Slashdot Mirror
AMD's Plan To Recover From Its Perfect Storm
An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily has an interesting write-up on AMD's big Q1 loss and how the company plans to get back into the black. AMD admitted that Q1 was a meltdown and not just a miss. Looks like cost cutting, including layoffs, may be on the way. But the company says it won't change its overal direction. The CEO Hector Ruiz is quoted as saying, 'We are not going to change our strategy because of one lousy quarter.'"
"It's to early, we are going to wait for a lousy year"
tar -xvf recover.tar
The fact that Intel could go to the C2D architecture from low-end to dual-socket server in the space of 6 months is the killer here. Even if 65 nm Barcelonas can give AMD parity on the high-end and mid-range, it'll be 9-12 months before they're all over AMD's lineup. In graphics, it's the same story. By the time R600 gets out the door, G80 will be all over Nvidia's line-up. AMD has a lot of work to do to catch-up on the speed/specs front.
Keep in mind that AMD recently greatly increased the clock frequency of their CPU's (as noted on slashdot), thereby also increasing the performace of single-thread applications and games.
This may help them get back on track.
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Why don't AMD switch to using Intel for their processors?
Look at how much good its done for Apple.
liqbase
I was at AMD during the ATI merger and I totally called layoffs in the upcoming quarter. This is what happens when MARKETING runs the company instead of the engineers. AMD makes processors, not "solutions." The moment they start to focus on the meat and potatos again and not the "whatever Intel is doing but with a green palette" the better.
Why did AMD start to eat Intels lunch? Compare the products at the time. Athlon vs. P3. Roughly equiv but the Athlon scaled, and scaled. Intel got scared and made the P4 which tanked because it was slow, drew way too much power, etc. Now that Intel has grown up a bit and caught up, AMD's answer? a 3GHz 120W core. Quad-cores in the future, etc. Where is the power savings? Where is the cheaper process? etc.
The core2 already pretty much beats the AMD64 in every measurable way. It's roughly the same in IPC, has a faster FPU, more cache, takes less power, runs cooler, etc. The only saving grace right now is HT which can help in certain applications.
Where are the lower power AMD64's for desktops/mobiles? Where are the 2MB/4MB cache parts? Where's the faster FPU? (the latter bit is coming up this year iirc)...
This isn't to say the AMD folk are bright people. The Athlon was a fairly performance driven design for the day, and the improvements in process have kept it in the running (anyone remember how hot the K7's ran?). But sadly I see AMD lagging behind Intel in both design and process for the fair length of future. Which is a shame because I've been a fanboi for a long time and would love to see AMD processors in my workstation in the future (right now it's a E6600 core2).
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The big problem with AMD is not their processor lineup, it's their business process. They lost $600 mil on $1.2 billion on revenue. That means they needed almost two billion dollars *pinky finger to mouth* to break even. Sure, R&D is expensive, but not that expensive. They need to cut back on expenses to stay in the game.
Are you talking about a strict limit on market share, over which a company is designated a monopoly? No such thing exists.
Intel is making chips with better performance per $ and per watt. What makes you think they should be punished for this?
Not so long ago, AMD was wiping the floor with Intel and gained significant market share. That alone suggests that Intel does not have exploitable control of the market.
Spencer Ogden
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing monopoly status is, but it's a long process to actually do anything about it. From 1969--1983, IBM was under suit for abusing their monoply status.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I would change one thing. AMD should come out against DRM and refuse to make products that limit what the user can do with his/her own media.
The "stay the course" strategy?
Why would AMD change course when they haven't even released the fruits from that course yet. The problem is not the course they're on, but how fast they are getting there.
So before you claim that their current products (the course they are on) are failures, shouldn't you wait for them to be released?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
In the very specific and narrow subset of "processors only used in computers (laptops, desktops and servers)".
BUT overall, the ARM is probably the most widespread architecture by far, once you exist the computers market and look for all produced processors.
In fact, if you count it as a processor, maybe the PICs are being even much more widespread than the rest.
On those markets, although Intel is also a producer of embedable RISC CPUs, it isn't the only producer.
