to recommend their own demise.
I don't see how anyone other than an externa
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What makes you think that if they were too incompetent to select the right people for the job and organize things properly,
that now they would be able to select which ones are the right people to get fired and how to organize that properly.
I have seen this exact scenario many, many times before.
The problem here is, that management itself is exempt from the firing.
And as long as that won't change, AMD is in for a long, seemingly endless Bataan death march to bankruptcy.
Only accelerated by Intel kicking them
This is a common misconception (Score:2)
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Am I the only one who thinks management teams that bring in consultants to do mass layoffs are pussies? If you fuck up a company so badly 30% of the employees have to go, the very least you can do is not hide in the proverbial closet until it's over.
One could argue that senior management doesn't have enough time in their day to organize and manage a mass layoff process at a company of this size.
Bizarro World (Score:4, Interesting)
So, profits are down and the answer is to lay off the people who bring in the profits? Or the people who build the products that make the money?
How is this right in any sense of the word? Instead of spot layoffs to raise the stock price a few cents, AMD should be focusing on beating the tar out of Intel, Nvidia, and ARM manufacturers. Or wondering why AMD doesn't have a chip that can drive a tablet?
It doesn't really matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel will just give them a few billion. Cheaper than to deal with antitrust issues if AMD goes bankrupt.
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Future Monopoly of Intel (Score:2)
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I doubt there's much Intel could do to keep AMD alive at this point (even if they wanted to).
If they had a fab perhaps Intel could allow them to second source parts (but they spun out Global Foundaries)
If they had something Intel didn't have they could license it (like a mobile GPU which they sold to Qualcomm)
If they had an ARM licence (which they don't and Intel sold theirs to Marvell, so they probably don't really want it anyhow)
If they just gave them money (they already gave them $1B, about 50% of their
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McKinsey? BCG? They are doomed (Score:5, Insightful)
These people focus on short-term optimizations. AMD needs a strategic fix, not a tactical one. A tactical one will only make matters worse.
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12-core Phenom IIIs. That'll fix the problem.
Engineering jobs will be shifted to Russia/Asia (Score:2)
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/Looks at Russia. /Looks at USA/Canada
You think the difference is high taxes and supporting the general society? Russia's economy is in the toilet, has horrible institutionalized corruption, crushing poverty.... and you think it's because El Norte pays too much taxes?
Don't worry, the same thing that messed up the soviet union is going to mess us up. They tried to buiild a military they couldn't afford to keep up with the Joneses(USA). Massive corruption leached money out of the system and into the pocke
Not exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
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If AMD is about to die, Intel will step in to keep it alive.
Last thing Intel needs is to be broken up because there are no other real players in the x86 market. Even the remote possibility of it happening is too much of a risk for Intel.
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Nonsense. In today's political and economic climate, idiocy rules supreme. AMD will be allowed to die, and Intel will cite competition in the ARM market in any anti-trust case (of which there will be none).
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I was going to say this upthread a bit. AMD will pull an Apple, just like when Apple had MS bail them out ( MS didn't want the extra hassle of being a pure monopoly ) and either ask Intel for "help" in engineering or R&D ( This may actually be a good thing, AMD gets money / die shrinking insights ETC and Intel would probably demand GFX processor technology to improve the onboard crap they make now) Or Intel will just offer to help them ( same terms as above ) and both go their merry ways.
Don't get me w
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Right, because PC makers get together once a month and decide how much business to give Intel and how much to give AMD.
In the real world, PC makers act independently and component manufacturers compete for their business. They never say, "Intel is giving us a better price, but we need to throw some business to AMD just to keep them around."
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No, AMD made some really stupid decisions over the last 10 years or so. Things like over paying for ATI, but they've been able to sell all the chips they've produced.
The problem is that they're still paying off that debt and need to put more money into R&D. I'm not sure what engineers they're allegedly going to be laying off, but I can't imagine them laying off any that are working in R&D.
AMD won't be going out of business any time soon because Intel can't afford the kind of questions that would rai
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Last I checked, Intel laptop chips were grossly overpriced and under powered.
My i7 3612QM is doing just fine, and there wasn't a price premium for my laptop compared to others I saw. My desktop (AMD, 5 years old) is now the slowest computer in the house, behind some other AMDs and 2 intels.
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Intel could argue that ARM is now their main competitor.
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They aren't using tablets and smartphones in place of desktops and laptops, they're using tablets and smartphones in addition to desktops and laptops.
