AMD Reportedly Preparing Massive Layoff

An anonymous reader writes "AMD is preparing to lay off 20 to 30 percent of its workforce after warning of a 10 percent decline in Q3 revenues driven by the weak global economy and PC sales, according to AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldehl. The layoffs will reportedly focus on engineering and sales, and are in addition to a 10 percent headcount reduction 11 months ago. Teams of consultants from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are reportedly swarming headquarters to advise the CEO Rory Read, who took over from Dirk Meyer a little over a year ago; several senior executives, including the CFO, have recently departed."

Comments

10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut. Down. EVERYTHING.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah.

Down 6% in Q1, down 11% in Q2, and they were expected to be down 1% in Q3... instead they were down 10%.

Meanwhile they're not competeing in servers or smartphones, the PC market is shit and it isn't looking like it's going to get any better. Laptops are the one place they're strong, and nobody is optimistic on laptop sales.

It's bleak over there, and believe it or not, they've got a pretty good idea of just how bleak it is.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Sulphur]

Uh, yeah.

Down 6% in Q1, down 11% in Q2, and they were expected to be down 1% in Q3... instead they were down 10%.

Meanwhile they're not competeing in servers or smartphones, the PC market is shit and it isn't looking like it's going to get any better. Laptops are the one place they're strong, and nobody is optimistic on laptop sales.

It's bleak over there, and believe it or not, they've got a pretty good idea of just how bleak it is.

Damn the decimal point.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[lightknight]

They're doing it to themselves in the PC market. They spent their resources on the Fusion crap, which while nice for low power devices, leaves the rest of us who want Phenom IIIs and Radeon 9900s out in the cold.

I'm at a FX-8150, and I have no AMD upgrade path. I am at the zenith of their multi-core designs, save switching to an Opteron processor, and I don't want to, because the motherboards are absolute crap. The next time Intel comes out with a top of the line processor, they're likely to get my money over AMD, simply because AMD isn't putting anything out there to compete.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

And WHY are they so down? One word....FAILDOZER!!!

Even guys like me that support competition and thought Intel should have been busted for the bribery and compiler rigging have been avoiding Faildozer and why? Because its a bad design, its a server chip designed for integer workloads when consumer workloads are heavy floating point, gets beat in many benches by Thuban, the chip they canceled which just FYI was still selling well and more importantly was getting nearly 100% yields oh and just to add the salt to the wound they didn't bother to tell Microsoft what they were up to so the Windows scheduler ties a boat anchor to its already pitiful performance in all MSFT OSes except...Win 8, the Star Trek 5 of OSes.

Let us hope to all that is good that they don't end up tits up, because Intel already has high prices and without AMD they would go insane on the prices. personally i'll keep building AM3+ and selling E450s and Liano on netbooks and laptops but faildozer is just an awful chip. I hope the former Apple chip designer they got comes out with a worthy replacement for Thuban, instead of just trying to crank up the clocks on a bad design. Hmmm...where did we see that before? Oh yeah...it was called Netburst, only AMD can't afford to bribe OEMs into taking it.

Oh and just FYI but there is still hundreds of millions of X86 units sold a year so its STILL a good market where good money can be made, but AMD needs either the performance or at LEAST the bang for the buck, instead AMD has a design that is too hot, costs too much to make so they have to price it noncompetitive, and has poor yields and lousy performance. If your product is bad? Nobody buys, at least not enough to make money, simple as that.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I don't know. I read the performance benchmarks on the 8150 before I bought it and I thought they were pretty good, except Win 7 doesn't hardware but a few 2D graphics calls, which is NOT AMD's fault and impacts some benchmarks.

Now that I have it , I love it. I can see all 8 cores working, I can keep it all cool (75 F) no problem and the price / performance ratio is excellent, leaving out legacy PC chips whose price is near zero. The absolute performance is also pretty excellent.. for between US $100 and $500 you can get a chip that's another 30% faster from Intel, but why bother ? I'd rather put that money into an SSD and really feel some difference for my cash.

AMD is not making its earning predictions, OK.. and their real problem is Wall Street who's punishing their stock for it. It's not like they can't make great chips at great prices.

If Bulldozer 8150 was not literally 8x's a Phenom II in terms of power, well, it's still better by a bunch and at a great price. I love my 8150 and it's blazing fast for everything I want it to do. Highly recommended.

The thing with Intel is, internally they're actually a worse corporation than even you described. Head hunters I have known almost immediately blanched at their name when I brought it up and said things like .. I do not recommend anyone work for Intel. I have seen the same remarks by the same professionals in print.

Why? For generations now, it's been stocked to the gills with corporate psychopaths. Like above, so below. The level of viciousness of the politics is out of this world . For instance, there's something called "forced ranking" where 10% of their employees with the lowest scores on their reviews are automatically fired each year.

Killing every tenth person in order to improve performance has another name- decimation.. deci-mation. It goes back to the Romans. Crassus used it to motivate the troops to capture Spartacus. The thing is even then it was considered regressive, ancient and barbaric.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)

Obviously, people in that environment are preoccupied with one thought - "not me".

Fucking over the other guy has evolved into a fine art there. Its totally vicious.

Maybe AMD stumbled with 8150 in some academic sense. I think I am a demanding consumer of PCs .. I build my boxes, and I sure don't feel it. If it was less than expected, which is very different than bad, well then, obviously, onward.

I'll never buy an Intel chip until they're the only chip maker on earth. Their business practices are as dirty and illegal as they come as the many lawsuits brought against them testify to. Is the Intel e3 1275 20% faster than an non-OC 8150 for another $150.00, almost twice the price of a 8150 ($169.00 Shell Shocker price this week) Fine. 20% for ethics and morality. It's what I give elsewhere in my life anyway.

Oh, and this giving works out to another $150.00 bucks in my own pocket. Now that's a decision everyone involved can feel good about....

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[MukiMuki]

Am I dreaming? Is this a dream?

The 8150 gets trounced by the overclockable i5 2500k in just about every benchmark under the sun. The 2500k is $30 more. AMD doesn't even RANK in the upper tiers of Tom's Hardware's CPU gaming hierarchy.

To be fair, it's a card that's $30 cheaper and slightly outperforms the Sandy Bridge part in the highest levels of processing requirements (video encoding, 3D rendering, basically things that can hit 8 honest threads of use), but it gets hammered EVERYWHERE ELSE.

That's to a system builder. On the pre-built retail desktop/laptop circuit (read: the grand majority of sales), the situation is far worse, where that single thread performance gap makes the AMD parts look really bad.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

.... why are you even comparing the e3 1275 to the 8150? The i5 2500k/3570k are the competitive parts. And they cost a whopping $30/$40 more than the 8150. Which, because they both draw less power, you can get away with a lower capacity (and less expensive) power supply without sacrificing PSU quality. So, what you "saved' at the CPU price you spent on the PSU's price. And the 2500k/3570k dissipate less heat into the case and eventually the room. Which is a small benefit (couple bucks/month maybe), but it isn't nothing.

The 8150 makes sense for.... some users, but not most of them. Which is sad. My past 3 systems were based on AMD processors. I want them to at least be competitive. They just.. aren't. I'm not a professional video editor, and I don't do nearly enough crypto. Just like most of the computer using population.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

mmm maybe you're dreaming..I dunno....

From passmark's score for high end CPUs:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

AMD FX-8140 Eight-Core

score: 7,133 $169.00

then about 20 CPUs down the ranked list :

Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz

score: 6,580 $217.99*

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Also, you might be interest in an observation... Win7 often uses all 8 cores. The chip comes with a utility from AMD that let's you track core activity. My IDE definitely uses all 8 to good effect and windows Explorer (file system) also uses all 8 on a regular basis. My MB has a slick 'n easy OC utility, but I don't use it .. like I said, this thing is way fast enough for me programming, using drawing programs .. moving files ...you know work stuff... .

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Dagger2]

Hm, so, the GP says that it slightly outperforms the i5 2500k in things that use all 8 threads, and you attempt to debunk him with... a benchmark that uses all 8 threads? In which the AMD chip beats the Intel one by a fairly minor 8%?

Seems to me like he may have a point. What's the single-threaded performance like?

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[mikael]

I've got a seven-year-old laptop - it's good enough to surf the web (even Google streetview) and watch HD videos. I was planning to buy a new laptop, but needed a new phone. A latest-model smartphone can do all the internet related things a laptop can do, as well as 3D graphics with texture-mapping (still blows me away - what used to be the exclusive domain of a SGI Extreme is now done by a mobile phone).

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[ifiwereasculptor]

The 8150 has many problems, but that's the first time I see anyone complain about its upgrade path. The thing is the 8150 is currently the flagship. Vishera is about to be released for the same AM3+ socket, with modest improvements. If you had an i7 3770k, you'd be complaining about the same thing, unless you went LGA 2011 (then again, if you did and got a $1000 processor, you'd be in a position to make the same complaint again). In fact, you're relatively better off than an i7 2600k owner because Vishera will probably bring a bigger performance improvement over Bulldozer than Ivy brought over Sandy (which, considering how the 8150 performs, isn't exactly impressive).

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I do not think I am debunking anyone; I am conversing. When I debunk, it's much bloodier.

This sums up the other link:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8150+Eight-Core

Let's say 8150 is slower , 20-30% on single threading (I am not saying it's true, I am saying people say it) than intel's chip. Is single threaded the normal use-case or is that a competitive gamer thing (obsession) where the only thing separating you from your opponent is not skill or strategy but CPU speed on a single thread.?

Mostly, in my life, I am using more than one thread. I am doing a number of things at once. The OS wants one (or more). My programs all want as many as I've got. Even people who aren't working with IDEs and rendering applications are still, say, listening to music and watching a video and all this kind of thing all at once.

Intel's chip costs more, are slower except on single threaded applications, Intel is evil. I can OC the chip easily and have a nice stable system that is just as fast for zero extra dollars on a single threaded application.

But the overall thing to not lose sight of is -the chips are stupifyingly fast . We can look at CPU bench marks all day but mostly they sit idle waiting for our I/O to hurry up.

Not arguing here. Just observing and thinking aloud.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[tomhath]

For instance, there's something called "forced ranking" where 10% of their employees with the lowest scores on their reviews are automatically fired each year.

That was considered genius when Jack Welch instituted it during his years as CEO of General Electric.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[ifiwereasculptor]

I think both you and the parent make some good points. For you, I'd say the 8150 is definitely problematic when it comes to power consumption. I like AMD, but even with the FX-6100 at the same price point as an i3-2120, I see no reason to upgrade my Athlon II X3. It would run slightly hotter, spend slightly more power and perform about the same in most productivity workloads, since they are limited by my HDD, and perform about the same or quite worse in games. So that I'd call a complete failure on AMD's part.

To the parent, I'd say the design is actually quite solid. AMD just stumbled on its first iteration. Trinity A10 is quite competitive with the slightly costlier i3s at x86 performance, finally surpassing Llano. To some surprise, Trinity chips perform much better in single-threaded tasks and its increased power draw is quite justifiable by its massive iGPU, meaning the x86 part of power concerns seem to have been adressed. And those are tests I've seen on Windows 7 with non-optimized programs. GCC has BD optimizations that can really improve performance, anywhere from 0 to 40%. Plus, there are the upcoming scheduler fixes and Vishera, a Trinity with L3 cache (and sans graphics).

I believe AMD launched BD before it was ready, just to break the catch-22 of "no one will write software for it unless we lauch, and if we launch it without optimized software, it will suck". So you launch a beta version and let software integrate with your design, while you refine it to something actually competitive. And just roll with the backlash. Doesn't seem to be working too well.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[thsths]

> Meanwhile they're not competeing in servers or smartphones, the PC market

And they are not competing in the PC market, either. You can get the same performance (and usually less driver issues) by just going with Intel. AMD lost the performance advantage that they had with the Athlon64, and now they have lost the price advantage, too. The only thing they have going is the APU concept, but single thread performance is terrible, power consumption is high, and the price is again not that much less than you would pay for Intel plus an entry level graphics card.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you've gotta cite your sources. Where have you read that Intel cuts 10% of their workforce every year? Is this in marketing, or 10% of their engineering workforce? You are obviously biased against Intel, which is fine, as you are entitled to your opinion, but when making accusations like this, you need to bring in credible sources to be taken seriously.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF???? As far as I can see the FX-8150 was being reviewed exactly one year ago this week, suggesting that it's a little more than a year old. And you're already worried about an upgrade path???

Here's the goddamn truth about what's hurting AMD. You are in the minority. Most of us aren't looking for new CPUs on an annual basis anymore. Last November I built a system based on a cheap 3.0 GHz Phenom II X4. Guess what. It's still good enough for what I'm doing with it. It WILL still be good enough for my needs, one, two and maybe even three years from now.

The world doesn't need new shiny every year any more. The vast majority of the PCs sold every year are not gaming, they're not doing heavy video editing or graphic design. There are doing basically -nothing-. PCs are already overpowered for 90% of all users. This is why AMD is hurting.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Kjella]

The 8150 has many problems, but that's the first time I see anyone complain about its upgrade path. The thing is the 8150 is currently the flagship.

I guess his point is that the flagship is getting "smaller", in 2009-2010 a top of the line Phenom II was pretty good compared to Intel. Now their top of the line is retailing for less than Intel's second tier CPU (3570K) on their second tier platform (LGA1155). If you want a better processor than that, AMD doesn't have anything to deliver.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[halltk1983]

Those things are ridiculously expensive to design and build. Smaller processes, linear optimizations, it's not cheap. And they just flat out don't have the capital. So what they were trying to do was focus on the bulk market to build back up some of that capital. The problem is that they didn't get the contracts from the big name manufacturers to provide them in bulk, and most of the people that buy at home will pat 75% more for that 10% boost in framerate and go intel. I buy AMD for a couple reasons. 1) I like the products. Overall they fit my need at a price point I like. 2) I like the company. I know a couple folks that work (or maybe worked soon enough) there. 3) I like competition. It keeps Intel's chips cheaper. I think that when AMD falls, the intel chips will go up in price, and then we'll be stuck with ARMs in our gaming rigs withing 5-10 years.

I just wish that more people bought their products for their machines, because we need them around.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

One nice thing is that AMD doesn't play tricks with features. All of their new CPUs come with IOMMU and AES instructions. With Intel, you have to be very careful what chip you pick. Core i3's for the most part aren't overclockable and don't have AES-NI. Looking for VT-d? Watch out, the overclockable Core i7-3700k doesn't have it, but the non-k version does.

AMD doesn't compete with Intel in the high end anymore, but I think that's okay. There isn't a huge market for the high end anymore. They need to focus on their strengths, which are budget systems that are perfectly fine for more than 80% of the computing population, and their excellent graphics hardware.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Numbers please ! Thank you!

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

One nice thing is that AMD doesn't play tricks with features. All of their new CPUs come with IOMMU and AES instructions. With Intel, you have to be very careful what chip you pick. Core i3's for the most part aren't overclockable and don't have AES-NI. Looking for VT-d? Watch out, the overclockable Core i7-3700k doesn't have it, but the non-k version does.

You obviously know WAAAAYY more about CPUs than I do. Just to give some perspective of where I am coming from in terms of background and knowledge...

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[halltk1983]

In that case, you're not the target market for the 8150. You're the target market for the APUs. Which provide the lower power profile you're looking for with rock solid 3d and GPGPU performance, at a lower total power envelope.

Quit complaining because you bought the wrong product.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not complaining. I didn't buy an FX processor. Because I did my homework and recognized that it was total shit for my needs. Just like it is total shit for most of the needs of the computing populace. Which.. is kinda why AMD has massive financial problems.

Do you feel better now?