Never underestimate the modern world of electronics where even a fridge is microprocessor-controlled.
In fact several components inside a PC or connected to it have their own RISC CPU :
- on-board target controller on harddrives, may use generic RISCs.
- most advanced host controller with real hardware acceleration (true hardware RAID) use small embed CPUs.
- Highend hardware monitor
- Advanced network card with either accelerator or even-when-turned-off-diagnosis
- Protection handling of optical drivers.
- WiFi card.
- Pretty much everything else inside your computer that has a firmware.
- the printer and its Postscript or PCL interpreter (except if it's WinPrinter)
- external enclosure with advanced functions
- the DSL router
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>> "We are not going to change our strategy because of one lousy quarter."
Without the benefit of insider knowledge, that statement wasn't hugely informative. There are so many changes afoot that it's almost impossible to forecast anything at all concerning the CPU companies at the present time.
The acquisition of ATI really complicated things, not only for share speculators but from a tech standpoint too. And while it doesn't necessarily mean that Intel will hitch up with nVidia (it seems not, given that the GMA965/X3000 competes with nVidia's lower-end offering), it does mean that both of those companies will have to respond very strongly to whatever develops from the joining of AMD and ATI. This whole area will become even more hectic than usual I think, once we start to see the fruits of the acquisition.
One of the things that will undoubtedly be on many Linux user's minds is whether the legendary disinterest of ATI in properly supporting Linux will change for the better. Once Microsoft shed nVidia in favor of ATI on going from Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, the likelihood of any such improvement plummetted drastically for obvious reasons, but the influence of AMD could of course be the exact opposite, since AMD can't afford to alienate the Linux market, one imagines.
But while we can hope that AMD will have a positive effect on ATI's attitude towards the FOSS community, what if the opposite happens, and by being tightly coupled to GPU hardware, AMD's CPUs start to lose the openness that has been traditional among CPU manufacturers until now? It's certainly a possibility, and a matter of enormous concern.
Which brings me back to the quote from TFA. It would really help AMD I think if the company removed some of the uncertainty or ambiguity in its position w.r.to FOSS as a result of the ATI thing. "No change" is a rather meaningless statement when their CPU and GPU divisions have diametrically opposite tendencies.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
1. Issue press release decrying DRM and refuse to support it at a hardware level.
2. Announce and develop proper linux support for the ATI range.
3. ???
4. Profit!
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
I'm not sure if I speak for anyone else, but the reason I stopped buying amd is because of the merger with ati.
/that/ bad, right?" wrong. Therefore, if AMD is going to force me to buy an ATI chipset, while still neglecting ATI support for linux, I'm going to go elsewhere.
ATI has consistently made horrendous linux drivers. They don't keep up to date, and they completely abandon "legacy" cards. Nvidia cards, however, have excellent drivers for linux, and always have. For that reason, I buy Nvidia cards over ATI ones.
With this new merger, however, it's become nigh-impossible to find a decent, small laptop which has an amd processor and an nvidia graphics chipset. I ran into this problem when buying my current laptop and thought "well, they're owned by amd now, they can't be
Intel, on the other hand, has an excellent driver for their graphics chipset, and it's even open-source. They might be the monopoly, but as far as linux is concerned, they actually seem to listen. My next laptop will be all Intel for that reason.
AMD, I've used your processors religiously for years, but if you're going to forsake your linux guys by forcing us to use ati graphics hardware with crummy drivers, don't wonder why your market share is going down. I know I'm not the only one.
Read the comments here. There's more of us than you seem to think.
A few dozen slashdot sales aughta fix their financial woes right quick.
The stock is right at where it ended the year in 1999. A great many other tech companies from that era are no more, or are trading at pennies on the dollar. Since 2000 AMD has handed Intel their hat time and again. Ruiz is doing great work.
