From Ars Technica's "article" on it:
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/amd-weighing-a-business-break-up-or-spin-off-reuters-says/
Consider this rumor started by panicked short sellers of AMD stock to be officially debunked.
That's a very different situation, and a very different impetus for the move they made then.
But feel free to compare apples and oranges.
Remember, you have to take these sorts of statements in a very literal manner. What she said was "we have not hired an outside company to...".
That could mean that they haven't had any discussions about it at all. But, that's not what they said, what they said was that they have not hired an outside company.
I knew a VP at Compaq when they were going through the merger with HP...it was brutal. He had to lay off 23,000 people. !!!!!! Can you comprehend what that pressure is like? AMD is worse off today than Compaq was back in the early 2000's... it doesn't take a Computer (or Rocket) Scientist to figure out that they have at least explored the option of a breakup.
More likely, they're hoping that somebody with deep pockets will swoop in and buy them. The only problem is that no potential buyer (even Samsung) is going to want to go head to head with Intel in anything. Nvidia, sure, maybe, but Intel? Why would I pay $2b just to get my (deleted) kicked by the 800 lb gorilla in the tech industry? Realistically, the graphics division is the only part of the company with a future, the cpu side could literally fold up tomorrow and nobody but us old-timers would even miss it.
The real question then becomes, "How much is the graphics division worth"? How much do they need from the cpu side to continue to sell APU's for the consoles? Is it even feasible to extricate the 2 companies anymore? Maybe that's the real issue, they discussed it and decided that you just can't split up the company.
I wouldn't be suprised to see AMD go bankrupt. Another potential option is for a private entity to purchase everything. Think about it...AMD headquartered in UAE would be outside the long reach of the NSA. Ok, maybe not outside of it, but a lot harder to get to anyway. And lots of countries intensely distrust US technology firms in the wake of the Edward Snowden scandal. Perhaps China, or Russia, or the UAE, or especially Iran, would prefer to do business with somebody who at least appears to be less likely to have backdoors for the next stuxnet built into every single chip.
I think AMD is betting that their experimentation with first-generation HBM will enable them to beat Nvidia to market with FinFET+HBM2 GPUs next year. That's really the only way I can see this gamble paying off; Fury isn't going to give enough revenue to justify the R&D costs by itself.
AMD desperately needs the FinFET process so they can finally get the aging rebrands off the market and introduce a new lineup. The best-case scenario for AMD would be beating Nvidia to market with FinFET+HBM2 by six months or so, which would give them a clear lead in both performance and perf/watt. While Nvidia would do a better job of holding their own, AMD could make some major inroads into winning back their lost market share and expanding their presence in the professional world.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that could potentially go wrong. HBM2 development isn't under AMD's control, and neither is GloFo's work on implementing Samsung's 14nm FinFET fab processes. If HBM2 is delayed until 2H 2016, then it's likely AMD and Nvidia are both going to be waiting on it, and AMD's chances of getting to market first become slim. And if it turns out that TSMC's 16FF+ process is considerably better suited for GPUs than Samsung/GloFo's 14LPP, then AMD could be in big trouble.
You're focusing on the wrong part. AMD graphics is at least competitive these days, and NV is not such a huge behemoth that they can't compete head to head with them in consumer and professional graphics. It's not unrealistic, in fact, to think that AMD will run something like 1/3 of the gpu market indefinitely. Heck, they might even end up with a significant advantage and more market share if GF proves to be more capable than TSMC of delivering the goods.
What IS unrealistic, however, is to expect AMD to go head to head in the CPU space with a company that is nearly 100x as valuable. They've been making some good inroads into other markets, but they need to do more and quickly if they hope to stay alive through what's coming over the next decade.
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