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

WoofyGoofy Law of Slashdot #36864 :

Any discussion about the relative merits of a CPU will devolve into a pissing match in 3 posts or less.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

hold on there. Floating point important for consumer workloads? for games and digital content creation perhaps, but not for browser/most office. It's certainly of no importance to me even running database & middleware and front end virtual machines and developing software in addition to the brower / office software. the only two things that matter to me are cores and memory, and AMD is a no-brainer choice in bang for 1/3 the buck.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

You did not just verbify 'hardware'! What is the world coming to!

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Great piece on psychopaths that includes an interview / profile of Jack Welch that NPR carried here:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/436/the-psychopath-test

After this week's outburst, it's come out that Jack's mind mind jump on the idea that critical numbers were being goosed because he did it all the time while at GE...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-gongloff/jack-welch-book-cooking_b_1954396.html

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[fast turtle]

To me, there's another just as important reason as Bang for Buck. It's the Higher TDP of their chips. For a large office, it's becoming very important to get a lower TDP chip that performs well and looking at the numbers, the Celeron G540 offers the most bang for buck at a nice 65 watt instead of the miserable 95 watts of any of the Athlon x2/x4 chips. Sure AMD has some that are in the 65 watt range but compared to even the low end celerons, their performance stinks and all of these reasons have pushed my decision towards an Intel chip for my next build. Even their onboard graphics are decent enough to handle what I actually do on a daily basis while allowing me some light/medium gaming. Of course, there's another reason and it's the quaility of the Open Source Drives, meaning I'm not locked into the MS or Apple camps and that's damn important to me.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Dude, you gotta learn to use Google:

1 go to www.google.com

2 type in "forced ranking intel"

3 3 read the top 10 results in the first page.

The are :

http://american-business.org/383-forced-ranking-systems.html

http://www.faceintel.com/discharge.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZT57xSrPJ5YC&pg=PA172&lpg=PA172&dq=intel+forced+ranking&source=bl&ots=BWTYfQm01x&sig=O61ae4i3pKexc_C5-yyCf5hVXdw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=j5d5UIyhM83ryAHc4oHACw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=intel%20forced%20ranking&f=false

http://www.markedbyteachers.com/university-degree/business-and-administrative-studies/despite-the-fact-that-intel-has-become-the-most-successful-company-in-the-microprocessor-industry-with-90-percent-market-share-it-still-has-some-problems-one-example-of.html

http://www.sibson.com/publications/perspectives/Volume_11_Issue_2/e_article000162170.cfm

http://business.highbeam.com/137618/article-1G1-116862343/forced-ranking-good-bad-and-alternative-one-out-five

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-01-08/the-struggle-to-measure-performance

http://books.google.com/books?id=9G1F5ymrYQgC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=intel+forced+ranking&source=bl&ots=C_Yp3z06bj&sig=Ioi8YTP1sHT4H2utqbAqo84Gu0E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=j5d5UIyhM83ryAHc4oHACw&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=intel%20forced%20ranking&f=false

http://www.halogensoftware.com/resources/reference-library/profiling-or-stack-ranking.php

and so on and so forth

---> BIGGEST. FAIL. EVAH.

YOU WIN!!! You WIN!!!!

Jack, what do we have for the guy who can't Google?

Well Dave, we have a free lobotomy followed up with an all expenses paid five weeks recovery in beauuutiful downtown DEEEEE-TROIT! !

Wow that's great jack.. well it's like the old saying .. those who already have, only get more!!!

Thanks for playing "I Post On Slashdot!!!"

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[nighthawk243]

Yep. When I got my 1055T, the i5 2500K wasn't out yet. Once Sandy Bridge was released, everyone was looking forward to Bulldozer, but that fell on its face right out of the gate; especially when many of the Phenom II processors bested it in certain areas. It was nowhere close to the i5/i7 Sandy Bridges. Even the i3 wasn't left in the dust either.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Agripa]

My current system is AMD but only because at the time, pre-DDR3, it was much less expensive than an Intel system with ECC support. Now AMD lacks even that unless I stay with the Phenom II but by the time I need to build a new system, Intel may be the only option.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Dagger2]

For a desktop, I'd say single-threaded speed is more important than total multi-threaded speed The performance of most things you interact with is dependent on single-threaded speed -- browsers, office suites or in general pretty much anything that happens in response to mouse/keyboard input. Things that benefit the most from arbitrary amounts of cores are usually things like compression, video encoding, rendering... things where you start the task and come back later. If you're doing that heavily then it makes sense to buy a many-core CPU, but for regular desktop use you want something that minimizes interaction latency -- fewer cores and higher per-core performance is better.

Of course, as you say, our desktops are often doing more than one thing at once, so >1 core is useful. No use having a fast processor if your interactive task has to wait for something else to finish first. Single core systems are also prone to having a single task eat all your CPU, rendering the entire system unusable until it's finished (although you could argue that's more a problem with the OS scheduler). There comes a point of diminishing returns though, and I think 8 cores is beyond that point. I'd rather have a 4-core processor with faster single-threaded performance than an 8-core one with higher total aggregate performance.

I don't think cost is even in AMD's favor either. It looks like Intel chips are using significantly less power for the same performance, so if you're paying for electricity then Intel will be cheaper in the long run. This review paints a pretty bleak picture for AMD.

About the only thing AMD have going for them right now is that they're not Intel. Intel's trick of not selling any CPU models with all features enabled (there's only a couple of models with unlocked multipliers, and those models have some "business class" features, which I happen to want, disabled) annoys me. But if I built a new desktop now, looking at AMD's current CPU offerings, I'm not sure even being made by Intel would be enough to stop me from buying an Intel chip.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[dshk]

AMD A6-5400K, for 70$, yes, it is not 50$, but it is also faster, it has far better graphics and it is 65W too.

I hope you also recognize, that office computers most of the time are idling. So if anything, the idle power is the interesting, not the TDP. And AMD is quite good in that.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Luckyo]

Minus one for not using lmgtfy.com to save space.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Luckyo]

Get E450 desktop/laptop. These are amazing for office needs. Not too slow to decode HD youtube, got built in low end radeon, has a minuscule power draw of around 18W. When in comes to low power semi-performance, AMD really leads right now. It's just not a very profitable segment.

(Typing this from E450 15" cheapo laptop while sitting in LoL queue)

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[halltk1983]

I've built two machines in the last year. A gaming rig for myself, with the now-discontinued Phenom II x6 1100T, and my wife with the 3870 APU. I carried over the video card I had used to previously upgrade the machine before that into my box, and didn't put one in hers. The only game we really play anymore is The Old Republic. We both play at 1920x1080. She gets ~30fps at low-mid settings, and I get 50-60 with everything maxed, including antialiasing. She noticed, with them sitting side-by-side, that mine looked better. But not enough better that she wanted to spend $150 on a new video card on it.

The person above that said it, said it right. Machines are just good enough these days. The video card I moved over was a 5770, which is now a few generations old.

I really hope we're all wrong here, and AMD is still around. Both of these machines have 16 GB RAM, and enough power to do what we need, and both were built for a few hundreds bucks each. Hers is quieter, mine is beefier. Both suited our needs. But I can't help but worry that if we allow AMD to die that the day of the cheap desktop is done. It'll be tablets for everyone. And I'd find it pretty hard to play The Old Republic on an iPad (though an app to send out my companions while I'm not at my desk would be nice...).

If you need ECC, you're a bit of the minority. And sadly, that's not something AMD can really afford to go after right now :(

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[MechaStreisand]

Maybe you shouldn't be a part of this conversation, then.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows comes with a utility that lets you track core activity since Windows XP, it's called the task manager.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

Dude...seriously man WTF. I get you are happy and I hate to shit on your parade and all but not only is the FX8150 priced within $30 of the Core i5 2500K which just slaughters it, but in many benches the Thuban X6 is close or beating it on a core by core basis...wanna know how much on average I been paying for Thuban X6 chips? Guess...nope, try $89-$109 depending on who is having the sale this week. hell there have been several times where I've been able to pick up the X6 units for less than the X4 and that is because thuban was getting nearly 100% yields whereas FX yields are poor. i mean think about it...bad core? You turn off 2 and you have a Phenom X4, 3 bad cores you have a Phenom X3, bad cache you had an Athlon X4, its easy peasy to get nearly 100% yield out of the Thubans which drove costs WAAAY down.

So I'm sorry dude but faildozer is just that, a giant fail, and ramping up the clocks on a shitty chip just makes for a very hot and wastful shitty chip. Again its the Netburst strategy all over again and its why AMD has been nosediving, people just don't want a hot power hogging chip when for a lousy $30 more they can get damned near double the performance.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

Again the i5 2500K curbstomps it, is within $30-$45 in most real world prices, and you seem to ignore IT HAS 4 THREADS so its not like we are talking single VS multicore as with the i5 you can multitask your ass off and STILL have great single core IPC.

Look I get why you are trying to defend a bad design, nobody likes to think they picked a shitty product, I get that. And if you are trying to support competition fine, I understand, I only build AM3+ on the desktop and have been selling Bobcat and Liano over Intel in mobile wherever possible, but it don't make shit into cotton candy and Bulldozer is a bad design anyway you slice it. Hell do I REALLY need to post the scathing reviews talking about how the price is wrong, performance worse than Thuban in many places, sucks too much juice and is too hot, because all you have to do is ask and I'll be happy to wallpaper the page with bad reviews.

There is a damn good reason why everyone compares faildozer to netburst, and that is because in both cases the company focused too much on one area and ended up with a bad design. With Intel it was all about the MHz, they thought they could ramp up high enough to make up for the shitty arch, and with AMD they thought they could throw more cores and speed at the problem to make up for shitty IPC and only having one FP unit per 2 cores. In both cases? It really doesn't work dude, and this is from someone whose sold nothing but AMD for several years and who just got done building yet another Thuban for a customer. Hell I don't even own a single Intel chip, my nettop is a Sempron, my netbook E350, and my family has 2 quad Phenom IIs, a triple Athlon and a pair of X6s, one for me and one for the oldest. So don't say I'm not an AMD fan but a bad chip is a bad chip no matter who makes it and faildozer? Great on servers, lousy on desktops.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

I'm not the guy you asked but I'll give 'em to ya Woofy...here is a review of FX 8150 VS i5 2500K that gves the tale of the tape with the numbers you ask for on page 2. i linked to the conclusion because its title sums it all up nicely...why so bad? And the answer they give is pretty obvious, not really better than the X6, sucks more power, lousy single core performance, and the prices are noncompetitive against the i5 2500k.

Its damned sad but in this case the numbers don't lie, they use real world tasks for their benches and the 8150 was found to be lacking, with the currently being sold for $89-$119 Thubans matching or even in a few cases beating FX 8150 while having a third of the price knocked off. So if you want AMD on the desktop the answer is Thuban, on the laptop liano, and the tablet netbook market bobcat... pretty much anything BUT the Bulldozers.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[AmiMoJo]

That should help AMD. Intel should be the ones suffering from a lack of demand for performance, while AMD benefit from lower prices (especially when you look at the total system cost).

Intel does well because it has built itself into a premium brand that OEMs are willing to pay a slight premium for. That Intel sticker makes a laptop look like a quality product with quality parts in the eyes of the consumer.

AMD needs better salesmen. Their graphics cards are top notch but only because they deliver on performance. Nvidia is the premium brand.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do us all a favor and follow your own recommendation.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Rich0]

How does the cost/performance compare when you include the motherboard? From what I've seen with Intel you pay quite a bit more for comparable features on the board.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I saw those reviews before I purchased the chip, but thanks for the links anyways. The Wikipedia article (there's one for everything... ) goes into the Tomshardware and other reviews you cited , the initial reception of the chip and AMD's response and some adjustments they made.

I tried not to give the impression that I am defending this chip . Actually, I consider the attention both good and bad this chip has gotten to be to my benefit so I could make an informed buying decision. I also appreciate your obvious enthusiasm for the subject and take it for what it is.

From Wiki:

The first Bulldozer CPUs were met with a mixed response. It was discovered that the FX-8150 performed poorly in benchmarks that were not highly threaded, falling behind the second-generation Intel Core i* series processors and being matched or even outperformed by AMD's own Phenom II X6 at lower clock speeds.

In highly threaded benchmarks, the FX-8150 performed on par with the Phenom II X6, and the Intel Core i7 2600K, depending on the benchmark.

Given the overall more consistent performance of the Intel Core i5 2500K at a lower price, these results left many reviewers underwhelmed.

The processor was found to be extremely power-hungry under load, especially when overclocked, compared to Intel's Sandy Bridge.[27][28]

The Tom's Hardware website commented that the lower-than-expected performance in multi-threaded workloads may be because of the way Windows 7 currently schedules threads to the cores.

They point out that "if Windows were able to utilize an FX-8150's four modules first, and then backfill each module's second core, it'd maximize performance with up to four threads running concurrently."

This is similar to what happens on Intel CPUs with HyperThreading â" Windows 7 "schedules to physical cores before utilizing logical (HyperThreaded) cores."[29]

On 13 October, AMD stated on its blog that "there are some in our community who feel the product performance did not meet their expectations", but showed benchmarks on actual applications where it outperformed "Sandy Bridge i7 2600k" and "AMD X6 1100T".[30]

On 6 March 2012, AMD posted a knowledge base article stating that there was a compatibility issue with FX processors, and certain games on the widely used digital game distribution platform, Steam. AMD stated that they had provided a BIOS update to several motherboard manufacturers (namely: Asus, Gigabyte Technology, MSI, and ASRock) that would fix the issue.[31]

I have an recent ASUS MB that I bought with the chip and I am telling you I think the chip is blazing. Just my opinion. I also have zero problem keeping it in the 75 F range ... it gets up to 95 F when it's working on file compression / comparison for a LONG time-.. I mean hours and hours.

As far as energy is concerned, the less energy the better no question. My house has LED lights and tons of insulation , plus we source 10% of our power from renewable resources thanks to our local utility so.. meh.. won't feel it in the pocketbook and the my fellow earthlings won't feel increased carbon emissions because of it either.

All the apps I run are muti-threaded.. woudl 6have done? Perhaps uut the 8 outperform the 6, as the AMD footnote cited by Wiki shows.

Right now, this is the best chip AMD has to offer and as I said intel was not an option for moral reason. So I bought the best I could . Buying the best was not out of my price range, and that doesn't happen in too many categories of Things I Wish I Owned.

I liked AMD's reposte and benchmarks here ...and also notice what the first commentor has to say; I fully concur, and no, it wasn't me.

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2011/10/13/our-take-on-amd-fx/

Thanks for the lively discussion.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Correction - we source 100% of our power from renewable sources... LOL big difference!

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[KingMotley]

Is single threaded the normal use-case

Unfortunately, for most software, the answer is yes. Most software is single threaded, or very lightly using two threads. The most threads I've seen in use by any game is 4 (Supreme Command 2 I believe). You really won't see any benefit in running any of these apps until you start to overload the number of CPUs you have, which running a bunch of non-CPU intensive stuff in the background really won't affect any of them on a 4+ core CPU.

Most people get confused and see a bunch of CPUs all being used x%, and think their software is multithreaded, but in reality it's one single thread that is just getting bounced between all the cores. Disabling the extra cores won't speed up the program, or setting it to force the app to a specific core won't hinder it's performance either. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, like photoshop, video encoding (Many of these are even limited to a certain number of cores, for example, Handbrake which uses x264 to do the heavy lifting won't use all 6 of my physical cores/12 hyperthreaded -- the decoding is single threaded and bottlenecks all the encoding threads -- effectively only using ~5 cores).

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[kimvette]

Shut. Down. EVERYTHING.

If they lay off engineering and sales, they may just as well do that.

Engineering: create product to sell

Sales: sell product engineering creates

How about axing middle management instead?

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Anonymous Coward]

ECC support.
Oh, and don't forget the +$100 for a Asus P8B-WS vs. a M5A97...

