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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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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