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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."
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.
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 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!
Back at MOT (now freescale) I hear they called him Hector the Sector Director. People were happy to see him go. After his time at AMD, I'd call him "Hector Ruinz".
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...
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.
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.
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.
As it stands, it's pretty dire. The question is, can AMD turn around and match the 45nm process with a decent design before the Nehalem generation? I wonder that explicitly because the last bragging point they have is their interprocessor architecture and memory controller, which Nehalem matches. If Intel releases that and the rest of AMD's tech remains as disadvantaged as it is, watch for some of the 4-socket and above space that AMD still has some sway in move to Intel.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
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.
...I'd try to think where I'd last seen it and look there.
In this case, AMD should be looking at 2005.
Advice: on VPS providers
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.
CPU != GPU
He was probably talking about the Intel GPU.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Haven't experienced a crash yet? Then try a dual monitor setup with an intel 945 (even when it works, it actually often draws garbage all over the screen... I haven't seen something like that since the DOS days).
The xorg intel drivers suck - but "luckily", they can't possibly suck as much as the ATI drivers... which are still, after all the open sourcing and linux support and whatnot, completely unusable. (At my company, we do some end-user linux OpenGL devel, and after a few weeks experimentation, we now shamefully have a company-wide "buy nvidia only" policy. We honestly just couldn't get the ATI drivers to work (on dual monitor setups; with a single monitor they're somewhat better). How does that work out for the corporation bottom line, guys?)
we discovered a new way to think.
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
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.
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 ....
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!