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AMD Hires Bank To Explore Sale Options
Dainsanefh tips this report from Reuters:
"Advanced Micro Devices has hired JPMorgan Chase & Co to explore options, which could include a potential sale, as the chipmaker struggles to find a role in an industry increasingly focused on mobile and away from traditional PCs, according to three sources familiar with the situation. ... Some investors believe part or all of AMD could be bought by a technology company that might want to emulate Apple Inc's tight control of software and components, a strategy credited in part for the success of the iPad and iPhone. Microsoft Corp, Google Inc, Samsung Electronics, Intel Corp and even Facebook Inc have been suggested by Wall Street analysts as potential suitors that could benefit from some of AMD's chip business, including its graphics division, PC processors and server chips. Others say AMD's most valuable asset may be its deep bench of engineers or its patents."
Update: 11/14 01:44 GMT by S : In an emailed statement, an AMD representative said the company "is not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets at this time."
Oracle? So they can make some sense out of Niagara... :-D
Sony? So they can make another poor decision...
They hired the most mercenary company they could find in order to salvage what is left of their shareholder's wealth. I'm sure they've already parted with whatevery IP allowed them to compete to date. I wonder what J Pee Morgan will be able to find in this pile of smoking rubble...
Their real estate and facilities must be worth something. Too bad they don't own clear title to their employees. Chatel used to sell well, back in the day.
They're the only likely candidate. Regulators would shit all over the idea of Intel buying AMD, even if they had a good reason to do it. nVidia might be interested, but again regulators would probably demand they'd divest themselves of the old ATi portion of the business. Facebook and Google? Don't see why'd they'd be interested. Dell or HP might have a sniff, but most of their business has always been built around high end Intel processors. Samsung are the only ones who make much sense, out of the list of potential suitors.
They want their own CPU and intel wont give the flexibility they want. Apple would gain their own GPU to tinker plus with bulldozer (or whatever they call it now) can have a nice APU for thei MBAs or IPADS with the x86 port replaced with an ARM.
Of course that would suck for us as I am typing this on an all AMD/ATI phenomII from Asus. But good for Asus investors since it looks like they wont survive this new recession that is starting.
http://saveie6.com/
That's worth something only if employees are bound serf-like to AMD, as opposed to being able to move to a different company if they don't like the new owner.
Similar post-sale exoduses happened when DEC sold itself off chunk by chunk.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
All Bulldozer-based processors and future generation AMD processors have hardware accelerated AES. Intel usually doesn't, but frequently they don't even specify it.
http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?AESTech=true Right down to the first-gen Core i5's
AMD processors all support ECC memory, while Intel usually only supports it in the Xeon processors (which can cost thousands of dollars).
http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&ECCMemory=true Even i3 CPU's support ECC.
AMD was also committed to Coreboot for a while, which was great for our freedom. (Unfortunately, they haven't released the required specifications for their more recent chips.)
You mean they not only failed to promote your freedom, they also reneged on a promise?
IBM, so they can definitely revenge themselves for their humiliation at the hands of Wintel.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
AMD wasnt "doing well independently", why do you suppose they spun off GlobalFoundries? Theyve been getting stomped since ~2006 when the core2 came out and dominated AMD's lineup.
You can't see why anyone might be interested in acquiring their vast patent portfolio, x86 license and cross-licensing agreement with Intel?
Let's all just hope they don't do a Lucent and the patents end up being held by a mysteriously well funded holding company...
Syllable : It's an Operating System
If only Valve/Gabe Newell had enough capital to buy AMD.
"Microsoft Corp, Google Inc, Samsung Electronics, Intel Corp and even Facebook Inc have been suggested by Wall Street analysts as potential suitors"
Intel would never buy AMD. Face it - right now, Intel is *winning* in the market, pretty much legitimately (not 100%, and they used to cheat like mad, but right now they're winning more-or-less fairly). But they need a competitor to avoid a massive antitrust investigation. They need AMD as an enemy more than they need it as an asset.
Facebook would not, and could not, buy AMD. They may be riding high on the Web 2.0 Bubble, but they're an absolutely terrible match. Facebook's made it a point of using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source solutions. They have very little experience with hardware (besides setting up networks and racks), and gain nothing from producing their own hardware.
Google doesn't need them. They're doing fine running on commodity servers for their web stuff, and trying to produce their own mobile chips would anger their hardware partners for Android. It might give them a slight edge in the long run, but the short-term harm seems to outweigh that.