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

The big problem is...and again if you are happy with it I'm glad, as i tell the guys that buy Apple if at the end of the day if it works for you personally that is all that should matter to you, is this:...8 cores is a niche that frankly 99%+ of the population will have ZERO use for in this chips lifetime. Know what the big seller is here? the X3 chips, why? because frankly most users can't find enough useful work to fill up triple cores. So you have a niche that lets face it, pretty much leaves gamers, yet your new chip performs worse than the previous one for that niche while cost more and being in the same price range as the Intel i5 which again curbstomps.

Then you have the whole "half core" issue which be honest man...its retarded, it really is. First of all they didn't tell MSFT who is now royally fucking AMD by refusing to fix it except in Win 8, they even pulled the patch because it screwed more than it fixed, its pretty obvious it was designed for the APUs which again, zero appeal to gamers as they don't want IGP graphics and the IGPs built on chip kills OCing ability, and it ties a boat anchor to most games and fucks up Steam which your own article notes.

Again this chip? Its Netburst man, its just netburst all over again. Intel thought they could get the clocks high enough that the stalls from having a long pipeline would be covered by MHz and HT, AMD thinks they can cover for worse than Phenom single core by ramping up clocks and stacking on the cores yet...who the fuck needs 8 half cores? I can get the Thubans for a good $45-$60 cheaper than FX, add $20 or more for Denebs or Athlon triples and quads....so sell it to me, what use is this to my customers? What could possibly justify the increased cost, and why should I buy the FX over the i5?

So if it works for you, you like the Win 8 Metrosexual UI and are happy switching so Windows don't tie a boat anchor? I'm happy for you, I really am. But forget the FX 81x0 chips for a minute and look at the lower SKUs, the FX4 and FX6...now what is the selling point there? Hell you can't even use ACC to take a shot at a poor man's upgrade like you could with the Athlons and Phenoms. Hell do you know how many successful unlocks I've seen here at the shop? We are talking a good 75% good unlocks here but again Thuban is going for $89-$120 and at that price who cares about all the extra BS and worse performance just to have a pair of integer modules that most will never use?

In the end what was keeping AMD in the game is all the system builders like me and OEMs pushing the whole "bang for the buck" mantra but the FX chips don't even have that, in the work most have day to day an FX4 will suck worse than a Deneb and will frankly barely beat an Athlon X4 unless you crank the locks, with the FX4100 scoring especially shitty in real world tests, and again the chips its competing against are not only even with it or even better on performance but frankly since the release of the FX they don't even get a single slot on Tom's hardware "Best chips for $xxx" list as the Sandy Pentiums again stomp the FX4 and are cheaper than the FX4, so what's the selling point?

I'm sorry but we'll just have to agree to disagree as I'm getting such low prices on Phenoms and Athlons and I can't find a single selling point for the FX chips. My gamer customers are better off with Thuban and i5 as they are sticking with Win 7 for now and Win 7 and games don't know what to make of the FX, the regular customers don't need 8 cores and the FX6 and FX4 are more expensive with truly lackluster performance per watt and overall performance...frankly again the only real niche I see for the FX is those that automatically think "Moar is better" and servers where you can buy a 16 core FX for around half what you can for an Intel with the same number of cores.

So I'll stick as long as I can to selling the AM3+ Phenoms and Athlons, as well as selling Liano and Bobcat units, but when they are gone if they don't have something better suited for my customers I'm just gon

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

And don't forget we aren't talking about a single core Intel VS an 8 core AMD here, we are comparing with both the Thuban, 6 cores and Turbocore, and the i5 2500K which gives you 4 cores and turbo. And sadly in both cases the single core performance is better than the half core design of the FX while costing as much as $60 LESS for the Thuban and less than $40 more for the Intel.

Hell I've been getting Thubans for $89-$120 depending on if they are having a sale with the average price at $110. What does AMD have in that price range in the FX line? The FX6 which the critic have firmly trounced for its bad performance against not only the Pentium G520 but also the Thuban. And that isn't even bring the Deneb Phenoms and Athlons into the mix which can be had for even cheaper now.

In the end i just can't see a selling point for FX unless you buy the FX8 and are one of the very few people that have a ton of loads where you can hit all 8 cores constantly, like image batch processing or video transcoding. Hell even then because of such piss poor single thread performance i'd have to wonder if you wouldn't be better off with the Thuban X6 or the i5 2500K, with the money you saved on the chip by going thuban you could add a 60gb SSD which would stomp an FX with a HDD, or with the Intel have killer IPC and a 3.7GHz turbo while having 4 cores that would probably chew through the loads nearly as fast as the FX does with 8.

Its just not a good design, any way you slice it. That's why I'll keep selling Phenoms and Athlons until i can't get 'em cheap anymore, along with llano and Bobcat mobiles, and hope that the former Apple/Athlon 64 chip designer they hired can come up with something better.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[hairyfeet]

What is sad is their conclusion is the same thing we have been saying, quote "the conclusion is crystal clear: there are very few arguments in favor of the FX CPU right now." and as a system builder that is exactly what I've been saying. I can get Thuban X6, Deneb and Athlon quads all for cheaper than I can get an FX with an equal or greater number of cores and the performance is equal or in single threaded better and against the Intel chips in the same price range it gets curbstomped.

Did you know that AMD hasn't had a single slot in Tom's hardware "Best chip for $xxx" in several quarters? they can't even rule the low end anymore because the Sandy based Pentiums while having less cores stomps them so badly on IPC and gaming as you pointed out rarely goes beyond 2 cores so there really isn't a selling point for FX. Most of my customers simply can't come up with enough work to stress a triple, much less a quad, so bolting on ever more cores to make up for low performance per core really doesn't help.

Frankly to be able to compete they'd need to shave another $40 off the FX8 and get it down to where the Thubans are selling now, and $25 off the frankly piss poor FX4 and FX6 but if the rumors are true they've got razor thin margins on the FX line thanks to poor yields which the previous chip didn't suffer from. Its just a seriously bad time for AMD, the FX chips suck, they canceled the successor to bobcat that was supposed to come out last year which while having low margins was a cheap chip with high yields but now that the next version of bobcat will end up coming out right at the same time as the latest Atom so that's not good, and finally Trinity just doesn't do good on the power usage, like FX the Bulldozer/piledriver design just doesn't do well with low power which with the popularity of mobile is seriously bad news. Its just not a good place for AMD right now that's for sure.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

IGPs built on chip kills OCing ability

and yet:it goes to 8.8 GHZ and perhaps 9 GHZ:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-bulldozer,15853.html

So there's more to the story than the simple statements you're making.

I know there are people out there who feel the way you do, but there are people just as knowledgeable who feel the opposite also and who can match you point by point. I freely and cheerfully admit it seems you're more technically savvy than me on CPUs, however, that doesn't make what you're saying correct or definitive.

My point stands: the 8150 is the top of the line AMD chip and it's imminently affordable and performance wise, I have found it to be awesome.

Earlier I linked you to the price/performance valuation which put the 8150 at the top of the heap; your opinion differs and you have your own sites which rate something else as being better, OK, but that evaluation is not some kind of fraud being perpetrated on unwary consumers. I think experts are genuinely disagreeing here, as opposed to people just misrepresenting reality all over the place.

Overclocking is not a problem at all.. my ASUS board makes it a no brainer , basically "how much faster do you want to go? .. push this button".

The Roadmap also seems to include the AM3+ socket. That would give me an upgrade path for which I am thankful.

I'll give you this AMD overpromised on this chip. They did. It is not 50% faster than the 2600k. Obviously they are aware of this and being the great company they are, I am pretty sure they won't misfire like that again any time soon. It's a new design. I am not on Windows 8 and it seems unlikely I will go there even if it does improve my performance because I really hate giving money to Microsoft also. But that's another topic.

Cheers.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[stoatwblr]

> The person above that said it, said it right. Machines are just good enough these days.

That's the crux of the the problem and it's been coming for a while. The market hit saturation point about 5 years ago and most machines are still "good enough" for their intended purpose.

The entire PC market has been built around relentless growth and replacement of business machines every 3 years. We're finding that 5-6 year old machines do fine for most business applications, so we're not replacing them unless we actually need to.

Even research machines don't need as much upgrading. You can't put a $20k 64-core 512Gb machine on a desktop (it's far too noisy), so existing desktop machines which used to be state-of-the-art 3-4 years ago are being used as Xterms for the big boxes - and that means we save about $40k/year on desktop equipment spend. People are buying tablets instead of new desktops and they're still way cheaper than the money we used to put into the desktops.

I understand why AMD is struggling, and it's not good, but their money is in the commodity processors. Top end stuff is worth a bit of PR hype but the sales don't cover development costs. When things get tight a company has to focus on what it does best - which is graphics cards and fusion CPUs, plus rolling out more low-power kit for bulk sales into appliances.

Re:10% decline in quarterly revenues?

[Shirley Marquez]

The 8150 does better in Linux benchmarks than it does on Windows, because the Linux scheduler has been fixed to be aware of it. I'm curious to see how much of an improvement the 8350 will turn out to be.

Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just...damn. Intel wins.

Re:Damn.

[symbolset]

Not yet. And there is still ARM.

Re:Damn.

[Z00L00K]

Maybe AMD should look at the product line and see if they can lower the number of models they are presenting. Is it really necessary to have a separate line of server processors?

And when you look at the price/performance ratio AMD is doing well, but that only means that they are more suitable to the mid/low range PC:s.

Re:Damn.

[locopuyo]

It isn't just Intel beating them. Intel is beating them in desktop and laptop processors. Nvidia and Intel are beating them in video cards. The tablet and mobile market is expanding as desktop as shrinking and other companies are taking that market share.

Re:Damn.

[ericloewe]

AMD is more than competitive in the discrete GPU market. Intel is only popular in low-power, and it's still not at AMD iGPU levels.

Re:Damn.

[lightknight]

Aside from the botched FX series, AMD is fine in higher-end PCs. However, that last processor line screwed the pooch, and for some odd reason, they bought into the hype / nonsense about low-power devices being "The Next Big Thing," and failed to ready a new top of the line processor. They're doing it to themselves.

As for the server stuff, hell yes they need a separate line. Those 12-core and 16-core processors are selling like hotcakes among University / College net admins, who want as many cores as possible for their VMs / clouds / whatever. No one needs the slight single-threaded performance boost and huge cost disparity that Intel has been offering.

Re:Damn.

[Z00L00K]

My point was rather that they should have those multi-core processors in the general lineup of processors instead. Not killing the multi-core solutions. I wouldn't mind having a 16 core processor but it's still expensive.

There are other things that can be done too - why not have processors with a mix of 64-bit and 32-bit cores? Not all applications are 64-bit. And maybe see if they can do something that is similar to the hyperthreading that Intel has.

Re:Damn.

[rcoxdav]

As ericloewe said, AMD is more than competitive in the discrete card market. If you check out the tomshardware.com best buy for the price range for video cards, almost every month AMD cards dominate. For example, take a look at the recent 650ti launch for Nvidia. It came out at a price of $150, while the Radeon 1GB 7850 is currently at $160, about 7% more, but has roughly a 15-20% performance increase. The reason Nvidia is ahead is first that there is a perception of being better made by fan boys, and also, that Nvidia throws a LOT of money at developers to make games "Made for Nvidia" (I don't remember the exact phrase actually), which includes PhysX. I have met quite a few people that for no good reason refuse to buy AMD/ATI cards, but slavishly get Nvidia, even when they would be better off financially and performance wise with an AMD. And, AMD is normally many months ahead in releasing next gen cards. CPU wise, especially with their APU's for low end machines, they are also very competitive for a light gaming machine. Their latest APU was about twice as fast in games with better game support than the Intel HD 4000 on a core i7. CPU heavy things, the Intel chips were faster. However, I know a few people with laptops with the AMD A8 APU's, and they do not notice any everyday lag, and they can game on a laptop that has discrete video card performance in a $500-600 laptop.

Re:Damn.

[hairyfeet]

Actually I'd say the problem is too LITTLE SKUs as they are pushing a chip designed for servers onto the desktop where.....it just doesn't work. remember the WinChip? That is pretty much Bulldozer in a nutshell. If you weren't playing games or multimedia WinChip was great and could be had for cheap, but home users DO play games and multimedia.

They should have kept thuban until they had another desktop chip, as it was "good enough" while being cheap thanks to the high tields. Now though all the can really sell is Liano and fool some people with FX and hope that'll get 'em through until the new Apple chip designer they hired can come up with something good. But the numbers show that enough people have seen the benches to know if they have thuban or even Deneb they are better just staying where they are at than buying the latest chips. Makes a good server chip from what I hear.

Re:Damn.

[lightknight]

They did something similar to the hyperthreading that Intel does -> that was the Bulldozer design! As it stands, they actually did it better than Intel, but it's still not what their customers were looking for.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know, that "new Apple chip designer" they hired was actually an old AMD chip designer - the guy who ran the Athlon64 series of chips. I keep cringing whenever you keep saying "that new Apple chip designer". Yes, he worked for Apple on the A series of iPad chips, but he is by no means new, and by no means solely an Apple designer.

He was also on the DEC Alpha design team way back.

But yes, people are looking forward to what he comes up with.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

And because of his Alpha heritage, you hear things about the Apple A6 being "hand designed" - that's his hallmark

Re:Damn.

[washu_k]

The problem is that AMD called its version of hyper-threading a full core, which it clearly is not. Even though they put a second integer unit in the module, most other parts are shared and the performance of the second half of the module suffers. The FX-8150 is really a 4 core CPU with a good hyper-threading implementation, not an 8 core CPU. If the FX CPUs had claimed to have hyper-threading instead of full cores then Windows 7 would have scheduled properly on them.

Re:Damn.

[dshk]

A unit is is not a pair of full cores, but almost. It is not in the same leauge as hyperthreading. Almost all parts are duplicated, or has enough performance to serve both cores without slowdown. As I see there are only special situations, which cause the two cores to collide (like the issue with shared libraries on randomized addresses, occassionally causing frequent cache collisions - already solved in Linux kernel), but in 99% of the workloads the pairs do not slow down each other.

For example, contrary to the common oppinion, the two cores in the module can do floating point operations parallel, the only restriction is that they cannot do 256 bit operations. On the other hand if only one core in a pair does 128 bit operations it can grab the other half of the floating point hardware of the unit. I think it is a very clever design, but the OS and compilers do need time to adopt.

See this article for more information: AMD Bulldozer - What's a Module, what's a Core?

Re:Damn.

[washu_k]

No, "Almost all parts" are not duplicated. Only the integer units and the L1 data caches are duplicated. The L1 instruction cache, the instruction fech, instruction decode (the big performance hit), branch predictor, instruction dispatcher, FPU and bus interface are all shared. Running almost any two threads that max out the "cores" on the same module is slower than running them on two separate modules.

Just because AMD calls them cores does not make it true.

Re:Damn.

[cheesybagel]

There are better development tools for NVIDIA cards and their latest card is better performing than what AMD can currently offer. This was not true in the previous generation however.

Re:Damn.

[hairyfeet]

Dude when it comes to chips its all about "What was your last job?" and helping design the Apple A6 which was wildly popular and a damned nice chip? I think he deserves to be called the Apple guy as i bet if you looked at the numbers Apple probably moved more A6 than AMD moved Athlon64.

Also AMD needs all the positive buzz they can get and having a guy that worked on such a wildly popular chip generates positive buzz for AMD which frankly AMD really needs. Every time I've pointed out on forums they hired the guy that did the A6 I always get a variant of "Oh wow, really? that's a good chip, I hope he can do something that good for AMD" and since we really need AMD to be competitive generating a little positive buzz for AMD is a good thing.