It's a new market, it grows, it matures, but the other markets still exist (but the players are already established there, so it's not as interesting; plus, people are wiser to manufacturers selling them crap in those markets). People are already getting tired of the 18-month treadmill that the phone manufacturers have had them on.
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Maybe AMD should look at the product line and see if they can lower the number of models they are presenting. Is it really necessary to have a separate line of server processors?
And when you look at the price/performance ratio AMD is doing well, but that only means that they are more suitable to the mid/low range PC:s.
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from the botched FX series, AMD is fine in higher-end PCs. However, that last processor line screwed the pooch, and for some odd reason, they bought into the hype / nonsense about low-power devices being "The Next Big Thing," and failed to ready a new top of the line processor. They're doing it to themselves.
As for the server stuff, hell yes they need a separate line. Those 12-core and 16-core processors are selling like hotcakes among University / College net admins, who want as many cores as possible for their VMs / clouds / whatever. No one needs the slight single-threaded performance boost and huge cost disparity that Intel has been offering.
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My point was rather that they should have those multi-core processors in the general lineup of processors instead. Not killing the multi-core solutions. I wouldn't mind having a 16 core processor but it's still expensive.
There are other things that can be done too - why not have processors with a mix of 64-bit and 32-bit cores? Not all applications are 64-bit. And maybe see if they can do something that is similar to the hyperthreading that Intel has.
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They did something similar to the hyperthreading that Intel does -> that was the Bulldozer design! As it stands, they actually did it better than Intel, but it's still not what their customers were looking for.
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AMD is more than competitive in the discrete GPU market. Intel is only popular in low-power, and it's still not at AMD iGPU levels.
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The problem came when AMD fans started spouting how the Bulldozer chips would stomp on I7s, and AMD didn't stop them.
Also, why did you choose examples of GPU intensive tasks ( those that typically aren't performed on the CPU ) to make the case for keeping around c
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Some kinds of graphic art still require quite a lot of CPU processing. The algorithms either can't or haven't been implemented in GPU versions. Especially in 3D modeling. Until very recently, the major modeling packages couldn't even render their workspace on the GPU, despite that being the ultimate destination of much of the media being worked on. It was all CPU rendered. That has changed, but basically all of the manipulation is still done on the CPU, so a capable processor is still very very useful.
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AMD's fault in was keeping the details hidden before releasing Bulldozer. Bulldozer isn't far off the I7s ( at least, not the 1000$ extremes ), but neither were the Phenom IIs.
If and only if you use well threaded applications that can evenly distribute loads across 8 threads. In single threaded performance the FX-8150 is slower than the Intel Pentium G620 (slowest Sandy Bridge chip) and the I7-3770K offers 62% (Cinebench 11.5 single threaded) [anandtech.com] higher performance for $332. In good cases it offers 80-90% of the 3770K performance - running at a 125W vs 77W TDP for the 3770K including the integrated graphics. In CPU benchmarks Anandtech found that system consumption increased between
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RadeonHD 5870s to run SLI
Sorcery!
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Indeed. 'Tis Cross-Fire with AMD/ATI, not SLI.
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Huh, didn't know Diamond was still in business. There's a ghost from the past.
Buy from HIS. They tend to care about their card designs, and have a decent warranty. I've bought several cards from them, haven't had any issues with them to date.
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Actually AMD CPUs are bad at HPC, due to terrible floating point processing.
More than 10 percent of the world's top supercomputers are based on Opterons. And you say that they are bad at HPC :) Not to mention that HPC does not equal with floating performance. Actually it is very far from it, moving the data between processors is the harder issue. Anyway, care to provide a citation about the "terrible floating point performance"? As far as I know AMD Opterons has much better multicore floating point performance / dollar than Intels.
And you get those wonderful bottlenecks when every once in a while you have to aggregate all those parallel computed values, which requires a single core...
No, this is simply wrong as a general statement. Fi
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iOS, Android, Linux (Gnome/KDE), OS X and Windows 8 are now somewhat capable of running the ARM ISA.
However MS has decided that only a gimped version of windows 8 will be available on arm. Anyone who needs a fully functional windows system will still need x86 until/unless MS decidedes to change that. Much the same applies to apple, while iOS has some technical stuff in common with OSX it's functionality is serverely gimped in comparison. Further even if ungimped arm versions of major desktop operating systems were released some form of binary translation would be needed to support existing apps.
AMD should stop developing new x86 microprocessors, and keep making the current ones for a very long time.
Would you