AMD Rumored To Announce Layoffs, New Hardware, ARM Servers On Monday

MojoKid writes "After its conference call last week, AMD is jonesing for some positive news to toss investors and is planning a major announcement on Monday to that effect. Rumor suggests that a number of statements may be coming down the pipe, including the scope of the company's layoffs, new CPUs based on Piledriver Opterons, and possibly an ARM server announcement. The latter would be courtesy of AMD's investment in SeaMicro. SeaMicro built its business on ultra-low power servers and their first 64-bit ARMv8 silicon is expected in the very near future. However, there's always a significant lag between chip announcements and actual shipping products. Even if AMD announces Monday, it'd be surprising to see a core debut before the middle of next year."

Comments

I remember

[MindPrison]

when AMD used to be the new kid on the block, super cheap processing power for all of us who wanted power without the money, I was a student back then. Amd could be overclocked out of this world, and Intel costing 3 times as much, and wasn't so overclockable.

It's always saddens me to see layoffs with the competitors because it only leads to more expensive products with the main stream, less innovations and everyone is going the safe way, saving, reducing costs, spending less on innovation and experimentation.

We need the confidence back.

Re:I remember

[Taco Cowboy]

It was one misstep after another.

AMD had had misstep before - as well as Intel.

But the only difference that separate Intel and AMD is that Intel had had a vision, and AMD had not.

AMD, since the beginning, tried to copy Intel.

When Intel was in the NOR flash business, AMD followed. Of course Intel had enough cash reserve to pull out from that business and still was able to fun its R&D.

For AMD, the loss that incurred on their NOR operation meant they had less money for R&D.

Still, AMD did come out with the X64 architecture, so much so that Intel had to follow.

Unfortunately for AMD is that the BOD do not work well with their CEOs. With the frequent change of CEOs, AMD is lost.

It's near the swan song for AMD - believe it or not.

Going for ARM server is but a desperate move, which, IMHO, won't save AMD from its own mess.

Re:I remember

[hairyfeet]

The problem is AMD's new "half core" design is a complete flop and is often just BARELY better than X6, and that is when you put X6 against the new X8, if you put them equal, X6 VS X6, then Phenom II wins.

That is why I'm still building pretty much AMD exclusively, because in socket AM3+ frankly the bang for the buck is STILL there and better than Intel. I've been getting Athlon triples for $60, quads for $70, Phenom quads for $90 and Thuban X6s for $110. These chips are frankly more powerful than your average user will ever need but when you figure in the cost of boards you can build a damned nice AMD system for less than $450 and still make a decent profit, the only thing you are building from Intel at that price is a Pentium dual core.

That isn't to say there isn't ANY markets where AMD's new chips can't be a good deal, the netbooks with the E450 are nice, and when you can find them the C60 netbooks make great "pocket PCs" and the Llano quad laptops are great multimedia portables. And hopefully that former Apple/Athlon64 designer they hired will come up with a killer new chip, its just that Bulldozer/Piledriver just don't cut it. Its too hot, too power hungry, and costs too much to manufacture so they have to put it against the i5 which curbstomps. But since the previous CEO killed Thuban which was getting damned near 100% yields they have no choice but try to push the turkey that is "half cores" while hoping to stay afloat until they can come up with something better.

Like you I hope they manage to pull it off, and as long as I can get such great deals on Am3+ I'll keep selling 'em, but ATM there just isn't any positives when it comes to the BD/PD design, there just isn't.

Re:ARM will kill x86-64 monstruosity in servers

[AaronW]

No it won't. Having done some serious looking in to ARM64 it is almost as much of a mess as X86, and in fact in many ways is worse.

ARM64 has almost nothing in common with ARM32. All of the things that make ARM "ARM" such as conditional execution, having the instruction pointer a general purpose register, etc. are gone in ARM64. The instruction encoding is a complete mess and is totally incompatible with ARM32.

Most RISC processors are fairly clean between 32 and 64-bit instructions. For example, MIPS and PPC just add new 64-bit instructions to the instruction set. ARM is not like this. With ARM, everything down to the most fundamental level changes in 64-bit mode. There is zero compatibility between the two.

As a developer I certainly am not looking forward to ARM64. The stuff I do I periodically need to look at hex output and figure out what instructions are being executed. On MIPS and PowerPC this is trivial. This is not the case on ARM, where the instruction encoding is a complete mess, far worse than X86. It is as if the ARM64 instruction encoding was designed to be obfuscated.

I think the big ARM64 push is the fact that it's not Intel and Microsoft wants to use it to pressure Intel. There are far cleaner 64-bit processors out there including MIPS, PowerPC.

For the record, I work on bootloaders for MIPS64 processors.