Even after the faildozer mess I'm still building AM3+ desktops and E350 SOHO/HTPC units, and selling E350/450 and Liano quads on the mobile side. I haven't forgotten the compiler rigging and OEM bribery which frankly should have gotten an antitrust investigation so as long as AMD has something, hell anything, that gives a good bang for the buck I'll be selling them. Even my own family is all AMD, between us we have 6 AMD desktops and netbooks, so its not like I don't hope they get better ya know.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

they bought into the hype / nonsense about low-power devices being "The Next Big Thing," and failed to ready a new top of the line processor.

The shareholders bought into the hype and then CEO Dirk Meyer was fired because he didn't buy into it.

Re:Damn.

[poofmeisterp]

Now it's a monopoly! *snicker*

Oh, come on. I'm just playing. ;)

How about laying off the consultants instead?

[KingSkippus]

How about laying off the consultants instead?

I'm serious. Consultants are nothing but leeches, and they will almost always give you advice on how you can make your company just like every other company in your industry. I yearn for the days when companies looked for ways to set themselves apart, to stand out from the crowd, instead of trying desperately to follow lockstep in line with everyone else. Other companies have massive layoffs, so hey, let's do it too!

Especially the engineers. You need engineers to keep doing what you do. This really bodes badly for AMD, because without engineers, they're basically slitting their company's wrists. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.

But hey, it's their funeral, so whatever gets the stock price up a little bit so that they can cash out their options, right?

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[mewsenews]

Especially the engineers. You need engineers to keep doing what you do. This really bodes badly for AMD, because without engineers, they're basically slitting their company's wrists. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.

Early retirement - the perfect recipe for short term savings and long term loss of institutional knowledge!!

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an engineer software consultant. Typically I'm brought in because I know something specialized (networking, embedded systems), but sometimes I'm grunt labor.

You would be surprised how many layoffs I've survived as a consultant. Companies seem to enjoy canning the regular folks and keep those of us who can be told "don't need u no mo, here's the check, there's the door".

I'm going to miss AMD. I see no way for them to survive, but their dying will be bad for the industry. Remember 10-15 years ago when the AMD chips beat the Intel chips, and forced Intel out of their complacency? With AMD gone where is Intel's motivation to keep the desktop going? Not to mention the graphics part.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Consultants are cheaper (for the next quarter atleast), duh!

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Spy Handler]

Remember 10-15 years ago when the AMD chips beat the Intel chips, and forced Intel out of their complacency? With AMD gone where is Intel's motivation to keep the desktop going? Not to mention the graphics part.

You don't have to go back that far. In 2005 I bought an Athlon and it outperformed comparable Pentium 4 Hyperthreading chips. At that time Intel kept upping the clock speed but there was no corresponding increase in performance. My Athlon which was 2.2 ghz (i think) outperformed Pentium 4 HT 3.0 ghz.

It wasn't until Intel came out with the Core2Duo that they began to push AMD aside.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[FirephoxRising]

Losing Engineers and the CFO is already gone...... Bad news. Honestly, if I saw our CFO selling/shorting stock and/or leaving then I'd really panic, they always seem to know what's going on, and when to take their golden parachute!

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[blind biker]

Consultants are nothing but leeches, and they will almost always give you advice on how you can make your company just like every other company in your industry. I yearn for the days when companies looked for ways to set themselves apart, to stand out from the crowd, instead of trying desperately to follow lockstep in line with everyone else. Other companies have massive layoffs, so hey, let's do it too!

Thank you for articulating that though for me so clearly. I've always hated consultants, and their stupid, homogenizing action.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't RIM basically an engineer-run business? Doesn't seem to be working too well for them. You need people who understand business and sometimes that comes from consultants. And I say this as an engineer.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to survive as a chip maker, you should keep an eye on the other chip makers... and AMD should have homegenized (in this case, diversified) a long time ago. They coasted on their strong showing in laptops as desktop sales withered, left the high-margin server market to Intel, and did nothing for mobile.

Now desktops are dead and laptops are slipping... leaving AMD hanging off a cliff by the tips of their fingers. Maybe they should've taken the time to set anchors elsewhere, instead of focusing entirely on having the best budget laptop processor.

You can imagine how brilliant that strategy is looking right about now.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Third level education typically does not specialise in, and rarely even features, independent thought beyond certain strict boundaries. Essentially its a brain factory. So as the first generation of entrepreneurs moves on and retires, the people who take their place are Properly Qualified and Of The Highest Standard, but they don't know how an entrepreneur thinks, don't like taking risks, and got where they are by doing things according to the book. Consultants don't force CEOs to obey them, the CEOs always make the final decision.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Killall -9 Bash]

The "Core" core was what put intel back in the lead... and they didn't even develop it themselves. They purchased an Israeli company that was making a new CPU based on the old P-III coppermine core.

Intel was, up until that point, still fighting the MegaHurtz war. This is in spite of the fact that the war had already ended a few years back when the AthlonXP line was easily beating higher clocked P4s. Intel's only answer was MOAR MHZ!!!1, spreading FUD about the performance ratings assigned to the AMD chips, and silly branding schemes that made me smack my head every time someone insisted they wanted a Centrino processor.

I really resent Intel for "cheating" their way back into first place.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[TheRaven64]

The Pentium M was competitive. It wasn't in the high-end market, but it had better performance per Watt than anything AMD had to offer. It took them a really long time to produce anything competitive for laptops - laptop sales had overtaken desktops by the time they did, and they missed out on the period when it was the fastest growing segment.

Intel had the advantage that they had a lot of chips under development. I strongly suspect that the Israeli team that was working on the low-power version of the P3 was underfunded and completely off the radar of Intel's strategists until they suddenly noticed that they desperately needed a decent laptop chip for a growing market and didn't have one.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Killall -9 Bash]

If desktop sales are dead, its not because people don't want desktops anymore. Its because they already have one, and don't need a new one. Same with laptops.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[runeghost]

Forget the consultants, how about ditching the CEO and his $15 million in compensation?

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[lightknight]

Exactly. They should be doubling-down on a new high-end processor design, not shedding employees that know their shit. They appear to be making the same mistakes that HP and friends have made in times past ("Hey, do we even need a PC division?"), which usually happens when you have the wrong people in high places. The company becomes a pump-and-dump, with each new CEO talking about turning things around and not succeeding, while accepting golden parachutes, with slight stock increases followed by larger and larger dips after each new 'message,' while assets are sold / spun off, until the main company is sold off to foreign competitors, and finally buried.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[drinkypoo]

Intel sold a lot of low-power P3s. I don't think those guys were off the radar at all. Intel would have to be massively lame to not keep a few irons in the fire since they are so massively massive. Itanic failed and Intel didn't crater. P4 failed (eventually) and Intel didn't crater. AMD, on the other hand, has to bet the farm, because they don't have so many engineers. And now they're getting rid of some...

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

They can survive - no problem. Raise prices 10% across the board and release Piledriver.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[hairyfeet]

Haven't been keepin up with the drama at AMD have you? I wish I'd have thought to save the bookmark as my Google Fu sucketh but on one of the AMD forums one of the engineers that USED to work at AMD (so if you want to call him disgruntled okay, but he really sounded more frustrated) talked all about how they got rid of ALL the guys that worked at Cryix, that worked on the Athlon64, they just culled all the guys that actually knew how to design chips and what did they replace them with? Computer layouts which according to this engineer (which since i'm not an engineer I'm just gonna have to take his word for it) which adds 20%+ to the power sucking and 20% die size while not gaining on the performance because the computer doesn't know how all the parts interact with each other.

So while I agree they need to fire the consultants, along with the moron that pissed on the FX name by tying it to the half ass bulldozer chip, if the engineer was telling the truth all the great guys were cut ages ago. They need to cull the guys that are just cashing a check and hire some engineers that have real knowledge and experience with hand designing chips and let them really cook up something good.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[xtracto]

. They purchased an Israeli company that was making a new CPU based on the old P-III coppermine core

.

Could you expand on that? maybe provide a link? I am really curious about that story.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[jeffmeden]

It used to be that AMD and Intel fought over the hugely profitable desktop and server market (when everyone needed good traditional desktops and servers), and both made out like bandits. Now, the desktop market is seriously sliding, the server market is stagnant, and the only thing growing is mobile (which is where intel is heading). Good graphics cards are even going the way of the dinosaur as games like angry birds are far far more popular than the latest Far Cry. AMDs core markets are disappearing. Intel will continue to fight for desktops over tablets and smartphones (until intel chips are in both) and will fight for servers over the specialized super core stuff, so the competition has just shifted from Intel vs AMD to Intel vs alternatives. Had the mobile revolution happened 6 or 7 years ago maybe AMD would have been positioned to move but now, they are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Intel is still very much motivated to fight for their existence, as good chips wholly made in Asia are becoming more and more common.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[edxwelch]

It's bullshit. The Isreali division of Intel were making a version called Pentium M, and that turned into Core

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[slyfox]

Intel has long had a group Israel, in fact, the two major design teams are in Oregon and Israel, and they alternate new core micro-archiectures every generation (which is a two-year tick/tock cycle, so each design time works on a new core design on a four-year cycle).

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but that is not correct. Intel has operated in Isreal since 1976 and the Core architecture was a revision of the P6 architecture (designed by Intel in 1993) with a few minor tweaks to reduce power consumption.

Post a reference to anreduce aquisition in Isreal or it didn't happen.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

anreduce = an ... autocomplete fail

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[nighthawk243]

Yep. It is much easier to hide the cost of hiring contractors from the shareholders than it is to hide the payroll.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[nighthawk243]

This. The difference between a Pentium and a Pentium II used to be so staggering that most people would upgrade.

Now, the difference in usability between a Core2Quad (2007) and a Ivy Bridge i5 (2012) is rather minuscule to most home consumers. I know guys who are still using a Q6600 as their primary processor for gaming, and it runs Diablo III fine for them; they don't even overclock. Hell, the only reason I got rid of my ancient Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (from 2006) was primarily because my motherboard crapped the bed (capacitors) and Socket 939 boards in 2010 were too ridiculously overpriced to even justify buying.

The upgrade cycle went from every two years to every 5-7 years. I don't buy a completely new system as often as I used to... even when I do, I still reuse a ton of the parts from the previous one since I tend to add new parts as old ones fail.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[nighthawk243]

Well, RIM was doing well until Apple decided to release their own smartphone in 2007. The iPhone stole a large chunk of the young female demographic that RIM depended on (before the iPhone, most girls I knew with a smartphone had their crackberries), as well as a large chunk of their executive/business clients (the only member of management still using a using a BlackBerry where I work is our CEO). Also the emergence of Android in the mainstream mobile market has also buried BlackBerry as well.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[nighthawk243]

"Do we even need a space heater division?"

FTFY.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[servognome]

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.

Typically they will trim based on projects that aren't profitable, for example anything related to netbooks will likely be shuttered. Once the project is killed you reshuffle staff casting aside those who are redundant in another group. Usually there isn't a differentiation between junior engineer over senior ones ones because the overall cost including benefits isn't that much different. The biggest difference is between those with or without a PhD, since the latter can be offset by R&D tax credits.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Sebastopol]

If you have any data backing up your claim about intel buying an Israeli company, I would like to read it, because I've never heard this theory before.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[AK Marc]

Ah yes, the traditional anti-education rants on Slashdot. The problem isn't the education, it's the knowledge. Someone who started low in the company *and* got appropriate third level education will be a better leader than the accountants that make it up to CEOs in industries they have never worked in and don't understand, and make a better leader than someone who worked their way up the same company without the third level education.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[cheesybagel]

Intel didn't purchase anything. They have had an Israeli design team since back when the 8087 FPU was designed. Yes that long.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[MechaStreisand]

If that's really the case, though, it's too late. Nothing can save them now. And if they really did can the guys who could design good architectures, then they deserve to fail. It's just a shame that with AMD gone, there will be no way to get ECC for a desktop system.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[hairyfeet]

Well according to him that is EXACTLY what happened, the CEO they had before this last guy basically just culled the entire braintrust, all the Cyrix and Athlon64 guys that did all the hand designs and replaced them with low level grunts and computer layouts. I remember when i read his rant thinking "Hmmm...now where did I see this same play before? Oh yeah when Circuit City fired all the experienced salesmen and replaced them with mickey D's workers." and that didn't work out too well.

But there IS a reason to hope, they did just hire the guy responsible for the Apple A6 who just so happened to be one of the leads on the Athlon64 team. So hopefully he'll "get the band back together" and get some of the best of the hand designers back and give us another great chip like the Athlon64 because honestly? he couldn't do any worse than faildozer.

And of course you can always build an AM3+ system now while the Thubans are so dirt cheap, I picked one up for a customer last week on sale for $89! Six full cores for that cheap? Talk about a no brainer. Hell even when its not on sale you can get the 1035Ts and 1045ts for less than $120, and the new AM3+ boards from guys like Asrock hold 32Gb of RAM and with that much RAM and 6 cores that can keep most happy and do what you wanna do.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[karnal]

A friend gave me a full Q6400 (I think?) system; 2.4ghz oc'd to 3ghz solid for as long as he's had it. I just left it alone; it's been running Borderlands 2 just fine for me with a GTX 280. I keep thinking about upgrading; but I don't think I have a need - other than maybe an SSD...

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this completely. My desktop is about 3 years old now, and still runs perfectly well. If it were to die today and I could not repair it I would buy a new desktop today. I think we have reached a point where even the cheapest PC's are "good enough" for most people. Unless you need to do high-end stuff, your basic dual core CPU and integrated video chipset from 3 years ago will get the job done just fine.

Re:How about laying off the consultants instead?

[MechaStreisand]

Where do you find the six core CPUs that cheap? Newegg doesn't sell them that cheap, at least in my country...

Hope this isn't it for AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

That whole settlement with Intel wasn't enough...governments should have fined Intel for anticompetitive behavior. Now AMD is just circling the drain. :-(

Re:Hope this isn't it for AMD

[qbitslayer]

AMD is so focused on competing against Intel that they missed the smart phone and tablet revolution. Few manufacturers need or want their heterogeneous processors. They had their chance and they blew it. It's sad, really.

Re:Hope this isn't it for AMD

[symbolset]

That is exactly not the problem. Buying ATI and the debt involved is what is killing AMD. It was too bold. But given the same options I might have been so bold too. Hindsight is 20:20.

Re:Hope this isn't it for AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying ATI was brilliant, overpaying for it was foolhardy. Assuming they do a better job with the next generation of APUs they should be sitting pretty. What they really need more than anything else right now is more money for R&D.

Re:Hope this isn't it for AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. The goodwill was a heavy hand but the problem is what they did with ATI.

AMD was used to doing what AMD knew best - CPU's.
They sold off Imageon to Qualcomm because no one needs to be in smartphones or tablets.
They sold off Xilleon to Broadcomm because no one needs digital TV's.

If you look at the books, you'll notice that AMD classic was a sinking ship and they were hoping ATI would keep them above water. ATI as a separate business was still profitable after the purchase but AMD was not.

That tears it

[tsotha]

They hired the two Bobs.

Re:That tears it

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to keep TDWTF out of slashdot, okay?

Re:That tears it

[chippey]

They hired the two Bobs.

"Good luck with your layoffs, all right? I hope your firings go really well. "

Re:That tears it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there.

Short term shareholder value

[Phelan]

What do you do when you are trying to maximize short term shareholder value in a distribution based business?
Cut R&D, get rid of sales staff for new markets...
Hit your profit goal, sell stock, get bonus by the time the company goes under you're long gone with your friends at McKinney.
Usually it takes 3 years in hardware for a R&D cut to show in sales figures... Mark it down also mark down the current CEO will be chilling on his new island by that time

Re:Short term shareholder value

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD is in the mess they're in right now because their previous R&D didn't pan out. Bulldozer turned out to be a failure and AMD's competitor to the Atom, while better in most regards, is in a low margin segment of the market so even if they did take most of the sales there, it wouldn't help their profit all that much.

