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AMD’s layoffs target engineering; Board incompetence dooms the company
- mtgx 14y agoI wonder who would be interested in buying AMD if things keep going downhill. Maybe a large Asian manufacturer like Lenovo?
- revelation 14y agoI could imagine two companies who have a vital anti-trust interest in keeping AMD alive: Intel for its processors, nVidia for the ATI graphics cards.
- smegel 14y agoIntel has ARM, ATI would be spun off if AMD went under.
- revelation 14y agoRight now, Intel and ARMs business are very much segregated. Each of the two is making steps into foreign country, but with relatively meager success. To clarify: ARMs business is the embedded and booming smartphone market, Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. The fate of the thing between, consumer and "office" PCs, is very much unknown.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoCloud-based data centers are beginning to adopt ARMs for power consumption reasons. If that trend picks up along with everyone using cloud providers, then I think even the high-end PC server business could start dying. Incidentally, this is a market where NVIDIA could begin to really cream Intel, a lot of scientific computing has already moved over to CUDA/Tesla (granted, there is a huge difference between scientific and enterprise applications). I don't see the same thing happening to workstations, however, difficult to move that work into the cloud.
- smegel 14y ago> Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. You haven't been an advisor to AMD by any chance?
- mtgx 14y agoNvidia might find itself in a similar position soon if its Tegra line-up doesn't become significantly more popular and successful. Intel is squeezing them out of the market with its integrated graphics in laptops, and I think that's quite a shame because I don't think Intel played fair there. They tried to force manufacturers to use integrated graphics even if the laptop used discrete graphics. Now that Intel's integrated graphics chips are becoming "good enough" for most people, it's going to be a very smooth transition to take Nvidia out of the laptop market. So Intel is killing both AMD and Nvidia. Hopefully Nvidia has the last say with its ARM-based chips, though. If ARM ends up disrupting Intel in all its markets, and if Nvidia remains one of the best ARM chip makers, then Nvidia will ultimately win. That can't be said about AMD, though. They're stuck in an x86 world where they're falling further and further behind Intel, and they haven't even begun to enter the ARM world, and even if they do, it might be too late now, because they lack the ARM engineering experience of their competitors. Buying the OMAP division from TI might help, but OMAP is not doing that great now either, and they always use overclocked last-gen GPU's to compete with the new mobile GPU's, which I find a bit annoying. Plus, I don't know if AMD can even afford them, or the turn-around that comes with that. Another interesting acquisition target could be MIPS, which is for sale, but AMD would have to also promote the benefits of that architecture on their own, which seems even harder.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoNVIDIA still owns the high-end scientific computing market. This combined with their ARM products could save it in the future. AMD...their only advantage has been X86 and that is just a dying market, kudos to the board at least for dumping the CEO who wanted to focus on the high end PC market. AMD still has really good GPU tech, enough to compete with NVIDIA on the high-end non-GPGPU market, but that is very niche.
- DeepDuh 14y agoActually, I fear for NVIDIA's HPC market as well. Kepler 2 in my eyes is not well suited for GPGPU, they've rather optimized it for the gaming market in order to go after AMD. I.e. they introduced much more cores, but those cores now have less cache and register resources available to them. Less registers, especially, is deadly - this has already been a limiting factor for many HPC applications. Meanwhile Intel pushes out their Xeon Phi boards with huge memory bandwidth and OpenMP support. If there's not some kind of surprise in terms of performance either on Intel's or NVIDIA's side I see dark clouds coming for them.
- CoolGuySteve 14y agoWhen 3dfx started flailing, they sued NVidia for IP infringement until NVidia purchased them. I could see the board of AMD doing the same thing, patent trolling everyone in sight until somebody buys them out.
- archangel_one 14y agoApple? They can afford it, and have already demonstrated interest in having their own chips. At the current valuation, it'd not cost much more than ATi did when AMD bought them.
- mtgx 14y agoWell Apple is certainly an interesting choice, and maybe if this happened like 2 years ago, they might've done it, too. However, I think they are too far along building their ARM SoC for Macs right now, and it would take them more than 2 years to put AMD's chips on the right track. Plus, if Apple bought them, would they even be allowed to keep them for themselves? Wouldn't that mean Intel would remain the only competitor in x86 for Windows devices?
- protomyth 14y agoHaving ATI's GPU on their SoC might be an upgrade. I am not convinced the Mac line will move to the ARM because of bootcamp and Microsoft's restrictions on ARM platforms. Technically, VIA is still producing x86 chips.
- mikeash 14y agoI don't know how much Apple really cares about the ability to run Windows on their hardware. I always had the impression that Bootcamp was done just as a bonus because it was easy to do, not because they saw dual-booting as something essential. Even if they did, that whole area is waning fast. I wouldn't be surprised if they tossed Bootcamp aside without a second thought.
- thrownaway2424 14y agoI think the people with the most interest in keeping AMD alive would be Intel's big customers who are not resellers. I'm thinking of people like Amazon, Google and Facebook.