That said, his engineers had better pull a rabbit out of their hat. Today he's getting stomped by a very angry Chipzilla, and Chipzilla looks like the type that holds a grudge for a looong time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Captain Smith is quoted as saying "We're not going to change direction because of one iceberg."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's no limit on the percentage of market share you can have and still be legal. Did you know that there are some companies with 100% market share that aren't illegal monopolies (monopolies, but not illegal ones)? In fact, in some markets, monopolies form naturally (because either the market can't bear more than one firm or because there are high fixed costs associated with entering the market). So, the legal test isn't market share or number of competing companies, but rather whether the company has demonstrated an abuse of their monopoly posistion. Intel has done this in the past, and has been taken to court over it (by AMD) and lost. As a result, they had to hand over a lot of documentation to AMD and anyone else who asks for it (which is why I have seven volumes of manuals on the x86 and x86-64 ISA from Intel and a matching set from AMD).
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The Core is great for everything. A high end Core 2 Duo is really fast, and fairly efficient. However that's not the only place it's good. A Core Solo is downright killer for low power laptops. It's still pretty zippy on modern apps, yet uses a very minimal amount of power. And everything in-between is covered.
That's the big thing. It's not just on the high end market AMD is having problems, it is the whole lineup, at least when it comes to processors. The Core series just rules, doesn't matter what level you are interested in them for.
It worries me. I'm an Intel fan, and have been for a long time, ever since having massive problems with Athlons back in the KT133 days, but AMD is the thing that's been forcing Intel to develop new technologies so fast. I sure don't want a single processor vendor out there for desktops. However unless they get their act together, we could be looking at that.
It's not like they have to beat Intel at every level, either. They could go the higher performance, without so much regard to power consumption route or something. But when Intel is beating you at basically everything, that just won't work.
Is that recently AMD's best chipsets for desktop systems have come from nVidia. AMD themselves seems to be unwilling or unable to make desktop chipsets, and thus relies on third parties. Of those, nVidia is constantly cited by AMD heads as the one to get. This is even more the case now that nVidia owns ULi and thus the market is reduced by one.
Well, though they haven't said anything, I bet nVidia has kind of a "fuck you" attitude after the ATi buyout. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that nVidia's latest, greatest chipset is currently for Intel only, and has been for some time.
This could screw AMD over if ATi doesn't get good chipsets out the door for them. You can make the most bitchin processor you want, if you don't have a good chipset for it to run on it isn't going to be something worth buying. This is especially true for OEMs. Hobbyists might be ok with a board that doesn't really follow specs and crashes to save some dollars, but the OEMs won't have any of it.
And it's been all downhill since.
Question: if you are an underdog in a hypercompetitive industry, when a little success comes your way and you are finally climbing out of debt, do you:
(a) Stop what you are doing and deeply indebt yourself in order to enter another cutthroat industry largely outside of your expertise?
(b) Freaking invest in your core competencies while you have the chance?
AMD did a lot of the former and a little of the latter. How long will it be until they spin off ATI at a multi-billion dollar loss?
To be fair, Intel got their act together in short order. However, I have to wonder if AMD could have maintained their lead if they weren't gathering wool. For at least 25 years, the market has continually payed through the nose for leading edge general purpose computing power, and AMD was finally beginning to grab a share of that high-margin turf - from a competitor an order of magnitude larger!
And they gave it all up for socket compatible GPUs, which, unlike the core2, are nowhere to be seen.
*sigh*
Time to add 0.50 SGI advantage-squandering units to AMD's tally... I hope that their accelerator gambit pays off. I hope even though I know better.
Seriously, how did you guys plan to put 512mb of multilinked DDR3 on a die + an entire video accelerator? Did you plan on doing UMA? Please tell me this isn't the unmitigated disaster it appears to be...
A key principle in business (and armed conflict), is to reinforce success. You direct your resources to where you are strongest, and your opponent is weakest.
.. and being flexible enough to change the plan to suit circumstances. Unexpected opportunities usually have short timeframes before they get patched up - you have to strike whilst the iron is hot, and sink the boot in hard when your opponent is down.
.. witness the Intel open source graphics chips .. winning back the hearts and minds where they know they are weakest.
.. and reinforce it .. then they deserve to die.
You exploit breakthroughs and follow them through. You dont waste resources by throwing them against minefields and barbed wire in some hope to wear your oppoent down over time, especially when you are out-gunned.