Microsoft *might* work. They need some special edge in the tablet war they just jumped into, and AMD is a good match with their successful Xbox line. But AMD isn't known to be particularly good at low-power chips. Perhaps they just haven't tried yet, or some older design could be successfully adapted into tablets (a single/dual-core, low-power K8 paired with a good Radeon design might be a good A6 competitor, especially if Microsoft tries to bill itself both as an 'enterprise' tablet *and* a 'gaming' tablet). But really, although it makes sense for Microsoft to buy some hardware company, AMD isn't the best choice. NVidia might make a better one, but I don't think they're looking to sell out right now.
Samsung might buy parts of the company, but they wouldn't want the whole thing. I imagine they would love the graphics section, maybe some of the CPU engineers, but I doubt they want to enter the full-on CPU market.
You know who might make more sense? Cray, or maybe IBM. AMD stuff is popular for supercomputers, both their Opterons and their FireStream/FirePro cards. IBM isn't too likely (they have enough good hardware people already), but Cray or one of their competitors seems at least more plausible than any of the other suggestions.
Another idea is some gaming company. AMD has a somewhat-competitive graphics division, and a compute side that could handle gaming loads well with some tweaks. Sony is really the most likely - they've *never* been good at the hardware side, only lucking into success with the PS1 and PS2 after some clever business decisions. But I also doubt Sony is smart enough to try to do that, especially since buying AMD might hurt their (Intel-focused) laptop business.
Hire back Linux Kernel Devs and focus on servers.
The fact is that AMD's Opterons are very competitive perfomance and feature wise vs Intel Xeons. The price puts them over the top, though.
You can build 64 core, 1U servers for ~$5000 with moderate DDR3 ECC RAM and HDDs (you'd probably want a SAN though). Fully maxed out still less than $10K.
I respect AMDs cheap desktop and mobile lines but Intel is a juggernaught in this space. They have better contracts with more manufacturers.
...intel processors soundly trump AMD in almost every conceivable metric that matters...
I am a big fan of AMD. I really don't want to see them disappear. The /one market/ they have is cheap, high core density servers and they fucked that up when they laid off their Linux kernel devs.
I was in the process of speccing out some new 32-core (dual socket, 16-core CPUs) 1U servers and when I heard that I shifted gears... now I am lost trying to figure out what to do now...
And the terrible thing about that is that if you want a high density server, 16 cores per socket for instance, your choices are AMD for a reasonableish price, or Intel... oh.. wait... no.. no you can't. Because there don't seem to be any 8+ core Intel CPUs.
So, AMD 16 core part for $519 per socket for Intel for over $1000 for an 8 core. Plus far more expensive motherboards and such. AMD going down will likely end up a disaster for anyone wanting lots of cores and not wanting to spend $1000 - $2000 per socket.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Well, maybe. Think about the following scenario. Let us say you are a chip design firm that wants to get into server chips – we will call it ARM. You have 2 choices.
The first is to build your team up from scratch. Search the world over, recruit the engineers, move them to your headquarters (or wherever.). Hopefully you get the right mixture of people.
Or you could buy AMD. They already have design teams set up. Sure, you may lose 10% in a well-executed buy out – but that will leave enough core people to continue on.
You could substitute Samsung and graphic chips.
This, of course, makes huge assumptions about building a team from scratch vs. AMD team – but I think it is where you want to start.
It's probably the time to mention that the qualification to be a 'Wall St Analyst' is to be standing on Wall Street and wildly waving one's arms like they're in the background of the Today show.
The fact that no specific analyst is being mentioned implies they couldn't even find that.
I don't know that Intel has better engineers. They doubtless have more engineers. Intel also has fewer constraints on their engineers. It harder to build a low power chip on a larger process. Its going to be hard to beat, on instructions per watt, the highly competent engineers at Intel who have access to 22nm process when your fabs can only do 28 and larger, even if you put together an engineering dream team.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The article text actually says that they are not pursuing a sale strategy but they need to fix their profitability. AMD is the GPU supplier for the Wii U, and early development boxes for the new xbox and playstation are running AMD chipsets. So AMD should just need to stay afloat until all the next gen consoles are released to return to being profitable.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
Even i3 CPU's support ECC.