What the hell are they supposed to do at this point? The only part of the company that's doing well by any standards is their graphics division (formerly ATI) but that's not going to be enough to keep everything floating. They're going to need to cut somewhere as they're not making enough money to pay the staff that they have. Their best bet is to hold out long enough that someone else acquires the company. Not really sure who'd want to at this point, but their market cap is so low almost anyone could take them over.

Re:Short term shareholder value

[qbitslayer]

Not really sure who'd want to at this point, but their market cap is so low almost anyone could take them over.

  They got excellent engineers. They should sell themselves to either Apple, Google or Amazon.

Re:Short term shareholder value

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with you on that. Bulldozer was a disappointment, but ultimately it was a necessary disappointment. the articles I've been seeing about the next generation are a lot more optimistic. In the long run APUs are the way that the desktop is going to be going. They haven't been having any trouble selling all the chips they've been producing, they've been having trouble producing enough chips. Now that they're free to contract with any foundry they like, they should be in a better position.

The other thing is that Intel can't afford for AMD to go out of business.

Re:Short term shareholder value

[Anonymous Coward]

The other thing is that Intel can't afford for AMD to go out of business.

Why the hell not?
Isn't that exactly what Intel tries to do since at least the first Athlon?

Re:Short term shareholder value

[HJED]

because then Intel would have a monopoly and would be up for anti-trust.

Re:Short term shareholder value

[Luckyo]

This would demolish the company value as most if not all cross-licensing agreements with intel would get nullified by such transaction.

Re:Short term shareholder value

[stoatwblr]

> I disagree with you on that. Bulldozer was a disappointment, but ultimately it was a necessary disappointment

And a lot of the damage has been made up by the next generation piledriver cores. We can see the difference clearly in server performance, it's not just PR guff.

The improvements in processor modules alone are substantial, but for our use it'd be nicer to have non-shared FPUs

AMD learned quickly from the mistake of over-long pipelines, unlike Intel, who kept foisting 'em on us for several years.

Before someone jumps on this and asks why we're not using GPU boxes, the code being used doesn't support 'em. Astrophysicists don't make brilliant code at the best of times.

Servers

[corychristison]

And virtually all through Q3 I've been trying to get my hands on 4 Opterons 16-core (model 6272 I think).

Only last week Newegg finally received some of the new revised version but were out of stock for months.

Either they overcommitted to OEMs or they simply did not provision enough for people like me. If they were quicker to get the revision out I am sure they could have made up for that 10% drop.

I do understand this article is referring to desktop CPU's but the Opterons are still a part of their bottom line.

Re:Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Either they overcommitted to OEMs or they simply did not provision enough for people like me. If they were quicker to get the revision out I am sure they could have made up for that 10% drop.
I am an engineer at Intel. I work on core design and engineering of Intel's latest-and-greatest products, and have seen extensive internal reverse engineering work done on AMD products.

It's incredibly hard to just produce "more" of a new product when the process engineering side is not functioning stably, as we believe frequently to be the case for AMD. You'd be amazed how much a fab's ability to pump out silicon is limited by one or two critical pieces, like a lithography tool which is literally unique in the entire world, will cost $50 million to replace, and cannot be had for love or money in less than 3 months lead time.

Re:Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

The supercomputing geeks and tier 1 vendors got all of the early shipments. Be patient.

Re:Servers

[SQL Error]

Odd. We've been rolling out dual and quad Opteron 6272 servers steadily for the past six months. No problems with supply, and they mop the floor with Intel systems on price/performance.

But we don't buy from Newegg; we go through three vendors Supermicro recommended.

Re:Servers

[corychristison]

I should note I live in Canada. While that doesn't mean I cannot order from US shops, I do have a tendency to only search businesses that have some form of operation within Canada to avoid duties/import fee's.

I did find the odd Canadian online shop that only had 1 or two in stock (or on order). My primary "goto" is NCIX. They still do not have 12/16 core in stock.

I am not in any immediate hurry to get them, it's actually worked out to my benefit by holding off as now I have access to the latest revision. :-)

Re:Servers

[hairyfeet]

That's why you should always check Amazon and Tiger as well as the egg, if one don't have it the other two probably will. If you still need some Amazon has the 6272 for $520 which for a 16 core ain't bad. But I don't understand why they had to lower projections when they have had trouble keeping enough chips in the channel. Did they think they could make 3 times more than they could? Did GloFlo screw them again? Who knows.

Re:Servers

[corychristison]

Yes Amazon has some now.

My post was to indicate it was very difficult to purchase 4 at one time from a single vendor over the 3d Quarter.

Now they are rolling out the Opteron 6274, which you can get about the same price as the 6272 was.

As I mentioned to SQL Error above, I live in Canada so my searching efforts were certainly skewed as certain vendors are not available here unless I want to pay gobs of money in duties/import fees. Amazon Canada is not the same as Amazon USA. My last experience with Tiger was not great a few years ago so I have overlooked them. I should give them another shot.

Byte the bullet & make ARM chips

[Tablizer]

Have a foot in both x86 and ARM.

Re:Byte the bullet & make ARM chips

[Anonymous Coward]

With who? The management turds looking for very short term profit, or the engineers they keep firing?

Re:Byte the bullet & make ARM chips

[Rockoon]

Have a foot in both x86 and ARM.

You arent very well informed. AMD doesn't fab processors, so cannot possibly fab ARM processors. AMD is like ARM now and only designs processors, but unlike ARM they do not license the design out (probably they cannot, thanks to IP deals with Intel.)

AMD spun off their fab business in 2009, which is named Global Foundries, divesting their last shares in the company earlier this year.

Re:Byte the bullet & make ARM chips

[Tablizer]

But couldn't they still do the same with ARM? Customize it for specific needs and then coordinate the manufacturing?

The fab plants could potentially make x86 chips on their own, but instead they rely on AMD for design and customization. Same could be done for ARM chips. Yes, you'd have to pay ARM some royalties, but so does the competition.

Pussies

[tsotha]

Am I the only one who thinks management teams that bring in consultants to do mass layoffs are pussies? If you fuck up a company so badly 30% of the employees have to go, the very least you can do is not hide in the proverbial closet until it's over.

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

Management is probably not that good at determining who should go - especially as in this case it it not so much down to the individuals talent and contribution, rather it is more about his mission and his section and division's mission Managers don't normally do that - they are hired and trained to make tactical decisions.
Also add in the fact managers (at least the middle management) are equally eligible for layoff but are unlikely to recommend their own demise.
I don't see how anyone other than an external consultant could make a halfway unbiased judgment.

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think that if they were too incompetent to select the right people for the job and organize things properly,
that now they would be able to select which ones are the right people to get fired and how to organize that properly.

I have seen this exact scenario many, many times before.
The problem here is, that management itself is exempt from the firing.
And as long as that won't change, AMD is in for a long, seemingly endless Bataan death march to bankruptcy.
Only accelerated by Intel kicking them while they lie on the ground.

And usually, that never changes.
What rather happens, is that a small core team of experts goes on to create a new company, which then re-hires much of the old peers, except the idiots.
To then become competitive again.

Unfortunately, that takes *forever*.
So unless ARM and nVidia have some tricks up their sleeves, have fun with the Intel monopoly on desktop PCs for the next 10-15 years. :/

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM do have some tricks up their sleeves, it's just that none of them are going to rid you of your legacy wintel code ball and chain.

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't need extra people temporarily to lay off 2200 people at one go you've got way too many people working in your HR department full time.

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

Many times, even 1 is too many.

Re:Pussies

[WML MUNSON]

Am I the only one who thinks management teams that bring in consultants to do mass layoffs are pussies? If you fuck up a company so badly 30% of the employees have to go, the very least you can do is not hide in the proverbial closet until it's over.

One could argue that senior management doesn't have enough time in their day to organize and manage a mass layoff process at a company of this size.

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been through many layoffs at different companies, and I've concluded that if the company does as well as it would've by throwing darts at an alphabetical list of employees hung on a HR staffers' wall, it's doing pretty well as far as selection is concerned.

Re:Pussies

[Anonymous Coward]

Read has only been there for about 15 months, and maybe he doesn't trust the team he inherited (many of which departed during his tenure anyway, voluntarily or not). They may have institutional knowledge about how AMD has been doing things for the past 15 years, but do they know what AMD should be doing to compete going forward? Human nature is to assume that small adjustments will work. So Read is using the MBA consultants as shadow senior management, not because they know anything about semiconductors, but because they aren't vested in the past. Yeah, it's weak, but maybe he didn't have a lot of options.

Bizarro World

[bignetbuy]

So, profits are down and the answer is to lay off the people who bring in the profits? Or the people who build the products that make the money?

How is this right in any sense of the word? Instead of spot layoffs to raise the stock price a few cents, AMD should be focusing on beating the tar out of Intel, Nvidia, and ARM manufacturers. Or wondering why AMD doesn't have a chip that can drive a tablet?

Re:Bizarro World

[Anonymous Coward]

...Or wondering why AMD doesn't have a chip that can drive a tablet?

That would be one of the "tactical decisions" that the skilled management team at AMD has been hired and trained to perform. Now why are all top-level management not being axed? That's the real question.

Re:Bizarro World

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary doesn't accurately reflect the article, so as far as I can tell it's wrong.

The article says it will affect employees in engineering and sales, which were not affected by previous layoffs. That's very different from saying it will focus on engineering and sales. And if you cut 20-30% of your workforce after already cutting 10%, you pretty much have to dip into cutting the profit centres.

It sounds like AMD is trending in a very bad way when they're jettisoning a huge portion of their employee base, not just dealing with a few cents of stock price (it's been knocked down way more than a few cents on this news, anyway...). Inspirational thoughts about beating the tar out of all their competitors might not be enough.

Re:Bizarro World

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and you explain to me how to pay all these workers when the company no longer brings in the profits to be able to compensate them all. Did you by any chance discover how to grow money on trees? if so, by all means do tell.

Re:Bizarro World

[Anonymous Coward]

If profits are down because their products aren't selling, then they need to manufacture fewer products. Manufacturing fewer products requires fewer people. They should focus on improving their sales, but in the mean time, they'd be silly to build warehouses full of expensive CPUs that no one wants.

Re:Bizarro World

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you... not paid attention the past few years? Beating the tar out of nVidia and Intel is basically what they promised Radeons and the FX processors would do. They don't. Although the Radeons are at least mostly competitive.

and.... the Brazos/Hondo chips are.. capable of driving tablets. So......

Re:Bizarro World

[nighthawk243]

Because unfortunately many companies focus too much on profit margins and EBITA. My company used the EBITA model and laid off enough production workers and IT support that it ultimately bit us in the ass when our largest client completely changed their requirements for the contact we had with them. The industry I'm in requires everyone to have a clearance, and you just cannot replace that many people who need to pass a 3-7 month federal background investigation on the drop of the hat. Luckily our current CEO (came in after the mass layoff) also hates the word EBITA with a passion.

It doesn't really matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel will just give them a few billion. Cheaper than to deal with antitrust issues if AMD goes bankrupt.

Re:It doesn't really matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can just imagine this phone call. "Hey Rory, it's Paul. Hey look, we were clearing up some stuff and found this old court case with you that's not settled yet. As you know, our graphics is improving, but still widely not well regarded, and I know we've got some process stuff you'd like to use. I was thinking we could roll up a settlement in the usual cross-license deal to make the NDA stick and throw in a little money to take the sting away... say, four billion? .... Yes, cash. .... Great. I'll have Stacy fax over the forms and we'll see if we can't get the funds transferred by morning. So how's Mary? Are you free for a round of golf next Tuesday? It's been a while."

Re:It doesn't really matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's quite possibly the least interesting or insightful fictional story this year.

Loss? What Loss?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Early retirement - the perfect recipe for short term savings and long term loss of institutional knowledge!!

But, but, its all documented! So even kids right out of school can replace the laid-off engineers when demand comes back.

Sheesh! It's not like they're VP's or something equally irreplaceable!

3. Profit!

Future Monopoly of Intel

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

I'm really interested to know how this affects Intel. If their main competitor is (theoretically) starting to die off as a company, that would naturally push them towards a monopolistic state, simply because so few companies *can* compete any more. Building next gen chips seems like it's an awfully high barrier to entry for a company just getting started. With the prospect of becoming an actual monopoly it seems like Intel would really want AMD to continue thriving in just enough capacity to keep sharpening their claws against them. Throwing it out there for the business-savvy or people who have seen it before in the economy, but what do you do to keep your competitor alive?

Re:Future Monopoly of Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

The same thing you'd do as a monopoly: keep your prices high and cheap out on research, manufacturing costs, and support. Actually, I said "monopoly", but I suppose you could substitute "publicly-traded company" if you added draining the assets through dividends (while the tax rate on those is still at 15%), running through an interminable stream of CEOs with their golden handshakes/parachutes, and trimming away non-managerial personnel.

Re:Future Monopoly of Intel

[slew]

I doubt there's much Intel could do to keep AMD alive at this point (even if they wanted to).

If they had a fab perhaps Intel could allow them to second source parts (but they spun out Global Foundaries)
If they had something Intel didn't have they could license it (like a mobile GPU which they sold to Qualcomm)
If they had an ARM licence (which they don't and Intel sold theirs to Marvell, so they probably don't really want it anyhow)
If they just gave them money (they already gave them $1B, about 50% of their current market cap)

I don't think at this point Intel can legally do much to keep AMD alive (without violating Anti-trust, and/or their shareholder fiduciary duty)... If you recall several years ago Google was trying some manuvers to keep Yahoo from falling into Microsoft's hand, and they realized there was little they could do for them w/o violating Anti-trust and/or their shareholder fiduciary duty...

Given that the PC market is in freefall right now, there's about 0% chance that there will be any consequence from regulators of being a monopoly in that space. In the server space, they are likely to become a strategic resource to the government (not unlike Boeing or Micron), so they probably can breathe easy in this area as well.

The only remote danger they probably face is someone proposing they get broken up (like AT&T) into a fab business and a chip design business, but given the state of the economy, I don't see anyone in government pushing for that anytime soon.

Re:Future Monopoly of Intel

[chowdahhead]

Intel was caught looking at their shoes the last time AMD was pushed to the brink and spun off their fabs to Global Foundries. I really don't think Intel saw that coming. If AMD starts selling assets again, it's probably going to be the Chinese government stepping in. They wouldn't need Longsoon anymore. That could really hurt Intel, both in terms of the Asian market and the unlimited financial resources that a reorganized AMD would have.

Re:Future Monopoly of Intel

[nighthawk243]

The closest competitor to Intel after AMD is ARM... and I really don't see too many desktops/laptops with ARM. PowerPC is another, but since Apple ran to Intel, they're mostly out of that sector as well with the exception of a few niche machines (such as A-EON's machines meant for the AmigaOS fans).

Not exactly

[rsilvergun]

It's been said before and will again, AMD will not be allowed to die, if only because the PC manufacturers are clever enough to know they need at least two vendors for the most critical part of their product. If Microsoft hadn't played games with Windows 8's ARM build I'd say AMD might be on the chopping block for real, but well, that's Microsoft for you.

Re:Not exactly

[lawnboy5-O]

But isn't the reason they are downsizing due to competition?

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

No, AMD made some really stupid decisions over the last 10 years or so. Things like over paying for ATI, but they've been able to sell all the chips they've produced.

The problem is that they're still paying off that debt and need to put more money into R&D. I'm not sure what engineers they're allegedly going to be laying off, but I can't imagine them laying off any that are working in R&D.

AMD won't be going out of business any time soon because Intel can't afford the kind of questions that would raise. AMD is pretty much the only reason why there's any meaningful innovation in that particular area of chips.

