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

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.