To be fair he did say "usually" it's only on the Xeons. Those i3's listed are a minority of all i3's.
intel processors soundly trump AMD in almost every conceivable metric that matters
Except price/performance.
Only for a small, random smattering of chips. The vast majority of i5s and i7s you find on Newegg and the like don't, and most systems that ship also don't include CPUs with ECC support. It's certainly not universal across all products, while AMD has made things like VT-x, VT-d, and ECC common to all their processors.
...and run as hot as the surface of the sun. So does my AMD FX 8120. I had to go liquid cooling to get that temp down. No heatsink & fan could get it done.
"That's right...I said it."
You are either stupid or you are being deliberately misleading. I can see 7 i3's launched all the way back in... Q3 2012. Nothing before that, and no mainstream i5/i7's. All the other Core CPUs in that list are for laptops (sockets BGA1288 and FCBGA1023).
In contrast, every single one of the AMD CPUs supports ECC and that has been the case since AMD64 launched.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The idea that a SAPR (Synthesis, Auto Place & Route) flow is fundamentally inferior to a full-custom layout is tenuous at best. It's really just a new parroting of the good-old days cliché.
Modern gate-mapping, placement, and routing algorithms are quite sophisticated these days (and improving all the time), and computers are incredibly fast, relative to a human mind. Could a really good layout engineer do a full-custom 64b carry-lookahead adder that is smaller, faster, less power than an automated flow? Maybe. But how long is it going to take him to do the whole FPU? Or how about a complex block with upwards of 1M logic gates? Hand-layout for digital logic has rapidly diminishing returns, in my opinion. Better to have your layout guys do some awesome stdcells, and let the tools and PD wizards do the rest. In many cases, it'll be just as fast (if not faster) than the full-custom option. Note well that automated flows don't explicitly demand random/non-structured P&R algorithms.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
Misleading facts with citations are still misleading.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I'd still buy 'em if I was you, its not like all that FOSS code is gonna disappear and too many corps support Linux on servers for them to let the code rot, so I'd say your safe as houses.
Hell I'm still buying AMD across the board even though I sell Windows desktops and laptops, the bang for the buck is still incredibly high and for Joe and Jane Average even an Athlon triple core is frankly overkill for the kind of work they have for their system to do. And on the gaming front my boys and I are quite happy with our AMD systems, we have two Thubans and a Deneb quad and they just crank through the latest games no matter how many fireballs and particles are thrown across the screen. heck all three systems cost less than one upper midrange Intel gaming setup so i have no problem recommending them to those that want to game without breaking the bank. Finally the AMD E350 units make kick ass low power HTPCs and office boxes, i have switched several offices over and the employees just love 'em, they can actually talk on the phones and not hear a single sound out of their office box while still running anything they need to run, its nice.
So if it were me I'd buy 'em, 32 cores should give you plenty of power and the money you save can go towards more RAM which you of course can never have too much of.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hell that is nothing, i built a fricking gaming PC for my oldest using an AMD hexa, the final cost? $420 after MIRs. Man you can NOT beat that price! I mean you can buy Phenom quad kits, NOT Athlon but honest to God Phenom II quad kits for $150 after MIR and that includes 8Gb of RAM, just add whatever HDD or SSD you want and any cheap burner. Hell you can buy the hexacore chip for $106 with NO rebates now how in the hell you gonna beat THAT kind of bang for the buck?
This is why I've been sticking with AMD, frankly most people just aren't gonna slam even an Athlon triple core, and the prices have been so low i can build people damned nice machines and still make a decent profit and they are HAPPY, damned happy, for the performance they are getting at that price. I also put my own money where my mouth is, not only is my entire family using AMD desktops and laptops but I've been selling AMD exclusively in the shop the past 5 years and people are happy as clams.
Its gonna suck balls if AMD goes tits up, especially for those that need real cores instead of HT. I'm just glad I got myself a 1035T, those 6 cores just chew through transcodes while giving me cores left over to multitask, you just can't beat having 3 cores for transcodes, one for my music playing, and a couple for browser threads and background tasks. Even with a couple of hours worth of transcodes running in the background my music never skips, the computer never feels like its under load, it just keeps cranking.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hyperthreading is not the equal of a full-fledged core.
Which is why I said sixteen threads, not sixteen cores. The original claim was that Intel had no CPUs with 8 or more cores, which merely proves the poster has no clue about current CPUs.