Last I checked, Intel laptop chips were grossly overpriced and under powered. The laptop I'm using was half the price of the equivalent Intel based laptop and while it doesn't get quite as good battery life, for the price difference I could buy a metric crap ton of batteries for it.

Re:Not exactly

[AK Marc]

Last I checked, Intel laptop chips were grossly overpriced and under powered.

My i7 3612QM is doing just fine, and there wasn't a price premium for my laptop compared to others I saw. My desktop (AMD, 5 years old) is now the slowest computer in the house, behind some other AMDs and 2 intels.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you could buy a crapton of batteries, but most people don't want to carry a crapton of batteries with them, because the point of a laptop is usually to be light, and easy to carry. Also, I'm not quite sure how you got that the equivalent CPU costs that much more, but the price difference isn't really that big.

Re:Not exactly

[ericloewe]

If AMD is about to die, Intel will step in to keep it alive.

Last thing Intel needs is to be broken up because there are no other real players in the x86 market. Even the remote possibility of it happening is too much of a risk for Intel.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

It's surely cheaper to buy a few congressmen and senators than it is AMD...

Re:Not exactly

[Sulphur]

Yes, you could buy a crapton of batteries, but most people don't want to carry a crapton of batteries with them, because the point of a laptop is usually to be light, and easy to carry. Also, I'm not quite sure how you got that the equivalent CPU costs that much more, but the price difference isn't really that big.

You go somewhere and you overhear "crapton's coming."

Re:Not exactly

[fm6]

Right, because PC makers get together once a month and decide how much business to give Intel and how much to give AMD.

In the real world, PC makers act independently and component manufacturers compete for their business. They never say, "Intel is giving us a better price, but we need to throw some business to AMD just to keep them around."

Re:Not exactly

[lightknight]

Nonsense. In today's political and economic climate, idiocy rules supreme. AMD will be allowed to die, and Intel will cite competition in the ARM market in any anti-trust case (of which there will be none).

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

So if Intel now also becomes just a meaningless shell, we'd have the US two-party-zero-choice system? ;)

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

cool story bro, tell it again.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter whether it's the processor specifically or the other chips that you need to make use of it, but I couldn't find any similar specced laptops sporting Intel chips which weren't an extra $400 or $500. Now, maybe they exist and I didn't notice them, but the laptop gets 5 hours on a charge, getting 10 hours is really not worth paying an extra $500 when I could buy a battery.

I could get 2 or possibly 3 extra batteries for the price difference.

Re:Not exactly

[mikael]

Intel could argue that ARM is now their main competitor.

Re:Not exactly

[chmod a x mojo]

I was going to say this upthread a bit. AMD will pull an Apple, just like when Apple had MS bail them out ( MS didn't want the extra hassle of being a pure monopoly ) and either ask Intel for "help" in engineering or R&D ( This may actually be a good thing, AMD gets money / die shrinking insights ETC and Intel would probably demand GFX processor technology to improve the onboard crap they make now) Or Intel will just offer to help them ( same terms as above ) and both go their merry ways.

Don't get me wrong, I like Intel ( as far as I'm concerned everything past the K6 from AMD was either crap or was just kind of BLAH and didn't offer anything I NEEDED ) but I like the fact that AMD is around to keep Intel in line... maybe Intel would go batshit insane on prices without AMD, maybe they wouldn't, I don't want to find out.

Re:Not exactly

[yoshi_mon]

Are you that ignorant? You don't know that Intel had to settle with AMD due to Intel forcing their Netburst chips, which vs the AMD chips at the time were not as good, on OEMs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_v._Intel

Most Intel fanboys are pretty easy to spot but they have the sense not to stay something as stupid as you just said.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not illegal to be a monopoly, it is however illegal to use your monopoly position to preserve a monopoly and shut down any competition. So Intel won't be violating any laws if AMD goes bankrupt, if Intel did nothing to cause that bankruptcy. Considering the market realities, AMD would have a VERY difficult hill to climb to prove that.

Re:Not exactly

[fm6]

AMD fanboy? I don't even own any systems with AMD CPUs.

I simply don't see what iitigation between AMD and Intel has to do with this thread. Please read TPP and expain why you're not an idiot.

Re:Not exactly

[Luckyo]

It's not just that. Intel won't let AMD die, just like MS didn't let Apple die. They can't. If they remained the sole major x86 manufacturer, anti-monopoly regulation agencies would demolish Intel and they know it. They need some minor competition to keep regulators reasonably lax.

Re:Not exactly

[Luckyo]

It would be a very difficult argument to get through to the judges, as x86 largely rules desktop and laptop regardless of the "please count tablets, phones, microwave ovens and cars as computers, PRETTY PLEASE" crowd. These aren't people who will be convinced by PR as easily as the masses.

Re:Not exactly

[Luckyo]

No, but it will mean intense scrutiny of every action they will take due to monopolist position. You want to buy a company? Present a shiltoad of paperwork that you're not leveraging monopoly. You want to make a major business decision? Present paperwork that it's not leveraging monopoly. You want to sneeze? Present paperwork. Did you paperwork show signs of leveraging? Time to break you up.

That is why microsoft saved apple. It may be a convicted monopolist, but it's still nowhere near being a full monopoly. The more of a grip you have, the less freedom you have to make business decisions. It's a very dangerous path to take.

Re:Not exactly

[jkflying]

Erm... he called you an *Intel* fanboy. That litigation is because of Intel using its monopoly position to force PC makers to use its chips instead of those of AMD. Thus, relevant.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

The only AMD CPUs I can see that outperform my i7 2630QM are either six core desktop monsters or quad cores running at double the clock speed. My laptop cost $1000 when it was new, so yeah, GP is full of shit.

Re:Not exactly

[cheesybagel]

This used to be true but in the age of too big to fail it isn't anymore.

Re:Not exactly

[fm6]

My mistake. But the usual litigation about anti-competitive practices doesn't mean there's a conspiracy to keep AMD alive. Rather the opposite, in fact.

Re:Not exactly

[jkflying]

Yeah, I think Intel was running scared for a bit so pulled some nasty moves. The gist from this side of the argument that I'm getting is now that Intel's nice and comfortable, it might be worrying about some old skeletons in its closet coming back from the grave to haunt it...

Re:Not exactly

[lawnboy5-O]

If you are going to count tablets and phones - Apple makes their own chips now, no? I just don't se ARM being competitive outside the mobile device space - which IS quite significant, and growing... no?

Re:Not exactly

[haruchai]

You just flunked the literacy test. If anyone has any explaining to do, that would be you.

Re:Not exactly

[fm6]

True. But TPP flunks the logic test.

Re:Not exactly

[yoshi_mon]

Moving the goalposts? Classic. Let met quote why I called you ignorant.

Right, because PC makers get together once a month and decide how much business to give Intel and how much to give AMD.

There is a discussion to be had about keeping AMD alive because it will not allow Intel to be seen as a monopoly, but you were talking about OEMs. Again you fail.

Consultants are not the devil

[rsilvergun]

yes, there are overpaid asshats out there. But most consultants are really just employees without health benefits and unemployement insurance. If you see a company with a lot of consultants that's why. You can fire them at the drop of a hat at no cost. It's a sign of the modern economy, and one of the reasons my political views swing so far left.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

So far center. The world just moved right.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

I agree. Well said.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[KingSkippus]

I don't think the kind of consultant you are talking about and the kind of consultant referred to in the summary are the same kind of consultant:

Teams of consultants from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are reportedly swarming headquarters to advise the CEO Rory Read...

These are the kind of consultants that tell the CEO that he doesn't need those expensive engineers with health benefits and unemployment insurance. For a reasonable fee (that will end up costing AMD even more money in the long run), these consultants will be able to bring in some of their company's other consultants and not have to worry about silly little things like benefits, thus reducing costs. For the next financial quarter or two--certainly long enough to cash out your stock options and find another job at a company that will pay you more because of your success here--it's win-win!

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[DigiShaman]

I've been a contractor and consultant half my life. The pay was ok if you're single, but not if you have a family. But at least in Texas, the job market is all around stable. That's because we don't have unions fucking up the state with their entitlement politics running the local government.

What's truly ironic is that leftism is what overall exasperates the issue, and yet you drift further to the left. It's like being bitch-slapped and you go "oh!!!, that felt good...do it again". WHY would you do that to yourself?!!!

Fact: America is OVERVALUED in a global market. That's the shakedown we've all been experiencing.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure they are paying for their benefits. That is why consultant charge more per hour to pay for those things. Its just not directly.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[nighthawk243]

There are a ton of companies that fire regular employees first. Having a ton of employees on your payroll hurts your stock prices. Contractors don't. Although contractors are more expensive, that holy stock price is what the shareholders are bitching about.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, there are overpaid asshats out there. But most consultants are really just employees without health benefits and unemployement insurance. If you see a company with a lot of consultants that's why. You can fire them at the drop of a hat at no cost. It's a sign of the modern economy, and one of the reasons my political views swing so far left.

The fact that this got modded up to Insightful shows how many leftist idiots there are on ./ That is not the kind of consultant that the article is talking about.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

If the CEO of AMD doesn't know what the expensive engineers do or why they are important there isn't any hope left for the company anyway.

Re:Consultants are not the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the kind of consultant you are talking about and the kind of consultant referred to in the summary are the same kind of consultant:

Teams of consultants from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are reportedly swarming headquarters to advise the CEO Rory Read...

It think the term you are looking for is 'MBA'.

This is a common misconception

[rsilvergun]

the top guys aren't hiding. They're you're ruling class. Multi-multi millionaires. The don't suffer consequences anymore than the kings of old. Sure, every now and then one of them pisses off the rest and gets thrown to the wolves (Bernie Madoff). But for the most part you don't spill noble blood.

Re:This is a common misconception

[rsilvergun]

Whoops, I mean "They're your ruling class". That's what I get for touch typing before bed :P.

Re:This is a common misconception

[tsotha]

Bullshit. There's no reason we can't hold them to the same standards as everyone else.

AMD should stop x86 development

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact of the matter is that mainstream x86 microprocessors have been good enough for desktop use for the majority of the market for the last several years. With improved process technology, worse microprocessor designs can produce good enough performance. iOS, Android, Linux (Gnome/KDE), OS X and Windows 8 are now somewhat capable of running the ARM ISA. AMD should stop developing new x86 microprocessors, and keep making the current ones for a very long time. ATI should continue to live on. AMD's microprocessor design team should make high performance ARM microprocessor designs for license.

There will be some that demand for high performance, single threaded microprocessors, but that will be a small fraction of the total market.

Re:AMD should stop x86 development

[petermgreen]

iOS, Android, Linux (Gnome/KDE), OS X and Windows 8 are now somewhat capable of running the ARM ISA.

However MS has decided that only a gimped version of windows 8 will be available on arm. Anyone who needs a fully functional windows system will still need x86 until/unless MS decidedes to change that. Much the same applies to apple, while iOS has some technical stuff in common with OSX it's functionality is serverely gimped in comparison. Further even if ungimped arm versions of major desktop operating systems were released some form of binary translation would be needed to support existing apps.

AMD should stop developing new x86 microprocessors, and keep making the current ones for a very long time.

Would you really buy an oly technology CPU from AMD when you could buy a newer technology one from Intel with comparable performance at a tiny fraction of the power consumption?

Re:ATI?

[Anonymous Coward]

They stopped developing the Linux driver for my 2 year old video card. The existing driver periodically crashes the entire system when playing games fullscreen in Linux (yeah, I'm the guy that tries to do this, but Steam for Linux is also right around the corner.)

I did this to get away from the nVidia experience and it felt like ATI doubled-down on it. I've been willing to pay a premium for competence but it's getting harder and harder to find it.

Re:Loss? What Loss?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Early retirement - the perfect recipe for short term savings and long term loss of institutional knowledge!!

But, but, its all documented! So even kids right out of school can replace the laid-off engineers when demand comes back.

Sheesh! It's not like they're VP's or something equally irreplaceable!

3. Profit!

4. ??????????

Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[DL117]

They should fire the 'geniuses' who came up with Bulldozer. It was so far behind the i7s, what did they expect?

I strongly object to everyone saying AMD should just make ARM processors. As a desktop users who is an avid flight simmer and graphic artist, I value the high performance desktop PC. Although most of the computer industry has decided to follow the lead of Apple and develop dumbed-down, week, simplistic products, shafting power users like me, they are wrong and the future is not well served by regression in technology

I'm 18, so I'm not cliinging to the past. I simply object to the dumbing down of anything

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[O('_')O_Bush]

AMD's fault in was keeping the details hidden before releasing Bulldozer. Bulldozer isn't far off the I7s ( at least, not the 1000$ extremes ), but neither were the Phenom IIs. I7s are impressive, but most is hype and post purchase rationalization.

The problem came when AMD fans started spouting how the Bulldozer chips would stomp on I7s, and AMD didn't stop them.

Also, why did you choose examples of GPU intensive tasks ( those that typically aren't performed on the CPU ) to make the case for keeping around consumer grade, high performance x86 CPUs?

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Some kinds of graphic art still require quite a lot of CPU processing. The algorithms either can't or haven't been implemented in GPU versions. Especially in 3D modeling. Until very recently, the major modeling packages couldn't even render their workspace on the GPU, despite that being the ultimate destination of much of the media being worked on. It was all CPU rendered. That has changed, but basically all of the manipulation is still done on the CPU, so a capable processor is still very very useful.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[Kjella]

AMD's fault in was keeping the details hidden before releasing Bulldozer. Bulldozer isn't far off the I7s ( at least, not the 1000$ extremes ), but neither were the Phenom IIs.

If and only if you use well threaded applications that can evenly distribute loads across 8 threads. In single threaded performance the FX-8150 is slower than the Intel Pentium G620 (slowest Sandy Bridge chip) and the I7-3770K offers 62% (Cinebench 11.5 single threaded) higher performance for $332. In good cases it offers 80-90% of the 3770K performance - running at a 125W vs 77W TDP for the 3770K including the integrated graphics. In CPU benchmarks Anandtech found that system consumption increased between idle and full load with 145W and 66W respectively including PSU loss, but the figures are comparable. Together it means the Bulldozer spends about 145/(0.8 to 0.9)/66 = 2.44-2.74W to compute what the 3770K does with 1W.

So to sum it up, in many workloads with single/mixed threads - where performance is capped by the speed of one thread - it's not performing well. And in the cases where it does perform well, it doesn't perform efficiently. That means higher power bill, more expensive and loud cooling and lower battery life - not that you'd put this one in a laptop but for AMDs chips in general. Granted this is the latter half of the FX-8150's life cycle, initially it would be pitted against the 2600K but it didn't perform well to start with either and while.new Piledriver chips are out any day now it's only half a year left until Intel comes with Haswell too. The Piledriver upgrade is reportedly quite evolutionary, so I doubt Piledriver vs Haswell will fare any better than Bulldozer vs Ivy.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...I have a customer that designs robotics in the latest Solidworks on a Phenom I X3 and he's quite happy with it. The parts in those designs are pretty damned intricate, tons of gears and bolts and chips and it renders just fine.

So while i'm sure that a faster chip could maybe shave a little time off the full renders its not like any AMD or Intel multicore can't do these tasks.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? Software (Microsoft) wasn't optimized for the changes Bulldozer brought. Bulldozer is a Multi-threading BEAST. I don't know about you, I don't live in a Single-threaded world.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[dshk]

I am not sure how accurate these tests. Bulldozer is a new architecture, and the compilers must catch up (and Windows too, on the other hand the new Linux kernels are good). AMD measured a 20% floating point performance increase just by recompiling the same test program with the newest gcc. 70% when they they used their own optimized compiler.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[jkflying]

That's odd. I'm struggling to do a smooth zoom of our (fully assembled) robot using Solidworks on a Nehalem-era i5. If you remove all of the internals, nuts, bolts and washers it isn't quite as bad... the GPU is a lot newer than the CPU, as well, and hardly gets taxed. Maybe next year's Solidworks will be better...

