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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's up to the shareholders to hold the company to the fire. I have no idea why every shareholder of every company out there isn't forcing the companies to put in performance clawbacks. Imagine if a CEO were faced with the possibility of having to return their bonuses, and maybe even a portion of their salaries, if the company did a nosedive like AMD has. But since shareholders are either too stupid or too frightened to start pushing their weight around, this CEO bonus crapola continues. Oh well, I'm not investing in AMD, so if they want to pay a fucking retard millions to screw their share value, then my hats off to them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But more importantly, lots and lots and lots of money. Intel had the financial wiggle-room to come back from some rather colossal errors over the last decade. AMD simply did not. It could stay competitive providing it had a focused plan, but the ATI deal was precisely what AMD could not afford.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The way they mis-managed their semi-conductor division pretty much made that the kiss of death. Great technology and good folks there at both AMD and Motorola, but folks that use to be Motorola Management might as well run around in a bunch of robes chanting for their ability to screw things up.
Though I doubt it would ever happen.
IBM buys AMD, uses circumstances to:
-Advance the fab capabilities of AMD generally (hopefully invest to actually keep up with Intel instead of lagging by a year or so)
-Release a Cell processor variant, replacing the PPC core with an x86 core.
It seems far fetched, but at the same time, the #1 supercomputer is already an AMD/Cell hybrid (two Cell processor packages for every AMD package). However, I wouldn't anticipate that core being any more performance than the PPC core, just a different instruction set. It *could* really cause some grief for intel if it caught on though. The ability to run Windows and games like normal (maybe with a penalty), but SPU enabled software could really make for some amazing media manipulation and incredible games.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's simple, the board of directors of most companies who are the ones setting things like CEO contracts are full of CxO's of other companies. It's felt that there is a major quid pro quo going on where the board of one company raises the pay for executives then the senior executives at company A talk to their friends who sit on the board of the companies B,C,D where the board members of company A are executives and increase the salary of the executives at B,C,D.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'd hesitate to call that luck, let alone "really, really, really lucky". It sounds like terrific teamwork by engineering, production and management.
I'd agree 100%. Intel's R&D group in Israel pulled off a small miracle with their work, and should be highly commended for it. However, from what is publicly known, it seems as if it were almost a sort of "skunk works" project, largely independent of the main R&D efforts of the company. I don't think that there was terribly much being expected from them, and the fact that they were able to deliver an extremely viable product was a fortunate coincidence.
Intel's main R&D efforts were terribly misguided. It was common knowledge that RAMBUS Itanium, and the P4 line all had serious limitations, and yet Intel continued pushing forward with these products.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
desktop PPC is an evolutionary dead end, but it's still in consoles, embedded, and servers.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Thank heavens for representative government that works better than our own. The EU has been watching Intel for more than 8 years and already has outstanding charges that Intel thwarted AMD sales by selling at a loss. We've all seen how they crushed OLPC. Good for the EU for doing something, we can only hope it's not too little too late given worsening economic conditions.
The story's "AMD sucks" slant is puzzling. Advantages come and go, but AMD has almost always been better for number crunching since 2000. They also have had significantly better interconnects and architecture for multi core processors. It's like blaming the victim.
Another factor in this sad story is the Vista failure which has hurt all hardware sales. In the last year or so, we've seen spectacular bargains like $500 and less dual core laptops on clearance and the collapse of CompUSA and other big box stores. AMD will suffer more in this downturn because it comes as they were gaining share.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.