AMD Confirms Commitment To x86

MrSeb writes with an excerpt from an Extreme Tech story on the recent wild speculation about AMD abandoning x86: "Recent subpar CPU launches and product cancellations have left AMD in an ugly position, but reports that the company is preparing to jettison its x86 business are greatly exaggerated and wildly off base. Yesterday, Mercury News ran a report on AMD's struggles to reinvent itself and included this quote from company spokesperson Mike Silverman: 'We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore.' When we contacted Silverman, he confirmed that the original statement has been taken somewhat out of context and provided additional clarification. 'AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.' The larger truth behind Silverman's statement is that no matter what AMD does, it's not going to be 'AMD versus Intel' anymore — it's going to be AMD vs. Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, and Intel."

Comments

Considering Bulldozer ...

[ackthpt]

The larger truth behind Silverman's statement is that no matter what AMD does, it's not going to be 'AMD versus Intel' anymore — it's going to be AMD vs. Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, and Intel."

Considering the execution of Bulldozer, you could possibly add AMD to the vs. list.

Re:Am I the onlyone...

[masternerdguy]

An inflection point is when the second derivative of a curve is zero, and is generally where a curve changes from concave down to concave up. I'm assuming the guy was talking about a profit over time curve or something.

Corporate double-speak

[LordNimon]

AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.

This is a completely meaningless statement. You could say the same exact thing about any microprocessor company. For example:

"Freescale is a leader in PowerPC microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the PowerPC market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud."

This statement is true even though AMD and Freescale aren't competitors.

This is the kind of garbage that makes employees think that their managers are clueless and don't know how to fix the company.

Re:Corporate double-speak

[Skarecrow77]

Meaningless marketing spin are the only public statements that:
A. don't cause controversy and anger among the investors/stockholders
B. you aren't forced to go back on 12 months down the line when you find out you were too optimistic and/or out of touch.

Re:Corporate double-speak

[arth1]

This is a completely meaningless statement. You could say the same exact thing about any microprocessor company. For example:

"Freescale is a leader in PowerPC microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the PowerPC market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud."

This statement is true even though AMD and Freescale aren't competitors.

Freescale commits to the cloud? That is BIG news. Time to run out and adjust my stock portfolio!

Re:Am I the onlyone...

[ackthpt]

that had to google "inflection point"? From a marketing standpoint it might be good to have a CEO who isn't an engineer :P.

or a CEO who picks up a word or phrase from an engineer and thinks, 'Hey, that sounds good, I'll use it in my next meeting or press statement!'

What's he gonna say?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Let's say AMD is planning - or thinking about, at least - stopping the manufacture of x86 processors. What's a responsible company spokesperson going to say? "Yes, we're working on an exit strategy and are hoping to be out of the business by 2014" - does anyone believe that would be stated? If it was, their x86 business would tank immediately, and all employees working on x86 now would update their resumes and get while the getting is good.

Several years ago, we had an important faculty member accept a dean-ship at another university. The lead time was going to be a bit more than a year. In the meantime, this faculty member still had research projects going full bore. So what did he do? He told his staff that the research projects were going to continue, and would remain at our university for the foreseeable future. Guess what happened a year later? Yup - the "foreseeable future" he spoke of 12 months before turned out to be almost exactly 12 months long.

Re:What's he gonna say?

[tlhIngan]

Let's say AMD is planning - or thinking about, at least - stopping the manufacture of x86 processors. What's a responsible company spokesperson going to say? "Yes, we're working on an exit strategy and are hoping to be out of the business by 2014" - does anyone believe that would be stated? If it was, their x86 business would tank immediately, and all employees working on x86 now would update their resumes and get while the getting is good.

I'd be willing to bet that one of AMD's investors is Intel, and while AMD may want to get rid of the x86 business, Intel won't let it.

Intel needs AMD. And AMD's weakened state is ideal for Intel. However, if AMD dies, Intel also suffers (think anti-trust). But with AMD alive, Intel's scrutiny is lowered and they can sell more chips easily.

Heck, I'm willing to bet Intel has next-gen chips ready, but they want to keep AMD viable and are holding off the release. There's no benefit to Intel other than a few percent marketshare if AMD dies, and there's a huge downside of EU regulators, US regulators and very close scrutiny.

Translation

[DarthVain]

"Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud."

We will continue to make chips for servers, and low end crap. We can't compete with Intel for the consumer market in the short to medium term, however we are still relevant in business circles.

Consumers prepared to be gouged by Intel as soon as they figure this out. Also other than to just "say it" this has been the truth for some time, years in fact. I don't know if it is AMD stumbling or Intel just continuing to hit home runs, but there hasn't exactly been a whole lot of competition since the days of the ye old Athlon 64 series of processors. Ever since Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo, AMD has been unable to come up with an answer. Perhaps it had something to do with diversifying by buying up ATI, diverting capitol or focus away from core business. Ironically the AMD/ATI brand of video cards has a better reputation than the AMD CPU division, if only my opinion...

Re:Am I missing something here?

[JDG1980]

When people say "x86" they usually include the 64-bit extensions in this category. Every x86 CPU made today, whether from Intel, AMD, or even Via, supports the AMD64 extensions.

Re:Dear AMD....

[0123456]

There are lots of us that actually do real computing that has really heavy math.

So shouldn't you be using SSE instructions rather than x87?

Re:x86

[TheRaven64]

When the Pentium 4 came out, it was frequently called the "7th generation", but it was never called the 786 or 80786, either formally or informally

But they are all x86 compatible, because they can all run code compiled for 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386 and 486 processors.

My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.

People do refer to x87 when talking about the FPU on x86 chips. It's commonly used when differentiating it from SSE - modern compilers will emit SSE instructions instead of x87 ones unless you specify a backwards compatible target architecture (PII or earlier).

Re:Radeon may save them...

[TheRaven64]

Not really. AMD has really crap proprietary drivers, nVidia has slightly crap proprietary drivers. AMD's open source drivers are poor, nVidia's are nonexistent. If you're willing to run a blob, nVidia's support is better. If you aren't, they both suck.