Slashdot Mirror
AMD Loses $1.2 Billion and Its CEO
Barence writes to mention that after seeing almost $1.2 billion in second quarter losses, AMD's CEO has resigned. Stepping up to fill his shoes will be Dirk Meyer, previous company president and COO. "Only two years ago, the company held a processor performance lead and was making serious inroads into Intel's market. However, AMD failed to keep pace with Intel's Core technology, and it once again surrendered its performance crown at the dawn of the multicore era. Those problems were exacerbated by the bungled launch of the Barcelona processors, which prompted Ruiz to make a frank public apology last December."
It appears their stocks have dropped 12% on this news.
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:AMD
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I don't want to see AMD fail either, but remember: we'll always have ARM.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sure, but you are part of the 3% that buys leading edge products.(right?) As long as you are in the mainstream BOTH have strengths and weaknesses.
As long as you are buying a low-mid priced system, AMD competes with intel. If you are a gamer, all that really counts is the Video Card anyway.
And don't get me started on the Intel Chipsets... remember when they were king? Well, my Core2Duo Centrino laptop chipset has so many bugs... The video performance under Vista and Linux STINKS big time. (WinXP is decent, but not near AMD/ATI's level with the 780g chipset, that chipset rocks )
AMD is a bit weaker on Laptops now, they have new silicon coming that will change that.
Hmmm, perhaps just a coincidence but the EU has just expanded it's anti-trust investigation into Intel.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-report-eu-to-expand-intel-antitrust-investigation.html
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
Because it is the Boards of these companies that set pay policies, not shareholders. Further, it is all but impossible to get a measure on the proxy vote to force the Boards to change pay policy. The best one can hope for is to make a 'recommendation' to the Board to change pay policy.
Unless is it is specifically stated somewhere in the corporate bylaws, the final decision as to executive compensation rests with the Board, not the shareholders.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I guess when a mediocre CPU manufacturer merges with a mediocre GPU manufacturer this is what you get.
At the moment AMD's GPUs are the best value you can get. The Radeon HD4850 and 4870 are exceptional cards while Nvidia seems to have botched their latest line - although they're faster, they're hideously expensive for only moderate performance gains above AMD's parts, and have very large power needs. And just for the record, every GPU I've bought has been an Nvidia one. I'm no AMD/ATI fanboy.
I didn't even know Intel made graphics cards!
Only integrated graphics, as far as I know.
The Intel integrated graphics is Crap. This is well documented. Not only is the hardware somewhat anemic, Intel does not give the engineers time to workaround all the bugs, so the drivers never mature to the state they should be in.
The hardware is low-end (and low power, which is good). The drivers ahve always proven rock-solid to me. And all the features work out of the box with no tweaking. There was a bug related to screens larger than 2048x2048 for 800 series chips. This is well documented in xorg, and is unlikely to be fixed. What awful bugs are there in the 900 series? I've never had a graphics related crash from any Intel GPUs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Just for the record AMD/ATI technically have the fastest single board Video card on the market smashing nvidia on pure raw power 2.4TFLOPS admittedly their is some creative thinking behind it but it is the king
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=14178&page=1
Unfortunately, as usual, management could only see 6-months ahead and the chip was canceled in favour of a 64-bit processor that was cheaper and easier to design and consequently would increase short-term revenue.
The processor that was hailed as a "revolutionary" x86 design, the Opteron, was, in fact, *directly* based off of the *K7* design. It was basically a K7 with a beefed up datapath, support for SSE2 and other miscellany, an on-board memory controller, and a high speed serial point-to-point interconnect as a replacement for the front side bus ( Hypertransport ) bolted on.
Now, you would think that the new Barcelona architecture was a great innovation, but not so much. It, like the Opteron, is a heavily leveraged design based off of the previous processor generation, namely the K8.
To get to the point, the fact is that AMD never truly created a new processor architecture -- they never truly innovated beyond bolting new crap onto old designs. In fact, the basic architecture of AMD's latest design, when you boil it down, is the same as the *K7*. Barcelona is just a ( very ) beefed up K7.
When you keep designing architectures like this you eventually hit a wall and start to stagnate due to the law of diminishing returns. So, while AMD basically did nothing essentially new with their architecture over the years, it gave Intel ample time to design, *from the ground up*, 5 new processor architectures : The Pentium-M, Core, Core 2, Nehalem, and Atom.
AMD's worst mistake was the cancellation of the Alpha EV8 inspired "K9" in 2003. Now they are paying for it.
jdb2
um...there is a 64bit version of windows, XP64, which Microsoft developed specifically for AMD's 64bit processors since at that time Intel was still pushing Itanium. This was available for public consumption not too long after AMD's processors were released and at that time only ran on AMD processors since they were the only producer of 64bit x86 processors. There is also a 64bit version of Vista available which runs on both Intel and AMD CPUs.