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AMD Layoffs Maul Marketing, PR Departments

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-ship-turns-slowly dept.

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."

14 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. What is the disaster of R600? by Etherized · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What is the disaster of R600? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      After spending lots of area and design time on the R600 to make this "ring-bus" to get good memory performance, basically someone at Ati f'd up and accidentally implemented the design of the R600 ROP w/o a pipeline (basically get a batch of pixels, crunch on it, output it, instead of pipelined like get a batch of pixels, crunch on it, and get the next batch of pixels, output the first batch, crunch on the second batch, get the third batch, etc, etc.). Although perfectly functional, the perf sucked big time (compared to the nvidia 8800 which was available about the same time and didn't make that kind of silly mistake).

      Through lots of software hacks and their marketing group twisting developer arms (having developers do massively custom AA modes or huge shaders where the abysmal rop performance didn't matter as much), they managed to salvage the situation from their crappy design mistake... This was highly fortunate as OEMs that purchase the midrange chips often use game benchmarks to select cards for various price points and if the game benchmarks showed say 1/3 the perf of a comparable nvidia card, they wouldn't sell many cards. That would have probably happened if all the benchmarks were ROP limited and they didn't use lots of MRT hacks to get better perf out of their ROP.

      Since ATI was losing money at that time, it may have been the end of the rope for them. They had just made an aborted R500 design (which they eventually salvaged by selling it to MSFT for Xbox360) and they were hoping to have a killer product on their hands and suffering through the illusion that nvidia wouldn't show up with a unified shader DX10 part. The resultant R600 wasn't good for ATI (bad slow rop made bad benchmark scores and nvidia G80 design was unified dx10 despite what the pundits thought at the time), but saved them long enough to be bought by AMD...

      -Anon

  2. Good? by Xanny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good? by blair1q · · Score: 4, Interesting

      TSMC isn't the only fabber.

      Rumor is that AMD and ARM may team up. But this means they might be thinking of an ARM/ATI combo chip. Which would be verrrrry interesting. But it would leave AMD's x86 department out in the cold for the future of computing.

      It's also a clue as to why AMD dumped the marcom hacks: these are the people who are supposed to tell the bigwigs what the Next Big Thing is going to be, and they have consistently been 1-2 years behind the curve.

      The only place AMD has been approaching the bleeding edge is in graphics, where the ATI engineers are merely advancing their skillz as fast as they can. No need to guess where their market is going, since there's always a call for more cores and more clock.

    2. Re:Good? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Informative

      AMD did start building fabs when the Athlon64 and Opteron were kicking ass all over, and when their projections of market share showed that they would be fab limited -- which for a while, they were.

      The problem is that when they opened up the flood gates on their production capacity, the market share didn't follow. It bumped slightly, but not nearly enough to justify the massive investment in the fabs, wrecking their financials and ultimately forcing them to spin off the fabs as Global Foundries. This is due to the backroom deals Intel had with OEMs limiting the amount of AMD parts they could sell.

      This is the essence of AMD's lawsuit against Intel and the anti-trust rulings by Japan, North Korea, and the EU.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
  3. Vital? by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Vital? by del_diablo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is easy: You cut down to the entire companies managmants wages to lowest engineering wage, and no bonuses. That includes the stockholdes, CEOs and other "high positions".
      It wouldn't surprise me one bit if that would earn them a really nice surplus of cash, which again could be used to massive amounts of R&D.
      Of course, no corporation these days wants to sit down and do what needs to be done.

  4. Does this remind any one of... by catmistake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Amazing by liquidweaver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    --
    mov ah, 4ch
    int 21h
    1. Re:Amazing by gman003 · · Score: 5, Informative

      From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...

      Actually, a huge part of Bulldozer's problem is marketing lies. The architecture is very interesting - it's based on a "module" made of an instruction fetcher/decoder, two integer cores, a floating-point core, and two levels of cache. The effect is comparable to Intel's Hyper-Threading, even if the implementation is different. A four-module Bulldozer chip is comparable to a hyper-threaded quad-core Intel chip - it can ALWAYS run four threads at once, and can theoretically reach eight.

      The problem is, AMD didn't market it that way. They market their four-module chips as 8-core, and their two-module chips as quad-core. Which isn't, technically, lying - they do have that many integer cores - but that marketing caused problems when benchmarks came out. People saw "AMD 8-core chip beaten by Intel 4-core chip" and thought "man, those cores must suck BALLS. And since even I know that a lot of programs are still single-threaded, it really makes no sense for me to buy an AMD chip right now".

      It's almost justice, seeing the marketers fired for this. They stretched the truth beyond what the public would believe, and it bit them in the ass.

      The other problem with Bulldozer is pricing - Bulldozer chips, at least right now, are ~$30 more expensive than the comparable Sandy Bridge processor. Sure, you'll quite likely save twice that if you're upgrading, since Bulldozer is mostly compatible with older motherboards while Intel is still thrashing sockets, but that's not going to be the case for everyone.

  6. This was back when they were a seperate company by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:This was back when they were a seperate company by Hadlock · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Excellent point. It's also worth pointing out that the 8800 survived for five years as a very viable card. Released in 2006, it's still listed as a minimum requirement for many games today (including Battlefield 3). That's quite a feat considering how fast technology matures in this market. In 2009 the 8800-class cards were still selling north of $120, and while not mind blowing by today's standards, were pretty much the gold standard until mid-2008. It's hard to compete against that kind of technology.

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
    2. Re:This was back when they were a seperate company by MagusSlurpy · · Score: 5, Funny

      The 6 series equivalent to the 5970 is the 6990, not the 6970 like any sane person would expect.

      And who's to blame for that? Marketing.

      --
      My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
  7. Re:Bye markedroids by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honestly they haven't been performing and it's understandable they got the axe. Maybe now AMD can focus on product rather than image.

    In my experience image sells more often than brand. Particularly image establishes brand, for what it's worth.

    These look like the sort of cuts of a company which may be in particular stress. Not encouraging.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar