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AMD Layoffs Maul Marketing, PR Departments
MojoKid writes "AMD's initial layoff announcement yesterday implied that the dismissals would occur across the company's global sales force. While that may still be true, it has become clear that AMD has slashed its PR and Marketing departments in particular. The New Product Review Program* (NPRP) has lost most of its staff and a Graphics Product Manager, who played an integral role in rescuing AMD's GPU division after the disaster of R600, also got the axe. Key members of the FirePro product team are also gone. None of the staff had any idea that the cuts were coming, or that they'd focus so particularly in certain areas. These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."
Honestly they haven't been performing and it's understandable they got the axe. Maybe now AMD can focus on product rather than image.
I'm missing the context here; could somebody explain what this disaster was and how it threatened the existence of the GPU division? A quick google returns nothing.
AMD's weakness is not in getting brand recognition, every major PC carrier knows who they are. They need a competitive product. That requires engineering investments and hard work to catch up to soon to be Ivy Bridge. Servers don't want a power inefficient processor, and power users want top class for the price, and AMD is delivering neither right now on the CPU front. They also shouldn't try entering any other markets, I imagine that is what they are thinking though, try to get out of the x86 business since they are falling behind. Hopefully the Radeon 7000 series does really well, this next GPU generation is shaping up to be a huge force in the massively parallel server market, and AMD better realize the opportunity they have right now to earn back some cred with a rock solid GPU lineup. It doesn't help that Nvidia, AMD, and every ARM manufacturer are all basically waiting on TSMC for bulk 28nm transistors. They are all starting to feel the heat for depending on one company for all their silicon for this next gen of graphics hardware.
These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."
Better to cut marketing and the "vital" line of communication to the press, than to cut product development and not have a new product next quarter... because then having lines of communication to the press won't seem so vitally important anymore.
Still it sucks for anyone to lose their jobs.
Seriously, with 14 bazillion bloggers fighting to get clicks to their webpages, all you need is one guy with a copy of the datasheet and a twitter account, and you'll have your part's nomenclature showing up on every RSS feed in the world within minutes if not days. And, if you're lucky (or just know where to put the typos), you can get /. to send your favorite blogger enough clicks to buy an iPhone.
Office Space?
These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press.
Bob Slydell: What would you say ya do here?
Tom Smykowski: Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
The Admin and the Engineer
Here it is, 2011, when CEO's live and die by 10K's and stock prices, we have a company that layed off marketing and PR and kept their engineers. How much AMD stock can I buy? Sign me up!
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The reason it was a disaster was the nVidia GeForce 8800. ATi was pretty sure that nVidia was still going to be back on teh old style of cards, with separate shaders, for their first DirectX 10 part. That is allowed, though not ideal (the programming interface has to be unified, not the hardware). ATi already had experience with unified shaders from the 360.
So from all accounts their not-so-great GPU that was up and coming was going to be fine against nVidia. Then out of the blue nVidia drops the 8800, they did a real good job keeping a lid on it. Fully unified architecture that was fast as hell. We are talkign twice as fast as previous generation stuff often and that was on DirectX 9 stuff, never mind what it'd be able to do with the newer APIs.
So ATi had to delay their release a bit and try to get something to compete better. When the R600 did launch as the Radeon 2000 series, it wasn't good competition.
However ATi recovered very well with the Radeon 4000 and 5000 series. The 4000 series were extremely competitive cards. Good prices, good performance, low power usage, etc. Then the 5000 series were the first DX11 cards on the market by a number of months, and also great performers.
Ultimately, they need both, but right now they need engineering far more than they need marketing. Intel has a significant advantage in that they sell far more chips and can afford to spend more money on bribes and development
None of the staff had any idea that the cuts were coming, or that they'd focus so particularly in certain areas.
And this is precisely why they were fired. I mean duh, this is not news that marketing is among the first areas to be axed in a dying company. There's quite a bit of precedent in the business world. If those employees didn't even know this, and had no situational awareness as to how their brands were doing, I can just imagine how they were handling their day to day work.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Advertisers and marketing people might be the lowest form of life too.
I'm pretty sure that title goes to IP droids as far as corporate lifeforms are concerned. At least marketers and advertisers create something of value (usually).
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Advertisers and marketing people might be the lowest form of life too.
Eh, I am sitting here uncomfortably as my wife is head of market research (not marketing) at a Fortune 500, and my sister in law is regional VP of a large media/advertising corporation...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
take a look a apple... marketing wizards. you may love their products, or hate it, but their growth and sales tell the story for itself. this may not end up to be such a good move for AMD in the long run.
In all fairness, that's a pretty low bar. Nothing to brag about if you say at least you are better that patent trolls
Considering how much higher quality Intel chips have been the last two years, they don't even need to bribe anyone.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
forthcoming chips from AMD will just have numbers instead of names
I don't know how long it's been since they've done this, but when I built my very first system more than ten years ago, I put a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird in the system, and it came with a 1"x1" (or whatever) AMD sticker to put on the case where the "Intel Inside" stickers always went.
Unfortunately for AMD, my case also came with an "Antec Outside" case, which suited my sense of humor much better.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
there are actually people still using 4870 cards, to play recent titles in high settings. i noticed that if i had had bought a 4870 instead of a 3870 back in 2007ish, i wouldnt need to change my card last year. even then my 3870 was holding very well, but the dual slot fansink was rather noisy (they always are). so i moved onto a 5670 arctic cooler sapphire, which is so silent that i didnt hear any fan noice for the last year despite overclocking it in taxing games.
ati seems to know how to produce gpus.