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[hairyfeet]

Maybe the wrong GPU to go with the CPU? I scored him an HD4850 when they were on sale for $40 new and it just chews through Solidworks like it was nothing, although to be fair the HD4650 he had before it didn't do too shabby either, but he wanted to move that to his bedroom system for movie watching so this let him get a serious kick in the pants on the office box and a nice boost in the bedroom box.

But then again SW has always been a "fussy" piece of software for want of a better term so maybe its just acting up. I swear certain pieces of software, SW, Quickbooks, Quicken, can be just as fussy as can be when it comes to what it likes and what it don't when it comes to CPU/GPU/OS/RAM and so on. Seriously picky.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[jkflying]

My GPU is Nvidia because I also need CUDA for some of my image processing. Maybe SW likes AMD/ATI better.

Re:Bulldozer sucked, the PC is good.

[hairyfeet]

My advice if you were my customer? Keep an eye on the Tiger kits and when they have one of their "$199 specials" like they had recently with a Phenom II quad snatch one along with an HD4850 (can be found in many places for $40) and make yourself a SW render box. No need to buy anything more than a KVM switch to use your existing setup and that way you have a system that can be stripped down and dedicated just to SW performance.

This way you can keep your i5 system with Nvidia graphics for CUDA and be able to continue working while even heavy renders are going on with the SW box and you can switch back and forth between the two with a keyboard shortcut. Because from what I've seen SW just seems to play nicer with AMD GPUs and the AMD parts are so cheap right now you can build a pretty nice system for very little.

McKinsey? BCG? They are doomed

[gweihir]

These people focus on short-term optimizations. AMD needs a strategic fix, not a tactical one. A tactical one will only make matters worse.

Re:McKinsey? BCG? They are doomed

[lightknight]

12-core Phenom IIIs. That'll fix the problem.

Re:McKinsey? BCG? They are doomed

[brxndxn]

I too am sick of seeing companies focus on the short-term.. But the problem for AMD is that now the short-term means 'can't pay our fucking bills.' I have said this over and over.. When AMD spent years with a huge R&D budget to leapfrog Intel, while focusing on the long-term, they accomplished that goal. What they did not accomplish was the political goal of forcing Intel to compete fairly. For years, AMD had the best processors and Intel were simply second-best.. but through monopolistic competition, AMD was held back - prevented from selling at Dell and HP.

For this, I hate Intel. Their processors might be the fastest right now.. They might own the future.. but I still hate them.

AMD is in a shitty situation.. If they produce 2nd best processors, they slowly fade into oblivion. If they produce 1st rate processors, Intel threatens the pc-makers.

They are setting up the company for a takeover...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.

I'll take that bet. I'm pretty sure they are doing the opposite: laying off all the junior engineers, support engineers, and the sales and marketing force in preparation for having some larger company (with their own army of overseas junior engineer worker-bees) take over. The consultants are there to negociate the headcount on behalf of the purchasers, they have nothing to do with the current management or the current product line. The consultants are like the home inspectors that a you hire when you are buying a house...

My guess is that larger company is probably one of Samsung or Qualcomm, secondary guess would be Apple or Microsoft. Both Samsung and Qualcomm have been hiring AMD (ex ATI) folks left and right for the last few months and if they can pick up AMD for a song, they will probably do it. What any of these companies don't need are a bunch of 2-5 year engineers, supporting engineers, nor sales or marketing employees as a purchasing company, they are likely to just abandon all the current (and planned) product lines. The only thing the want is the core engineering assets (GPU designers and high-speed CPU physical design group) and the patents to deploy in their own product lines. The consultants job is to figure out who those folks are. All the bulldozer architects and APU stuff will probably go in the dumper as soon as the deal is closed.

Put a fork in it. AMD as we know it is probably done.

Does price point matter for the regular consumer?

[dyfortune]

I've always prefer AMD due to their low price point (I attribute my ability to buy my first computer to this). Would this matter for the regular consumer, if the salesman makes a better commission off of an Intel powered computer, wouldn't he always try to sell Intel first and talk down AMD.

Re:ATI?

[collet]

RadeonHD 5870s to run SLI

Sorcery!

In other news:

[Anonymous Coward]

Haswell has been delayed by several years.

Do the math

[Anonymous Coward]

10% revenue decline, gross margin decline from 44% to 31%.

Suppose they were scheduled to have revenue of 'R' which '0.44*R' is potential profit (minus cost of sales), now they will only have sales of '0.9*0.31*R' which is '0.28*R' is potential profit (before expenses). At their current run-rate, that's R=1.4B, that is ~$224M less money they will have this quarter than they expected to have (and they are already losing money).

To give some perspective on that $224M, the whole company's market cap is under $2B (they just estimated that 10% of that is gone). It's not as if your salary was cut 10%, it's as if lost 10% of your total net worth in a quarter. If this happened to you, wouldn't you be thinking that you have to do something?

Re:Do the math

[Anonymous Coward]

If this happened to you, wouldn't you be thinking that you have to do something?

Yes but that "something" wouldn't be "sack the people that actually make the revenue possible".

Re:Loss? What Loss?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Early retirement - the perfect recipe for short term savings and long term loss of institutional knowledge!!

But, but, its all documented! So even kids right out of school can replace the laid-off engineers when demand comes back.

Sheesh! It's not like they're VP's or something equally irreplaceable!

3. Profit!

4. ??????????

5. profit moar!

Re:They are setting up the company for a takeover.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the event of a change in control, all of AMD's x86 cross-license deals are void.

Re:They are setting up the company for a takeover.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the event of a change in control, all of AMD's x86 cross-license deals are void.

None of the potential purchasers care one iota about x86 cross-licenses. The will take the high-speed CPU design team and make ARM processors and bury the current x86 product line. They will take the GPU designers and make mobile GPUs.

Re:ATI?

[lightknight]

Indeed. 'Tis Cross-Fire with AMD/ATI, not SLI.

Re:ATI?

[lightknight]

Huh, didn't know Diamond was still in business. There's a ghost from the past.

Buy from HIS. They tend to care about their card designs, and have a decent warranty. I've bought several cards from them, haven't had any issues with them to date.

It is time to buy AMD processors!

[dshk]

You always bought Intel processors* even when they were far inferior compared to AMD. Now stop that, and just buy AMD processors even if they may perform a bit lower in some measurements in benchmarks (and better in a few others). For example people does not like Bulldozer, because it is not much better on the desktop front than its predecessor, but it is a great server architecture, especially for virtualization and high performance computing. There are quite a few AMD systems in the top 500 supercomputer list. Maybe it will be good enough for you too... The last time I checked an AMD Opteron offered the best performance / price ratio, not an Intel.

Not doing so will bring back the years when processor technology stopped improving and the prices remained high.

(*) Except those who build their own computers, among them AMD is much stronger, there were years when AMD had more than 50 percent.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually AMD CPUs are bad at HPC, due to terrible floating point processing. And you get those wonderful bottlenecks when every once in a while you have to aggregate all those parallel computed values, which requires a single core... so it all slows down to the AMD's single core processing power, which is prett much as bad as an atom cpu.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[dshk]

Actually AMD CPUs are bad at HPC, due to terrible floating point processing.

More than 10 percent of the world's top supercomputers are based on Opterons. And you say that they are bad at HPC :) Not to mention that HPC does not equal with floating performance. Actually it is very far from it, moving the data between processors is the harder issue. Anyway, care to provide a citation about the "terrible floating point performance"? As far as I know AMD Opterons has much better multicore floating point performance / dollar than Intels.

And you get those wonderful bottlenecks when every once in a while you have to aggregate all those parallel computed values, which requires a single core...

No, this is simply wrong as a general statement. First, aggregation is likely insignificant relative to the computation (otherwise it would be useless to parallelize the computation), moreover if aggregation in itself is still a significant task then it may be parallelized too and performed on multiple levels by aggregating subsets first.

so it all slows down to the AMD's single core processing power, which is prett much as bad as an atom cpu

Single core performance becomes less and less important. If you have a huge computing task, it is still a huge task on a single core even if that single core is the best of the world and it has double throughput than a usual one. For a huge task you have to use a huge number of cores if you want results within reasonable times.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no way I am having a CPU with a TDP of 95 to 125 watts. AMD needs to understand what Intel only finally realised after the BTX debacle - computer designers and home builders don't want a bar heater inside their computer. With all-in-one desktops now becoming the norm this only makes things worse for them.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[dshk]

You can get Phenom II with 65W. But there are more than a few AMD desktop processors with 18, 25, 35, 45 watts.

May I ask you something? When AMD lead the performance/watt charts by a huge margin, did you buy AMD processors?

By the way, TDP is misleading. I do not know what is the current situation but a few years ago Intel and AMD calculated TDP differently. The AMD 100W TDP meant much lower consumption than the Intel 100W. It is also misleading because it is a theoretical limit, which is quite hard to actually reach. I have a single processor 12 core Opteron server, processor rated at 115W. Plus 4 drives and 48G ram. Even if I stress test the processor with 100% load on all cores, I cannot reach more than 160W for the whole server. And that also includes the ~20% loss in the power supply.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[EmagGeek]

You know, it's practically impossible to make a CPU consume its TDP. You do know that, right?

TDP is simply the thermal rating of the CPU package with the OEM cooling device. That's how much power you are allowed to dissipate before exceeding the maximum junction temperature of the processor.

Sitting there typing email, it is unlikely your CPU is consuming more than a couple of watts. If you max out all cores with perfectly optimized code that exercises 100% of the CPUs resources, you MIGHT get it to dissipate something close to 70% of TDP, since the chip is usually designed with plenty of thermal margin to account for degradation in the cooling device over time.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to realize that most CPUs are running idle for the majority of their lives. In this case, the AMD CPUs have lower idle power use than the Intels.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Lord Crc]

You always bought Intel processors* even when they were far inferior compared to AMD. Now stop that, and just buy AMD processors even if they may perform a bit lower in some measurements in benchmarks (and better in a few others).

While I'd love to buy more AMD, I've had quite a few bad experiences with the motherboards for AMD, while I haven't had any issues with the Intel based motherboards I've bought over the last 5 years or so. As such I'm keeping to Intel for now.

Generally kept to Asus, and not the cheapest models. Is this just my bad luck or?

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Lord Crc]

Anyway, care to provide a citation about the "terrible floating point performance"? As far as I know AMD Opterons has much better multicore floating point performance / dollar than Intels.

He's probably referring to the Buldozers which do have terrible FP performance, primarily because two "cores" share a single FPU.

For example, while the FX-8120 gets about 77% of the score the i7 2600k gets in PassMark, in a very floating-point heavy, multi-threaded rendering application the 8120 gets about 51% of the 2600k.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[dshk]

I have good experience with both Asus AMD and Asus Intel motherboards. I (let's say) supervised about 30 pc's over the years, 70% of them was AMD, and none of them failed early. There were about 4 motherboard failures, roughly proportional to the processor manufacturer, and all of them after several years of usage. They usually become obsolete before they have a chance to broke.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[dshk]

While the 51% in the second application is indeed disappointing, it must be noted that we are comparing a $160 processor to a $290 processor. Even in this particular workload the performance / price of the overall AMD system was much better (but not the performance / watt), according to the person who posted the result. In the PassMark score this is even more obvious.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Lord Crc]

While the 51% in the second application is indeed disappointing, it must be noted that we are comparing a $160 processor to a $290 processor.

True, however if you're planning on using the FX in a rendering farm or similar, then the Intel CPU is definitely more bang for the buck. Not just the CPU itself but you'll be able to use less machines in the farm to get the same performance, which would be a huge saving. Using the LuxRender data, 10 i7 2600k boxes would give you the same rendering power as 17 FX-8150 boxes! I've assumed FPU performance scales similar to the PassMark score there, which I think is reasonable.

So that's 7 more motherboards, RAM sticks and PSUs compared to using Intel. And then there's the power drain...

So yeah, for anything FPU intensive the FX series could end up being an expensive investment. Which is sad, I'd really like to buy AMD gear.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[stoatwblr]

Funny. I've had at least 3 Intel Desktop Boards burn up (literally) in the last 5 years. Several more have failed for other reasons. We no longer buy IDB-based machines.

Re:It is time to buy AMD processors!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, it's practically impossible to make a CPU consume its TDP. You do know that, right?

Actually, these days it's pretty easy.

TDP is simply the thermal rating of the CPU package with the OEM cooling device. That's how much power you are allowed to dissipate before exceeding the maximum junction temperature of the processor.

It's more like "OEM, this CPU will not average more than TDP watts over any thermally significant time window, though extremely short-term current spikes might well be double the nominal TDP so your power supply must be built against more stringent requirements than the cooling. The cooling system needs to remove TDP watts while maintaining a junction temperature less than Tjmax".

(These are subtle yet important distinctions from what you said. A CPU doesn't automatically hit max junction temperature just because it's running at its designed TDP limit, for example. It might if the cooling system was just barely in spec with no margins, but a better cooling system can do better.)

If you max out all cores with perfectly optimized code that exercises 100% of the CPUs resources, you MIGHT get it to dissipate something close to 70% of TDP, since the chip is usually designed with plenty of thermal margin to account for degradation in the cooling device over time.

That used to be true, back when CPUs ran at a fixed clock frequency and voltage. It's not any more. The difference is that today's CPUs have more control over their power dissipation, and more on-die sensors to monitor it. They can request voltage changes from the motherboard's regulator, they can adjust clock frequency, and if need be they can throttle instruction dispatch.

This stuff permits today's CPUs to regulate themselves so they hit the nominal TDP quite precisely if you max out all cores. Especially Intel's CPUs -- they've been doing DVFS (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling) for longer than AMD and their power controllers are pretty sophisticated now.

Re:Does price point matter for the regular consume

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for. Their CPUs cost half as much, and have half as much of the performance of the Intel based CPUs.

AMD Killed Itself

[Anonymous Coward]

And make no mistake, their days are numbered. I give them two more years of floundering, one more failed processor architecture, and that's it.

They've spent the last 10-15 years anti-diversifying. They got out of the logic business. They got out of the flash business. They got out of the foundry business. Each sale along the way was an emergency stop-gap to boost short term numbers to make shareholders happy, but terrible in the long run.

Then, they leveraged themselves to the hilt to buy ATI so they could compete with the Intel on CPUs with integrated graphics. That was a good move, but they overpaid bigtime. ATI's debts are crushing the company now, and nVidia did not just simply go away as they had hoped in their business plans that were used to justify the whole deal.

It's like AMD has been run by 9th graders in an economics class or something. It's a shame, too, because they used to make decent processors that were better than Intel's for less money. Believe it or not, there are times when you should not quit while you're ahead, but that's exactly what AMD did.

Sayonara, AMD. It was good knowing you, but you are irrelevant now.

x86 is not the only architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD will not be allowed to die, if only because the PC manufacturers are clever enough to know they need at least two vendors for the most critical part of their product.

There's no requirement that a vendor uses x86 CPUs. ARM desktops and laptops are becoming more and more feasible every day. I expect ARM's rise actually has a lot to do with AMD's falling profits, because more and more people are using tablets and smartphones rather than desktops and laptops.

Re:x86 is not the only architecture

[lightknight]

They aren't using tablets and smartphones in place of desktops and laptops, they're using tablets and smartphones in addition to desktops and laptops.

It's a new market, it grows, it matures, but the other markets still exist (but the players are already established there, so it's not as interesting; plus, people are wiser to manufacturers selling them crap in those markets). People are already getting tired of the 18-month treadmill that the phone manufacturers have had them on.

