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

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?

[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: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: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: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.