Read radical news here
AMD seriously needs to jump on some Taiwanese necks and get the fab stuff fixed pronto.
Most of AMD's chips are fabbed by GlobalFoundries. GF is Chartered Semiconductor merged with AMD's former fab operations (spun off to raise cash when AMD was circling the drain a couple years ago). GlobalFoundries doesn't have anything in Taiwan. Try Germany, Singapore, and upstate New York.
That's true.
The unfortunate truth for Intel, though, is that their chips have historically been fairly overpriced in contrast with comparable offerings from AMD. Of course, AMD is beaten into a pulp by Intel's high end offerings and can't even compete in that market segment, but I can't think of anyone much who'd fork out $1,000+ for a desktop processor unless they had a business-related reason to or had more money than sense. Certainly not in this economy clime.
I recently spent a fair bit less than $200 on a CPU upgrading my desktop to AMD's then near top of the line offering. Sure, it wasn't near as capable as Intel's chips (and I've historically always purchased Intel CPUs), but the problem is that Intel's comparable offering was over $100 more expensive--never mind how much more expensive Intel motherboards were. I'm not a regular gamer, I often write code in my spare time, and I have no real need for anything ridiculously fast (just more cores). I did want something reasonably future-proof without breaking the bank, which is why I went with AMD for the first time ever. I know of at least one friend of mine who recently did the same thing. I've been extremely pleased with the results.
On the other hand, I know of someone in my circle of acquaintances who purportedly forked out almost $4,000 to build an Intel rig with their latest CPU offering at the time. Yet, in spite of the investment, he never played anything other than WoW on his hardware. To each his own, mind you, but it seemed like something of a waste to me. He had his reasons, and that's fine.
I expect Intel to continue dropping the price on their low- to medium-end offerings in order to compete, but I also don't expect to see them drop very far since 1) the low end has tighter profit margins and 2) Intel has volume (in terms of production capabilities) plus market share in their favor--don't expect that combination to allow for much generosity on their behalf.
He who has no
For whatever reason, AMD decided that they wanted to mess with their scheme. In the 5000 and 4000 series, the x8xx part was the high end single card, the x7xx was the lower range (like half as many shaders and so on) and the x9xx part was the dual GPU part: two actual GPUs on one board.
Well for the 6000 series, they changed it. The x8xx range is the same as the x7xx range from the 5000 series and the x9xx the same as the x8xx. So the 6970 is now the highest end single GPU card, and is equivalent in the lineup to the 5870.
Turns out performance wise they are a bit faster for almost everything (different shader setup) though not a ton.
That's where the confusion comes from. If you look at pricing, you can see what they did. Annoys me to no end but it is what it is. For some reason the graphics card companies can't stay happy with a naming scheme for long.
The future market for GPUs is not a bunch of gaming enthusiasts and the design cycle for new devices takes sometimes years. The future is in tablets, phones, TVs, and other connected devices. Having a GPU that fits in a smartphone is more important than having insanely good rendering performance. Having a GPU that draws little power and does not need three fans and a big heat sink is crucial. AMD's marketing team made a colossal branding mistake by killing the ATI brand when millions and millions of gaming devices were sitting in people's living room with little red stickers on them and on the splash screen. ATI had become a household name thanks to the Will. ATI was a much more recognizable brand than AMD ever was. When you add together the amount of change in the GPU market (desktop down, small device up) My guess is senior management did not like the fundamental marketing strategy and wanted to change the direction. After marketers lock in to a branding strategy, it's very hard to get them to change direction, just like it's really hard to get a Java development team to port their product to Lisp, Add to that the sea change in who is buying GPUs and what devices they go in, and you have a situation where AMD needs to totally reposition. To everyone here who is saying marketing people are not as important as the engineers, I believe that you are talking about a chicken and egg problem. To succeed in the market, you have to have a product people want (good engineering) and the marketing make sure that the appropriate level of demand develops in the marketplace. Marketers do a lot more than hang around the coffee pot wearing black turtlenecks and discuss the merits of sumatra vs. colombian coffee.
-- Mike
I expect Intel to continue dropping the price on their low- to medium-end offerings in order to compete, but I also don't expect to see them drop very far since 1) the low end has tighter profit margins and 2) Intel has volume (in terms of production capabilities) plus market share in their favor--don't expect that combination to allow for much generosity on their behalf.
On the other hand, now that Intel has AMD up against the ropes, Intel might be content to put the squeeze on them, and take a hit (or just break even) on the low-end chips to push them even further out. Intel is certainly pulling in more than enough cash to buffer a bit of a hit in that market.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
They don't need to right now, because they successfully drained AMD of customers long enough for AMD to have funding issues with their R&D. The incompetence of over paying for ATI didn't help, but the consequences of Intel's anticompetitive activities are going to take years for AMD to overcome.
Intel needs AMD, otherwise it faces even more antitrust suits and a closer eye from the DoJ and whatever agency in Europe does the same thing. I'd expect that Intel won't make the mistake of squeezing AMD completely out of the market.
Intel definitely could do it, but they'd end up being broken up if they managed to succeed. There's only so much anticompetitive activity that the DoJ can turn a blind eye to.
AMD is a Fabless chip company now. That means they design chips. They are behind in performance on the x86 side, are about to be behind in low power when Intel uses FinFETs (sorry Tri-Gate). The last thing they need to cut is their core design business - it's what the company does.
The Bulldozer FPU is shared between the two cores in a module. It sounded like it's really only a single FPU for the new 256 bit instructions. Remember when the K8 used a 64bit FPU and still kicked Intels butt? IMHO they waited about a year too long to upgrade it to 128bit. Do we really know where BD bottleneck is?