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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."
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.
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.
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