Engineering jobs will be shifted to Russia/Asia

[Phoeniyx]

I left AMD a couple years ago to pursue other interests before all this layoff crap was happening and the mood was pretty good. There was a new team that was started in Russia, but the teams were assured that "this doesn't effect the jobs in Canada, as these are NEW jobs and the team in Canada was growing as well!". Many people bought into this - I didn't. Went back for a visit a few months later, and found out that they had opened two new offices - in Europe and Asia I think. The mood was a bit grimmer - not due to the offices but just the market in general. All these Engineering jobs they are laying off now, when they "create" these jobs again in the future (if AMD improves) will NOT be in North America. They will for sure just expand the teams in Asia/Russia/Eastern Europe. Same level of expertise and capability for less cost. What's not to like? I am not saying that North American engineers are undeservingly expensive. Just that they NEED to make more money to survive in North America due to the high taxes and supporting the general society.

Re:Engineering jobs will be shifted to Russia/Asia

[whistlingtony]

/Looks at Russia. /Looks at USA/Canada

You think the difference is high taxes and supporting the general society? Russia's economy is in the toilet, has horrible institutionalized corruption, crushing poverty.... and you think it's because El Norte pays too much taxes?

Don't worry, the same thing that messed up the soviet union is going to mess us up. They tried to buiild a military they couldn't afford to keep up with the Joneses(USA). Massive corruption leached money out of the system and into the pockets of a few defense and energy schmucks.

Meanwhile Canada has sane banking laws, way less military spending, and they seem to be doing fine with their health care for all, better overall health, less financial stupidity, etc.

I think you looked and saw the wrong problem.

Current Intel employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Current employee here (I'm not an official spokesperson, this may not be the corporate line, yadda yadda) let me clarify some stuff.

The thing with Intel is, internally they're actually a worse corporation than even you described. Head hunters I have known almost immediately blanched at their name when I brought it up and said things like .. I do not recommend anyone work for Intel. I have seen the same remarks by the same professionals in print.

Why? For generations now, it's been stocked to the gills with corporate psychopaths. Like above, so below. The level of viciousness of the politics is out of this world . For instance, there's something called "forced ranking" where 10% of their employees with the lowest scores on their reviews are automatically fired each year.

Killing every tenth person in order to improve performance has another name- decimation.. deci-mation. It goes back to the Romans. Crassus used it to motivate the troops to capture Spartacus

Yes, we have problems with people who exist only to further their own career, or that somehow subsist by controlling information such that no one else can get it. The information hoarders in particular are annoying because you have to have their blessing to get stuff done. I believe that any organization with >80k employees is going to have this somewhere in their organization

We have some psychotic managers that act like 2 year olds. They put unattainable deadlines on the board and they hoard resources to do their job. I hear that this was the norm in the previous CEO's days because of the 10% layoffs of which you speak. The way it worked wasn't 10% of the worst employees, but rather entire departments would be cut for failing to meet the numbers. While I have a good manager, and several other people I know have, you may end up having one of these ancient trolls that still exist within the system. The perception is that Paul is trying to clean this stuff up, and the review process has been restructured to try to weed this out.

Intel does have a bad reputation in some of the local communities for various reasons. I hear stories of construction projects that never started, never finished, or sat around forever. I'm sure you're not wrong about your headhunter stories.

For reviews, employees are ranked in a scale against each other. You're put into one of 5 buckets, and you want to try to be in the top 3. The relative performance of each bucket is determined by the performance of you and your peers (i.e. you have to be better than your peers. If they all suck, the bar is pretty low, but if they're geniuses, you better work your ass off.). I don't think there's a set percentage for each bucket. If there's not enough people to compare you to at your site, you're compared to similar people in your hemisphere. This isn't all of it, like there's some more paperwork involved in getting feedback from coworkers and such, but at the end of the day you're in one of the buckets.

Re:Current Intel employee

[yoshi_mon]

We just had the discussion here on /. about Forced Ranking a month or so ago. I'm too lazy to look up that article but I will link this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

What I got from the, rather extensive thread, was that Forced Ranking has the potential to be a good tool for weeding out people that might have gotten/are lazy in an organization. However if it is constantly used, or badly implemented (which it can very easily be), it overall will create a very bad atmosphere.

Re:Current Intel employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you be willing to chat offline about your experiences for a piece I'm working on for a major business television network? Let me know and can arrange email. Thanks!

SABERTOOTH990FX and HIS 7970 UBUNTU 12.04/12.10

[keneng]

I have nothing but praise for AMD.
The SABERTOOTH990FX motherboard 8GB RAM with the AMD FX-8120 Eight-Core CPU and the HIS 7970 graphics card rocks with UBUNTU 12.04/12.10.
AMD also supports opencl very well with the AMDAPPSDK.

There are others here saying ARM is a competitor, but they are competing more in the GFLOPS/Watt market rather than pure GFLOPS. Nobody here mentioned the Loongson Godson 3A/3B cpu competing in the GFLOPS/Watt market, but they haven't arrived in North America yet mainly because of Intellectual Property reasons. Eventually they will arrive in North America.

From my standpoint, AMD does still have its loyal fanbase for desktops and servers which want respectable performance at a competitive price without caring about GFLOPS/watt. I got more bang for my buck when I bought the above configuration. I have confidence in AMD and will be buying other AMD-based motherboards/CPUS/Graphics in the future. I hope whatever AMD internal bickerings they have stay internal and that AMD keep on churning out great product as they have been. Keep in mind AMD, Intel and ARM all have their niche markets and that's why all of them will continue to thrive. AMD's R&D headaches are no surprise, all companies have headaches like these.

There are other reasons consumers/small business owners would also buy non-Intel architecture based systems. For example having different hardware helps to have a better security because if there is an Intel-based virus flying around and it hits a Loongson/MIPS/ARM cpu for example, it will have less probability to propagate. Keeping that perspective there is more of a COOPETITION going on because we need the varieties of CPUs in order to provide better security.
The complexity of hardware helps elevate the level of security. There is effort involved with learning all these different hardware chipsets and their intricacies.
Security is everyone's concern and every consumer should be aware of this and buy accordingly. I look forward to seeing Loongson in the North American market simply because it will make things very interesting for all consumers and small businesses across the planet, but I'm still a loyal AMD consumer because I have been satisfied with their product for over 12+ years and that's nothing to sneeze at. Hats off to AMD.

In addition? sure, but look at the time amount

[Bananatree3]

As I type this on a Asus Transformer Prime Android tablet/keyboard, I realize I haven't turned on my workhorse desktop for a few days. In fact, 90% of my use on the desktop was internet browsing anyways, and I now do that on the tablet. Email, reading pdfs, light gaming, you name it there's probably an app for it now. I have found most of my necessary computing can be taken care of by the Prime, and I enjoy typing on it on my couch vs being tied to the desktop.

While I could try shoehorning that 10% desktop use onto the tablet, I find it easier to just boot it up when I need it, and shut it down when I don't.

I hate decisions made for stock

[whistlingtony]

I just looked at their financials....

OK, stock price sucks. Guess what, Intel hasn't moved in years either. AMD is profitable. I can't help but think that the decision to lay off a bunch of workers is short term "omg the stock is too low" thinking... and you know what? Dumping workers usually doesn't make the stock price go up any significant amount. All it does is burn out the remaining workers and create low morale and more mistrakes.

I work in semi manufacturing. Mistrakes are BAD. It's better to pay the extra worker (not that my bosses get it either).

I'm really sick of bosses firing people to make the numbers look good. Lets hire some more people to make the numbers look good. Lets put out great product to make the numbers look good. Lets focus on the health of the organization instead of the stupid numbers, to make the numbers look good.

grumble.....

Re:I hate decisions made for stock

[Anonymous Coward]

I just looked at their financials....

OK, stock price sucks. Guess what, Intel hasn't moved in years either. AMD is profitable.

Huh? You better look a bit closer with those financials. Sure they made money this past quarter, but AMD's EPS is -0.88 (meaning they are losing money YOY). Also things don't look pretty going forward now, they estimated that they would make money, but now revenues are down 10%...

Ont he other hand, INTC EPS is 2.36 (meaning they made $2.36/share) and they have a Quarterly dividend of $0.90/share so even if their stock price is flat, investors are getting the dividend return.

CFO leaving for different reason

[edxwelch]

I understood that Thomas Seifert left because he wanted to be a CEO and the only way to achieve that was leaving AMD. The summary makes it sound like a rat leaving a sinking ship

Re:They are setting up the company for a takeover.

[Konster]

Except that anyone buying AMD won't be getting any of their x86 stuff because there's a lot of cross-licensing with Intel that won't get transferred on a sale.

Anyone who buys AMD at this point will only be getting their GPU division, unless by some miracle the purchaser works out a licensing deal with Intel for x86 stuff. Fat chance.

what the hell is amd doing

[Vince6791]

AMD still has that underdog mentality and maybe this is the problem. AMD needs strong marketing of their products otherwise people won't know who the hell AMD is. I have run amd and intel side by side and I really don't see much of a difference. Even online test's between these chips show that the phenom ii is faster than the i7 in some test's and vice versa but it's usually a few seconds to a minute or 2 - 10 fps difference. Running today's games on my machine is excellent. I can run blender, libreoffice, media center, and windows 8 in virtual box all at the same time on the phenom ii x6 and my system runs just fine it does not come to a crawl. The biggest and most important difference between amd and intel is the pricing. Why spend $200-$1000 on an intel i3, i5, i7 chip when I can get a phenom ii or fx chip for a lot less. I know there are nutty people out there who actually buy intel chips and piss away their money because it's 10 seconds or 10 fps faster than amd.

When it comes down to cpu's the majority of computer users in this country really have no clue what they are using under the hood even though they probably know who Intel is and so AMD has to rely on companies like dell, gateway, hp etc.. to buy their processors for their machines to sell to consumers.

       

It's a shame..

[Paracelcus]

It's a shame, i used to really like their products, built many machines with their CPU's.

Future ForeCast

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Intel Corp. in the 1990's they have licenses from other CPU companies so that they can make RISC CPUs.
Since ARM CPU is the trend for CPUs, AMD should get a license to create ARM CORTEX-a15 CPUs.
I think that AMD would be able to generate $Millions of Dollars/profitability if AMD licensed Cortex-a15 dual/quad/maximum cores.

 

Consumer workloads are integer ...

[perpenso]

... its a server chip designed for integer workloads when consumer workloads are heavy floating point ...

Consumer workloads are integer, email, browser, etc, ...

Its gamer workloads that are floating point, well high end gamers that is, casual games are probably not heavy floating point.

Re:They are setting up the company for a takeover.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they're getting rid of the ones with seniority at that to try to save a few bucks on salary while simultaneously bleeding themselves out of knowledge and experience.

I'll take that bet. I'm pretty sure they are doing the opposite: laying off all the junior engineers, support engineers, and the sales and marketing force in preparation for having some larger company (with their own army of overseas junior engineer worker-bees) take over.

I'll double down on the original poster.
All my friends who worked at ATI and saw the layoffs round after round noticed that almost everyone who was let go had way more years of experience than the peers they kept. One round it was a Manager at 15+ years, a Director at 12+, another Manager at 10+ and then a whole bunch of IC's who were at the top of end of their job pay scales. The layoff compensation was based on years of service so some guys didn't have to work for another year if they didn't want to.
Some of it was losing the fat but some was a loss of tribal knowledge.

Re:Loss? What Loss?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at the level of expertise coming out of schools? College is more expensive than ever so they aren't going to work for cheap and high schools are producing wage monkey drone workers. The other thing is you cannot "document" experience.

ATIAMDNvidia

[Sebastopol]

I used to think Nvidia would buy AMD for the core IP, which would be really funny if nVidia ended up owning ATI because of AMD's past acquisition. However, I suspect a mobile phone co would snap up AMD first.

IMHO, the desktop battle is over, because the desktop is (largely) done. Intel's biggest competition is Oracle and nVidia in the compute server space, and Apple and ARM in the mobile world. Content creation can be done on laptops easily, especially since CPU-intensive creation can always farm out to virtualization or distributed computing, without even investing in a compute center (e.g., Amazon's compute services).

The glory days of Sanders vs Grove is long gone. Sadly. At least Ellison is still carrying the torch of eccentric billionaire, even if he does look like he strangles hookers.

Yeah, I suspect AMD will be acquired by someone unexpected.

Test on Opteron 6234

[dshk]

OK, I did a small benchmark. I run a test program with two threads. In each test run I assigned two cores to the program. Both threads add integers in a cycle, nothing else. The test program completes in 14 seconds if it is running on two cores of the same Bulldozer unit, while it takes 11 seconds on 1-1 cores of two different Bulldozer units.

Re:Test on Opteron 6234

[washu_k]

You just proved my point. You ran a test with the most ideal case (pure integer code) and it ran slower when on the same module. Run more real world code with two threads and the performance hit gets bigger. Try the same test on an i7. The code will run the same speed no matter which cores it uses, as it doesn't lie to the OS can claim the SMT units are full cores.

This is the whole reason why Windows 7 has problems scheduling on the FX CPUs. AMD LIES to the OS and claims the SMT units are full cores. This causes performance problems when Windows schedules as if it was true. If AMD had been truthful then the FX CPUs would perform to their fullest potential on any OS, and Linux and Win 8 would not have had to be modified to work around the issue.

Call it hyper-threading, SMT or whatever, the second integer unit on FX CPUs are not full cores. AMD did SMT better than Intel, but it's still not a full core.

Re:Test on Opteron 6234

[dshk]

You just proved my point. You ran a test with the most ideal case (pure integer code) and it ran slower when on the same module.

No, no, this was not the ideal case. Actually this was one of the worst test case for Bulldozer. The test is a simple integer addition in a cycle. The emphasis is on the cycle, not on the integer addition!

If I run the same cycle but with 8 integer addition instead of only one, then the difference between running two threads in one Bulldozer module vs two Bulldozer modules is 47 s vs 53 s. That is only 13%.

If I run the cycle with one floating point addition then the differrence is 17.0 s vs 17.6 s. That is only 3%. And how ironic this is! The most frequent complaint against the Bulldozer architecture is that two cores share a single floating point unit. AMD should tell one million times that yes, they share a single floating point unit, but that is a 256 bit wide unit, which can be split into two 128 bit parts. And what is the size of the usual floating point number? Not 256 bit, not 128 bit, but only 64.

If AMD had been truthful then the FX CPUs would perform to their fullest potential on any OS, and Linux and Win 8 would not have had to be modified to work around the issue.

I think you underestimate the complexity of scheduling on modern processors. Consider the turbo mode, which boosts the frequency of a module, but cannot boost all modules at the same time, the new Opteron 6200 family which is essentially two processors with two memory controllers in a single socket (NUMA), and multiple sockets on most server motherboards. This is no longer SMP, and not a simple hyper-threading either.

The processor should inform the OS about its capabilities the most precisely. If a Bulldozer tells the OS that it is hyper-threaded, then I consider that a dirty hack. That is the same when Chrome, Opera, etc. says that it is Internet Explorer. It might be practical, because they wouldn't need to beg the Microsoft guys to update their scheduler in Windows 7. By the way, it is strange, that the Linux developers were able to update the kernel quickly, is not it?

Was a big fan during the Athlon days

[Runesabre]

I was always amazed with AMD's ability to create a cheaper yet better performing chip during the Athlon days. At that time it seemed silly for anyone to even consider Intel.

Re:Loss? What Loss?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh.

AMD should become ATI

[unixisc]

This! With AMD having sold all its fabs and always had capacity problems, they should morph the whole company into ATI. No need to remain a competitor to Intel - just be a competitor to NVIDIA, and let Intel be the sole casuality of whatever happens to the x86.

Incidentally, how is Via's Cyrix/Centaur lines doing these days?