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."

Comments

i hope they keep up

[Anonymous Coward]

The last thing i want is an intel/ms only world. Bad enough MIPS and PPC have gone the way of the dodo more or less. AMD is the last bastion of creativity in CPUs.

Re:i hope they keep up

[dedazo]

Not to worry. History (or the Slashdot version of it at least) will remember AMD being taken down by the evil Intel, and things like AMD having taken to lead in the desktop CPU market or the fact that buying ATI was a phenomenal mistake will be ignored.

Companies don't die, they're just taken down viciously by companies we don't like.

Re:i hope they keep up

[alan.briolat]

Speaking purely as a cynic, Intel were dragged into having to innovate by somebody (AMD) producing something better and also instruction-set compatible. That meant they had to invest some money in R&D rather than continuing to push their fairly abysmal P4 line because there was no choice. The emergence of AMD as a serious contender is what has done the industry good in this instance.

I'm sure that without actual competition, we'd be in the usual position (again) of a company not bothering to innovate because their profit margins are fatter without doing so.

Re:i hope they keep up

[Kneo24]

And how exactly was buying ATI a mistake? Every since AMD bought ATI, ATI's driver support has became significantly better. ATI cards have usually had better hardware than NVidia's cards. With the improvement in Driver support plus the better hardware and at lower prices (I hope AMD isn't losing money for the lower cost of these cards), ATI is now finally king of the hill in the GPU segment.

Fix it!

[raijinsetsu]

I fell in love with AMD many years ago. They had the price and performance edge, and were also more stable than Intel. I think they need to take a step back an evaluate what the hell they're doing. They need to find a way to pull out of the competition while they clean up their act so they can start giving their customers what they want: cutting edge technology. I've read many articles about proposed AMD technologies, but I haven't seen many come to light (glueless HT, is one that comes to mind). Clean up your act!

Buying ATI = idiocy

[Spy Handler]

if instead of buying ATI, the dude spent the money on R&D and actually coming out with products that can compete with Intel CoreDuo, he might not be resigning...

Re:Buying ATI = idiocy

[moosesocks]

The problem was that Intel wasn't spending money on products that could compete with CoreDuo. They got really, really, really lucky.

The Core line of chips were originally developed as low-power laptop chips based around an older technology than Intel's "mainstream" chips of the day. Intel's roadmap up until very recently focused on further development of the Pentium 4 and Itanium lines (both of which ultimately proved to be unsustainable)

One of Intel's development teams in Israel saw the huge potential that the old Pentium III architecture had to be fast and power-efficient, when coupled with a more modern manufacturing process. In the end, the low-end power-efficient chips began to outperform their power-hungry Pentium 4 desktop offerings, and Intel quietly rebranded the line, and began to offer the Core chips as their flagship desktop offering.

Intel also made a great many mistakes with the development of Itanium, and their reliance on RAMBUS (which was proprietary, expensive, and actually slower in many cases than plain old DDR SDRAM). Their failure to embrace x86-64 could have also easily spelled disaster for the company. In terms of 64-bit development, AMD has always been the clear leader.

Intel should be counting its blessings, as they've made far more missteps than AMD have. Fortunately for them, they have a massive marketing team and extensive manufacturing facilities, both of which AMD lack.

Hopefully AMD can make something out of their R&D relating to GPGPUs, and stay viable as a competitor.

Re:Buying ATI = idiocy

[Otter]

One of Intel's development teams in Israel saw the huge potential that the old Pentium III architecture had to be fast and power-efficient, when coupled with a more modern manufacturing process. In the end, the low-end power-efficient chips began to outperform their power-hungry Pentium 4 desktop offerings, and Intel quietly rebranded the line, and began to offer the Core chips as their flagship desktop offering.

I'd hesitate to call that luck, let alone "really, really, really lucky". It sounds like terrific teamwork by engineering, production and management.

Re:Buying ATI = idiocy

[Otter]

But the Israeli group *did* exist, they *were* given the autonomy to do that work, the management *did* recognize the merits of it and decide to change course, and the production people *did* make it happen! That's not luck! If you don't understand how remarkable all of that is, you've never worked for a huge company.

What you people all seem to be arguing for, putting all your eggs in one basket and having it work out as you'd planned -- *that* is luck!

Get 'em while they're cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

Better grab those Intel processors while they're cheap, because once AMD goes under, you just know Intel will return to the good old days and jack prices up through the roof.

Must be nice having no competition in the market.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

[damonlab]

I bought and recommended AMD products up until a few years ago. I did that then because they had the fastest / better CPUs on the market at that time. During the last few years I have went with Intel because they have the better products now. If AMD wants my future business, they need to come out with something that beats what Intel has.

Doomsday?

[Trayal]

What's with all the doom and gloom predictions and massive stock declines every time one of the 'underdog' companies (AMD, Apple, etc.) has a rough year? These up and down cycles are a natural part of business. AMD still has a lot going for it, and a lot to offer, even if they don't currently hold the technological 'edge' in the x86 market. Given a few years, the picture between Intel and AMD may well switch again - unless too many investors bail out prematurely, of course.

Re:Doomsday?

[tyler.willard]

Such doom/gloom FUD encourages investors to flee, bringing the FUD to fruition.

There is only one case where fleeing investors, and thus dropping stock prices, affects a company: if they need to issue more stock to raise more capital.

Other than that the stock price doesn't hurt the company since it's already been sold (during the IPO).

AMD

[mlwmohawk]

I love my AMD systems. What the hell? How can you have a GREAT product, market share, and blow it as often as AMD has.

I hope they can come back. ATI was such a mistake, EVERYONE knew it was, I shake my head at what passes for management or vision these days.

You just know the guys that destroy good companies get many millions of dollars while the stock holders get shafted and the stake holders get ignored.

Re:AMD

[Bj�rn]

ATI was such a mistake

If the future is an integration of CPU and GPU, ATI might have been a necessary, if expensive, purchase for AMD. Also note that what AMD got was not just the ATI graphic cards, but also the chipsets. The support chipsets were always AMD's week spot.

Re:What about the video cards?

[pdusen]

AMD is fine. They are having a rough spot that is worse than the ones Intel goes through due to Intel being far more diversified. People in these comments touting the death of AMD are being melodramatic.

Re:Huh?

[serviscope_minor]

If you haven't tried the new ati linux driver (yes, it's a binary blob, waaah) then you should. Ever since AMD took over, it's gotten a lot better.

What's with the "waaaah" comment? These days, I steer clear of binary drivers. I spent many years on proprietary hardware with binary drivers. I have used binary blobs in Linux as well. I have consistently found that open drivers provide a better experience, with more stability, better implementation/larger quantity of features, and greater longevity of the hardware, since support stays around. Binary drivers (and closed software too, as it happens) have always come back to bite me sooner or later. Are you saying I should:

1) Ignore my years of previous experience

2) Support manufacturers who do not supply products I like

because you think I'm needlessly complaining?

Re:STFU Lin-sux user.

[jslater25]

I didn't realize that you could both 'Think Different' and 'Think APPLE'. Isn't that pretty much polar opposites? Once you an Apple fanboi, always ....

Re:Don't invest in AMD...

[MarkvW]

Corporate management and boards of directors comprise an overcompensated incestuous club that everybody wants to join. There won't be any change--politicians want to be in on the club too. Fat brain-damaged companies can be beaten by leaner companies, but as soon as prosperity pokes its head into the lean company's corporate boardroom, most management hurries off to join the club. Who can blame them? They want to be rich, too!

Re:It's all about the architecture

[AnObfuscator]

Back in 2003, when rumors were circulating about an AMD "K9" processor, everyone thought that a new, revolutionary, designed from the ground up processor architecture was in the works. Actually, it was. AMD was designing an *8-issue superscalar OoOE* 64-bit x86 processor. Basically the Alpha EV8 reincarnated in the form of an x86 chip. ( remember that AMD inherited a substantial portion of the Alpha design team after DEC was swalloed up by Compaq )

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.

No, they canceled it because it was over-ambitious and couldn't work. The thermals of the design were impossible to manage, and the frequency scaling was predicted to be horrible.

No halfway-successful CPU company thinks "6 months down the road" like you claim. CPUs take years to design, tape-out, and manufacture, and CPU company management knows this.

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.

... not to mention AMD64, a new ISA based on x86 -- something Intel wrote off as "impossible". It includes 2x the number of GPRs (from 8 to 16), and eliminates tons of legacy cruft instructions from x86.

The "mode switching" behavior that allows K8 to switch between 32bit and 64bit modes on the fly is pretty impressive, as well.

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

What the fuck? Pentium-M, Core, Core 2, etc are not "revolutionary, from the ground up" architectures. In fact, the basic architecture, when you boil it down, is nothing more than a "very beefed up" P6 -- AKA Pentium Pro -- which predates even K7.

I don't disagree that K9 is a disappointing warm-over of K8, but truely "new" cpu architectures don't come around all that often. Power6 is "beefed up" Power5, which is "beefed up" Power4, etc. A good architecture can last a very long time, and it's wasteful and dangerous to throw out a proven design for an unproven "new" design -- see NetBurst for an excellent example.

Re:That would be interesting..

[LWATCDR]

"Remember that IBM is forbidden from selling CPUs for home desktops."
Huh?
Since when? IBM made the PPC for Macs for years.
So where is your documentation on this?