Sometimes this means seeing and adapting to opportunities that arrise, which were never part of the original plan
Intel is clearly the opponent of AMD in this contest. Intel's core2duo product consistently outperforms AMD's product on just every windows centric benchmark.
However, when it comes to 64bit linux, the AMD chips are arguably better performing than the core2duo. Never mind the price - AMD already wins there - Im saying that AMD64 X2's run 64bit linux better than Intel Core2Duos. People BUY these dual core AMD CPU's because they make great linux boxes.
Linux is AMD's unplanned, surprise strength. With a good general at the helm, they should have seen this for what it was - an unexpected weakness in the opponents line - and then followed through on it. Rather than slash the price to the bone, which is equivalent to a human wave attack to break a minefield, they should have positioned the AMD64 X2 at that point as 'The 64bit Linux CPU', and done something significant to get ATi video drivers in a state which is attractive to the OSS crowd.
But no, like General Haig at the Somme, its 'one more charge across the wire and we should break through', reinforcing failure and leaving their actual advantage unsupported.
Meanwhile, it appears that Intel understand whats going down, and doing something about it
People whinge and whine about multi-core chips, claiming 'there is no software that takes advantage of it yet', which is total crap - Linux thrives on multicore chips, even as a desktop. LAMP is inherently multi threaded. Again, its Intel leading the core count here not AMD. Everything indicates that Intel is addressing it's weaknesses when it comes to being the best bang for the buck Linux platform.
If AMD are too short sighted to recognise their real strength in the market
YOU, yes you are whats wrong today. You and your attitude is what drives companies out of business, which FAR to many people have. You want immediate gratification for you stock value. Back in the old days companies were invested in, not bet upon, by people who viewed investments in increments of 5,10 or even 20 years. They looked for dividends, not windfall profits. Back when companies actualy paid dividends people made a good return on their investments. These days with every pencil pushing asshole in NYC screaming SELL SELL SELL at the top of their lungs if a company misses "The Streets" target by even a few pennies, its surprising that a publicly traded company even stays in business.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Those little black arrows on that graph indicate splits. I would not expect someone making such an uninformed comment to know that, so I figure I'd try to clue you in. Also, unless you missed the past 5 or so year, the Athlon hasn't done too shabby. Remember, just because the cyclic nature of the chip sector has swung back to intels favor doesn't mean AMD is or has been worthless.
I agree with you statements. My dad is of the "old days" and frowns upon the newer generation. I do too, because what I learned from him. On the other hand, it is still perfectly possible to invest in the long term and get dividends. The only difference, is that you won't get really-really-fucking-rich which is what happens when you have a lucky streak with in what you just described. The old way is to secure yourself, the new way is to have a chance to get rich quick.
Somehow the American dream (if I understood it correctly as a European) to "make it" by hard work and perseverance has been replaced by "get rich quick". I might have misunderstood though.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I don't quite understand how AMD are falling so far behind in the performance race.
They have what, on paper, should be a superior architecture. Core is excellent, but it's still an evolution of a 32-bit design and handicapped by the FSB. With a clean-sheet 64-bit design, Hypertransport and an on-die memory controller, AMD should easily be able to put out something competitive with Intel's offerings. As soon as their 65nm process was up and running they should have followed Intel's Lead and put 2 dies in one package to create a 4-core chip. The architecture is already designed to scale to at least 8-way (Opteron), and they have the advantage that they can link the cores internally via hypertransport. This would need very little R&D - it would just be a new configuration of proven technology.
I hear that in pure 64-bit operation things are much closer anyway, and that's obviously the way of the future.
I'm only 30, and I've never thought the 'American Dream' was anything but 'get rich quick.' I mean, sure, maybe 200 years ago. But even in the early 1900s, all the movies show immigrants coming to America and suddenly they have nice clothes and smiles. Just from moving here.
It's been a LONG time since the 'American Dream' was portrayed as anything but 'move to America and be fat and happy'.
As for the stock market, my Dad is caught in the middle. He watches it short term (daily, ugh!) but says he wants it as a long-term investment. He curses day-traders constantly. I just stay away from it. I figure it'll eventually settle down again and be an investment, and if it doesn't, it isn't what I want anyhow.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM