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.

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.

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: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.