- seivan 14y agoPoor Engineers :/ Board untouched....
- imglorp 14y agoVery good point. It's telling. Screw the company, they say, we're going to inflate this thing, take our profits, and go to the next con. In this new world we're watching unfold, boards no longer do what is in the interest of the company. This guy puts it well: 2)"Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners." Shareholders are the most mobile of corporate stakeholders, often holding ownership for but a fraction of a second (high-frequency trading represents 70% of today's trading). Shareholders prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits and dividends, usually at the cost of long-term investments. (This often also includes added leverage and risk, and reliance on socializing risk via 'too big to fail' status, and relying on 'the Greenspan put.') Chang adds that corporate limited liability, while a boon to capital accumulation and technological progress, when combined with professional managers instead of entrepreneurs owning a large chunk (eg. Ford, Edison, Carnegie) and public shares with smaller voting rights (typically limited to 10%), allows professional managers to maximize their own prestige via sales growth and prestige projects instead of maximizing profits. Another negative long-term outcome driven by shareholders is increased share buybacks (less than 5% of profits until the early 1980s, 90% in 2007, and 280% in 2008) - one economist estimates that had GM not spent $20.4 billion on buybacks between 1986 and 2002 it could have prevented its 2009 bankruptcy. Short-term stockholder perspectives have also brought large-scale layoffs from off-shoring. Governments of other countries encourage longer-term thinking by holding large shares in key enterprises (China Mobile, Renault, Volkswagen), providing greater worker representation (Germany's supervisory boards), and cross-shareholding among friendly companies (Japan's Toyota and its suppliers). source - http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1608191664/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1...
- Retric 14y agoThe real problem showed up when Hedge funds became so popular. People putting money into there 401k care a lot about long term gains, people running Hedge funds care mostly about short term gains. Hedge funds end up filling board seats not small time investors. It's actually a common problem with 'money managers' as generally they share far more of the upsides than the downside risk. Yet, there is no way to consistently beat the market so trading risk is really there only option.
- pjmlp 14y agoIf AMD goes down, Linux will be surely affected. Down goes the only graphics manufacturer offering proper graphics cards with documentation for open source developers. Intel graphics card don't count if you're doing serious 3D work.
- aristidb 14y agoLast I heard (very recently) the NVidia closed source drivers are still the most practical option, because the AMD closed source drivers are fickle and the AMD open source drivers are incomplete. Wrong?
- staticfish 14y agoNo, you are dead right. Even though a lot of NVidias stuff is closed source, the binaries have always had much better support for graphics and power management than ever the Radeon drivers. I could never get things like graphics hibernate to work as well as it did with those from NVidia. I believe I read earlier that they have promised to open source a lot of their drivers for OSS.
- dlitz 14y agoRight, but it was improving. If there's no high-performance 3D hardware target with a hope of having FOSS driver support, it'll put a stop to any innovation in that space. Hence, this is bad.
- pjmlp 14y agoTrue, if you are really serious about 3D in Linux then NVidia is the better option. With AMD there is still some pressure that someday NVidia could follow. With AMD gone, NVidia does not need to worry any longer, because Intel really isn't a valid competitor in the professional 3D space.
- joelthelion 14y agoIntel graphics have the best drivers and are the best options if you're doing simple desktop stuff. For serious 3D, Nvidia proprietary drivers are so far the only good option. AMD is not very relevant in the linux world.
- caycep 14y agouh oh Apple better hire Jim Keller back...
- anakanemison 14y agoNews like this worries me because I've always imagined the world's improvements in mass market technology being driven by competition between major players like Intel and AMD. In other words, I'm afraid that the loss of competition for Intel will slow the approach of the future. The other sources of competition that Intel faces might be strong enough to motivate it, but I'm not as familiar with the influences that, say, ARM chips and Apple's own CPU development have had on Intel.
- flyinglizard 14y agoIn desktop and servers, for about 5-6 years now Intel has mostly been in competition with itself. If it can't engineer faster parts, it can't get people to upgrade, which means no sales. I wouldn't worry about that too much.
- CamperBob2 14y agoIntel has mostly been in competition with itself. This is more true than you'd think, unless you know how Intel is organized and operated. When someone from Intel visits your company to discuss future product directions and you sign an NDA, they give you some documents with scary-looking bright yellow "CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DUPLICATE" covers. The thing is, though, they don't much care if you turn the document over to AMD, Samsung, or whoever. They might yell at you or sue you or take you off of their Christmas card list, but they'll get over it. What the program manager is absolutely terrified about is that another manager at Intel will hear about the project and knife it. Intel is a Darwinian dystopia. When Andy Grove titled his book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," he wasn't joking around or being overdramatic. It's an interesting company, quite unlike any other I've ever heard about.
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- malkia 14y agoall nextgen game consoles would rely on amd for cpu (2 of them) and gpu (3 of them)