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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."
Shut. Down. EVERYTHING.
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?
They hired the two Bobs.
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
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
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.
Have a foot in both x86 and ARM.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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?
Intel will just give them a few billion. Cheaper than to deal with antitrust issues if AMD goes bankrupt.
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!
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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Not yet. And there is still ARM.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
These people focus on short-term optimizations. AMD needs a strategic fix, not a tactical one. A tactical one will only make matters worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
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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.
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.
RadeonHD 5870s to run SLI
Sorcery!
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?
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am John Hurt.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Indeed. 'Tis Cross-Fire with AMD/ATI, not SLI.
I am John Hurt.
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.
I am John Hurt.
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.
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.
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 $500-600 laptop.
I left AMD a couple years ago to pursue other interests before all this layoff crap was happening and the mood was pretty good. There was a new team that was started in Russia, but the teams were assured that "this doesn't effect the jobs in Canada, as these are NEW jobs and the team in Canada was growing as well!". Many people bought into this - I didn't. Went back for a visit a few months later, and found out that they had opened two new offices - in Europe and Asia I think. The mood was a bit grimmer - not due to the offices but just the market in general. All these Engineering jobs they are laying off now, when they "create" these jobs again in the future (if AMD improves) will NOT be in North America. They will for sure just expand the teams in Asia/Russia/Eastern Europe. Same level of expertise and capability for less cost. What's not to like? I am not saying that North American engineers are undeservingly expensive. Just that they NEED to make more money to survive in North America due to the high taxes and supporting the general society.
AMD's fault in was keeping the details hidden before releasing Bulldozer. Bulldozer isn't far off the I7s ( at least, not the 1000$ 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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
I am John Hurt.
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.
I am John Hurt.
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.
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.
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 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.....
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
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a shame, i used to really like their products, built many machines with their CPU's.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
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?
... 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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...
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
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.
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.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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?
My GPU is Nvidia because I also need CUDA for some of my image processing. Maybe SW likes AMD/ATI better.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Now it's a monopoly! *snicker*
Oh, come on. I'm just playing. ;)
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.