[allthingsd.com] AMD getting ready for another round of Layoffs

[podspi]

Rory would say "you had me at employees..."

Hahah, low blow!


We will see how this all shakes out, but this (and the hiring of outside consultants) does not inspire confidence.

 

[sontin]

They will cut 15%:

The savings will be largely driven through a reduction of AMD's global workforce by approximately 15 percent, which is expected to be largely completed in the fourth quarter of 2012.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1747465&highlight=

 

[boxleitnerb]

Less than expected. At least something...

 

[Ajay]

They will cut 15%:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1747465&highlight=

Well, at least the layoffs are less than the 20-30% flaunted elsewhere on the web. Still, down 25% YoY, bad news! The only bright spot was graphics, but that was down as well.

 

[Ajay]

Rory would say "you had me at employees..."

LOLZ!

 

[Idontcare]

The savings will be largely driven through a reduction of AMD's global workforce by approximately 15 percent, which is expected to be largely completed in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Q4 Rory reportedly went on to state:

So have a great Christmas and a happy new year, team

(no, not really, but man 4th quarter layoffs suck especially hard IMO)

 

[ShintaiDK]

So AMD is back to operating at a loss (157mio$) and the endless "restructuring".

And they had to take a 100mio$ writedown on Llanos they couldnt get rid of.

R&D budget also keeps declining.

Graphics revenue and profit also dropped. A mere 18mio$ profit.

And they dont expect a break even before Q3 2013.

"Read has brought in a team of business consultants from McKinsey & Company and BCG (the former Boston Consulting Group) to advise the company on how to fix its business model. McKinsey’s role is said to involve identifying and handling the job cuts. BCG’s role is said by people familiar with the situation to be consulting on what has been described as a “grand strategy” to take the company forward."

What is Rorys job again?

 

[Idontcare]

What is Rorys job again?

Rory may be doing exactly what Dirk should have done - go get a second opinion on the sanity of the master strategy being pushed by the BoD and if the second opinion doesn't support the BoD then push on the BoD to perhaps go forth and educate themselves.

It is pretty obvious that the BoD wanted a puppet CEO, not one with a vision but one who would take direction. Dirk wouldn't. And it took the BoD some 8 months to find someone who would, even with the multi-million dollar golden carrot dangling in front of candidate after candidate.

The BoD may already be tired of Rory and are getting ready to shove him out. Otherwise Rory wouldn't need to bring in outsiders just to tell him to do the dirty work that the BoD wants him to do.

This may be Rory fighting for his own job in a way that Dirk simply wouldn't.

 

[zaydq]

I read that many tech companies are having their shares go down... people just aren't buying what they used to. Microsoft is down, Intel (i think) is down, Google is down....

 

[blastingcap]

Yet there are some stocks out there defying gravity like LNKD at near-quadruple-digit P/E (if everything goes right for several years in a row, LNKD may finally be worth that much... if anything goes wrong at all (like Google starting Google Jobs with G+, etc.), it isn't worth the ridiculous valuation that it's at right now... and things go wrong all the time!).

 

[Olikan]

Rory may be doing exactly what Dirk should have done - go get a second opinion on the sanity of the master strategy being pushed by the BoD and if the second opinion doesn't support the BoD then push on the BoD to perhaps go forth and educate themselves.

It is pretty obvious that the BoD wanted a puppet CEO, not one with a vision but one who would take direction. Dirk wouldn't. And it took the BoD some 8 months to find someone who would, even with the multi-million dollar golden carrot dangling in front of candidate after candidate.

The BoD may already be tired of Rory and are getting ready to shove him out. Otherwise Rory wouldn't need to bring in outsiders just to tell him to do the dirty work that the BoD wants him to do.

This may be Rory fighting for his own job in a way that Dirk simply wouldn't.

dude, that was impressive... and actually make sence

 

[CTho9305]

Also given AMD's low market cap and extensive IP, it wouldn't be surprising if somebody bought them up, shuttered x86, and remade them into an ARM SoC company. They have (almost?) all the non-cell IP for it.

Are they able to design SOCs cost-effectively? The ARM ecosystem players seem to move much faster, and do designs with smaller teams than the historical CPU companies.

