The Ups and Downs of AMD (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: In 2003 AMD was on top of the world. Now they're not, but they're also still in business. AMD continues to produce inexpensive, well-engineered semiconductors. The fall over the last 10 years is due to Intel, who used illegal practices and ethically questionable engineering decisions to knock AMD off their roost while still keeping them in business. The latter prevents the finger of antitrust from being pointed at Intel the way it was for Ma Bell.

Comments

Re:AMD was their own worst enemy

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't know your father, but i was there for a "long time" up till 2013, and mismanagement is about the only thing AMD had going on at the top. it was comically bad. and it still is... i get a chuckle out of fanbois hyping Lisa-this, Raja-that, whatever. i never met Raja, so can't comment on him; but Lisa is not terribly impressive technically, and seemed to be planning for her golden parachute from the moment she walked into our office.

she also, apparently/allegedly, told teams (who had dependencies on other internal teams) that different projects were "top priority". so you'd have a weird deadlock case of project A being held up by people who were working on project B (being told it was top priority), being held up be a different set of people working on project A (being top priority). was a way of bullshitting paying customers, best i could tell. that was a sign that it was time to move on...

Re:Ive always prefered AMD

[unixisc]

Actually, the K7 - which was the Athlon and the first processor made by the ex Alpha team - was their first great CPU which matched or beat Intel. They did a remarkable coup when they came out w/ AMD64, totally upsetting Itanium in the process and forcing Intel to adapt their architecture and do a cross licensing deal. Too bad that on the fab side of things, they failed to keep up, and thereby let their game plan implode. That's one thing Intel had been brilliant at. In the 90s, I recall people would speculate on which of the major RISC CPUs - SPARC, MIPS, POWER, Alpha, PA-RISC, et al would make it big. Just having far superior process technology enabled Intel to ultimately first catch up, and then beat each of them one by one.

Re:AMD settled

[Pulzar]

A bunch of fucking MBAs decided they didn't really need to pay a bunch of expensive chip designers to make chips, and that it would be a better idea financially to sell of the fab so their remaining development team could be isolated away from the fabrication process. Brilliant plan.

While, yes, AMD management totally did destroy the company, the bit about selling the fab happened later, after the Barcelona disaster, and after they threw away all their money on ATI.

The fab was not competitive (as GlobalFoundries performance showed for the next few years), and they absolutely had to get rid of it to survive. Not having the cost of maintaining that thing is the reason they are not bankrupt (yet).