 

[Keysplayr]

Less than expected. At least something...

More than expected or was hoping for in my case. I was hoping only the minimum at 10%. That's a lot of jobs man, and right before the holiday season. I mean, it's rough at anytime of the year, but you know what I mean.

 

[podspi]

Are they able to design SOCs cost-effectively? The ARM ecosystem players seem to move much faster, and do designs with smaller teams than the historical CPU companies.

I would imagine so, but I have no real idea. I don't know if ARM really moves much faster though. How long have we had A9-class designs, and how much longer are we going to be stuck with them? Meanwhile Intel has new designs coming out more or less like clockwork.


AMD actually is seems to be trying to get into the yearly cadence as well, though they seem to be more tick-tick-tick to Intel's tick-tock-tick.

 

[pm]

Rory may be doing exactly what Dirk should have done - go get a second opinion on the sanity of the master strategy being pushed by the BoD and if the second opinion doesn't support the BoD then push on the BoD to perhaps go forth and educate themselves.

So, IDC, you always seem to understand these things better than I do, so can you tell me what you think the approximate (or even precise) master strategy of the BoD is? Because I've been trying to figure it out since last year and I still am not seeing any part of what the plan is.

 

[anongineer]

I don't know if ARM really moves much faster though. How long have we had A9-class designs, and how much longer are we going to be stuck with them? Meanwhile Intel has new designs coming out more or less like clockwork.

Well, the recently announced Chromebook has an A15, so it should wind up in tablets and phones shortly, unless it's fundamentally too power hungry.

The CPU core provider (ARM) is not necessarily the same as the SOC integrators who license the core or ISA (Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI, Apple, etc). Intel does occupy both roles with Medfield and Clover Trail, which is good because their fab rules, but not great because it locks a manufacturer into whatever design decisions Intel made regarding choice of I/O and graphics.

SOC development can be done with smaller teams especially if they simply integrate blocks and don't do any design work of their own. Most of the front end effort is making sure that the blocks work as advertised, and can communicate with each other across some bus (AMBA). Variants on a known working design can then be churned out quickly by plugging in or removing blocks.

Are they able to design SOCs cost-effectively?

An APU is SOC-like (CPU + GPU + I/O), and they're cutting costs, so no. I'd cut them some slack because almost none of their blocks come from third parties who would be on the hook if things didn't work as claimed. But when chips are delayed to the point of cancellation or irrelevancy, it means that there is something seriously wrong with how blocks are designed, or how chips are put together, or both.

 

[anongineer]

The board appears to have an obsession with tablets, after seeing the success Qualcomm has had. It was on their watch that AMD sold ATI's mobile graphics division to Qualcomm.

(In a cute move, the graphics core was changed to Adreno, an anagram of Radeon.)

AMD faced a number of problems in entering the tablet space. The most obvious one was that a big chunk of low-power design experience, nevermind IP, was sold to Qualcomm. On the CPU side, it was hard enough to compete with Intel on power consumption, and ARM-based tablet SOC's would totally clean up on that front. And then there was the matter of GF and yield, important in a low-margin high-volume product line.

The board wanted tablet SOC's. Dirk Meyer didn't. The board turfed him and found someone that would accommodate their tablet vision.

Hondo is launching with no announced design wins, and after Clover Trail launched and lined up Samsung, Lenovo, HP and Asus. This is probably not the high-profile entry the board envisioned.

Maybe management is starting to realize that rushing through a tablet design was about as smart as melting down pots and door knobs to make "steel." Their silence on Kaveri has been noted, but management has been equally silent on Samara.

 

[Abwx]

Awesome, according to a blogger, Intel is supposed to degrade their performance because AMD doesn't have a register that's physically required for the Intel code path.

I guess that would mean that AMD's AVX implementation isn't fully compatible with Intel's. And that's somehow Intel's fault.

Wasn't there a court order or agreement of some sort that Intel wouldn't degrade AMD's performance with their compiler? Why isn't AMD making an issue about this? Most likely because there isn't an issue.

As always, AMD's problems are never of their own creation (not that this is one)...It's always Intel's fault.

That has nothing to do with registers , you re of bad faith
and really talking non sense.

If a processor support a set of instructions it will forcibly
have the required hardware to execute them....

The FTC settlement included a disclosure provision where Intel must:[29]
“ ...publish clearly that its compiler discriminates against non-Intel processors (such as AMD's designs), not fully utilizing their features and producing inferior code. ” In compliance with this rule, Intel added an "optimization notice" to its compiler descriptions stating that they "do not optimize equally for non-Intel microprocessors" and that "certain compiler options for Intel compilers, including some that are not specific to Intel micro-architecture, are reserved for Intel microprocessors". [30]

According to Intel :

Intel® compilers, associated libraries and associated development tools may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2), Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSE3), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSSE3) instruction sets and other optimizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C++_Compiler

 

[Vesku]

Rory may be doing exactly what Dirk should have done - go get a second opinion on the sanity of the master strategy being pushed by the BoD and if the second opinion doesn't support the BoD then push on the BoD to perhaps go forth and educate themselves.

It is pretty obvious that the BoD wanted a puppet CEO, not one with a vision but one who would take direction. Dirk wouldn't. And it took the BoD some 8 months to find someone who would, even with the multi-million dollar golden carrot dangling in front of candidate after candidate.

The BoD may already be tired of Rory and are getting ready to shove him out. Otherwise Rory wouldn't need to bring in outsiders just to tell him to do the dirty work that the BoD wants him to do.

This may be Rory fighting for his own job in a way that Dirk simply wouldn't.

Interesting take on the situation. I do think the BoD has been AMD's achilles heel in concert with Ruiz.

 

[v8envy]

Well, at least the layoffs are less than the 20-30% flaunted elsewhere on the web. Still, down 25% YoY, bad news! The only bright spot was graphics, but that was down as well.

The 20-30% will probably be right. An announced RIF of 15% to be completed by end of year will have competent people stampeding for the lifeboats. Any techie or product manager able to prove themselves a non-negative contributor with any contacts in the industry whatsoever is going to shift their main focus to finding a different gig ASAP.

Barring a miracle AMD is done as a mainstream alternative to both Intel and Nvidia.

 

[pm]

Thanks, anongineer. Great posts. Thanks for your thoughts. You've given me a bit to think about... and some code names that I didn't recognize to google.

 

[Olikan]

The board appears to have an obsession with tablets, after seeing the success Qualcomm has had. It was on their watch that AMD sold ATI's mobile graphics division to Qualcomm.

IMO, the board appears to have an obsession is cutting costs...

 

[CTho9305]

The board appears to have an obsession with tablets, after seeing the success Qualcomm has had. It was on their watch that AMD sold ATI's mobile graphics division to Qualcomm.

(In a cute move, the graphics core was changed to Adreno, an anagram of Radeon.)

I'd always thought that at the time, AMD had two options: 1) turn off the lights and tell everyone to go home 2) sell off absolutely anything they could (even if it had to be at lowball prices), keep the lights on, and hope that the products they continued working on would turn out ok. Was there more to it?

 

[NTMBK]

Maybe management is starting to realize that rushing through a tablet design was about as smart as melting down pots and door knobs to make "steel." Their silence on Kaveri has been noted, but management has been equally silent on Samara.

Hopefully Hondo hasn't taken too big a chunk of their resources- cutting down their existing Z-01 a bit more and shipping it should have been a relatively cheap task. It's better to show up to the fight than to not show up at all- at least they'll manage to ship some chips, hopefully, and stall until Jaguar is ready.

 

[Idontcare]

I'd always thought that at the time, AMD had two options: 1) turn off the lights and tell everyone to go home 2) sell off absolutely anything they could (even if it had to be at lowball prices), keep the lights on, and hope that the products they continued working on would turn out ok. Was there more to it?

That was my take on it as an outsider. The selloffs weren't done out of strategic planning, it was done out of crisis-mode management that was simply trying to keep the power bill paid so the lights didn't get turned off.

People who find themselves selling their belongings at the pawn shop aren't accepting the pawn shops low-ball offers because they have a choice - they are hawking their goods at lowball prices because it a choice of doing that or starving to death.