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AMD to Cut 5% of Workforce

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Fjodor2001 said:
Good enough to put out cat core APUs that required the mighty Intel to have to resort to contra revenue to be able to compete.
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Contra-revenue had nothing to do with AMD. In the segments where Intel competed with AMD, no contra-revenue was required and Intel profitably took pretty much all of AMD's low-end APU biz.

And all this achieved with such a relatively small R&D budget. If anything the AMD engineers seem to produce much more and better results per invested dollar than e.g. the ones at Intel. E.g. Intel have been bleeding $4B a year alone on mobile for several years without still being competitive.
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What a strange comparison! Look at how much profit Intel generates per invested R&D dollar compared to AMD. Intel mints billions in profit each year; AMD has been bleeding money for years 😉

The reality is that people do not only choose jobs based on what revenue or profit a company has, or even what salary they get. I'd say more often they factor in whether they'll be able to work on interesting technologies, what role they'll have at that company, if the company is close to where they live and have friends, etc.
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Sure, but job security is nice. The pride that comes with working on successful products is nice. Bigger paychecks are nice.
 
Arachnotronic said:
LOL, this is only currently usable with Intel processors.

What a joke. Go home, AMD -- you're drunk.
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Strange that despite having to cut down their sales structure AMD doesn't kill their memory and SSD business. I wonder if Rory gave AMD yet another strangling contract.
 
Arachnotronic said:
Sure, but job security is nice. The pride that comes with working on successful products is nice. Bigger paychecks are nice.
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Sure those also also factors in the addition to the ones I mentioned. But the point I was trying to make is that it's not so simple as to just look at the revenue and profit of a company to determine the skill of the engineers working there.
 
Fjodor2001 said:
Sure those also also factors in the addition to the ones I mentioned. But the point I was trying to make is that it's not so simple as to just look at the revenue and profit of a company to determine the skill of the engineers working there.
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Sure. But I would say this: in the case of a company like AMD where the business has clearly been falling apart, and given how competitive the semiconductor market is, the best talent will probably look for better opportunities.
 
Arachnotronic said:
Sure. But I would say this: in the case of a company like AMD where the business has clearly been falling apart, and given how competitive the semiconductor market is, the best talent will probably look for better opportunities.
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Don't count on that. I've been working (as a contractor) at several companies where lots of talent stayed at the company even through the tough years. Often for the reasons mentioned before. But also because many of the most talented engineers take pride in their work and want to follow it through. Having said that, some did also leave. But it's not so clear cut as to say that either no talent left, or all talent left.
 
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readers said:
Calling out BS is not sick.
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Nah, definitely a rival crush. I don't post in this sub section much, but woof. I can see it from a mile away.

The sig before he edited it was a huge red flag. He's just dying to get a "gotcha" on him.
 
mrmt said:
AMD doesn't make money, Nvidia does, even with the GTX 480 (which became the Quadro 4000 series), that makes a hell of a difference.
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Money doesn't trump entropy.

The real standard for the quality of a product is how much it delivers to the world, not how well a company manages to get more than what it's worth.

I will give you that not being profitable tends to reduce one's ability to fight entropy via R&D, but, at the same time, fraudulent business practices are hardly laudable.
 
Fjodor2001 said:
Don't count on that. I've been working (as a contractor) at several companies where lots of talent stayed at the company even through the tough years.
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There's "tough years" and "headed for liquidation" like where AMD is headed. Maybe the folks in the GPU group think they will just get spun off, but everyone else has to be looking for the exit. And if they were in denial about how bad things have gotten... Keller being let go should have been the wake up call they needed.
 
AMD is dead. We don't need to talk about that anymore. We better start to focus to the living ones. So forget AMD and nVIDIA, both are dead.
 
dark zero said:
AMD is dead. We don't need to talk about that anymore. We better start to focus to the living ones. So forget AMD and nVIDIA, both are dead.
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Nope
https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=NVDA

I'm genuinely surprised how well Nvidia is doing. One thing that jumps out is that market cap is $13.88B, but the enterprise value is $10.61B. That means the company has relatively low debt, little or no preferred shares, and is sitting on an enormous amount of cash. The stock price is $25.75, but the company holds $8.36 per share in cash. it's not a bad company to own shares of. The price might go down in the near term, but why would anyone sell shares of this thing? It's a cash cow.
 
Spungo said:
Nope
https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=NVDA

I'm genuinely surprised how well Nvidia is doing. One thing that jumps out is that market cap is $13.88B, but the enterprise value is $10.61B. That means the company has relatively low debt, little or no preferred shares, and is sitting on an enormous amount of cash. The stock price is $25.75, but the company holds $8.36 per share in cash. it's not a bad company to own shares of. The price might go down in the near term, but why would anyone sell shares of this thing? It's a cash cow.
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NVIDIA is doing well because they are the best at what they do. AMD has not yet learned the simple but powerful lesson that focus is the difference between a mediocre company and a great company.
 
superstition said:
Money doesn't trump entropy.

The real standard for the quality of a product is how much it delivers to the world, not how well a company manages to get more than what it's worth.

I will give you that not being profitable tends to reduce one's ability to fight entropy via R&D, but, at the same time, fraudulent business practices are hardly laudable.
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Yea, well, if you are talking about AMD, they are losing on both counts-- profit *and* quality of the products, especially cpus.
 
jpiniero said:
There's "tough years" and "headed for liquidation" like where AMD is headed.
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I'll clarify: One of the companies I worked at eventually actually went bankrupt. That company was in a far worse shape than AMD is currently, and still lots of talented people stayed for the reasons I mentioned. It was not until the very last end (some months before, when it was more or less obvious what would happen) that some of them left.
 
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Arachnotronic said:
Contra-revenue had nothing to do with AMD. In the segments where Intel competed with AMD, no contra-revenue was required and Intel profitably took pretty much all of AMD's low-end APU biz.
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Wrong, in the tablet market that AMD had a better product Contra-Revenue destroyed any AMD competition against Intel.
Also because of the contra-revenue in tablets, OEMs purchased desktop ATOMs to get higher rebates at the end of the month or year. That also destroyed AMD CAT-based desktop competition.
 
AtenRa said:
Wrong, in the tablet market that AMD had a better product Contra-Revenue destroyed any AMD competition against Intel.
Also because of the contra-revenue in tablets, OEMs purchased desktop ATOMs to get higher rebates at the end of the month or year. That also destroyed AMD CAT-based desktop competition.
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Well AMD's brazos was successful as a product.
AMD's low end brazos didn't compete with contra-revenue..They were beaten by low end intel pentiums and celerons based big core laptop chips towards the end.
AMD's cat cores low powered desktops required active cooling,bay-trails didn't.
Even if they had somewhat lower performance,they won more design wins with NUCs and small form factor designs..which was not covered in contra-revenue.

Tablet market.AMD didn't have a camera sensor(correct me if i am wrong) and why were there no sub 9/10" tablets,not even demoed.Who rules out the possibility of higher power consumption unsuitable for 7/8/9" tablets?And apart from the top-end SKU which was used for demos the most others w/ E- series had half the cores and lot lower clocks.They would have had lot lower perfomance and would have lost to mid-range bay-trail quads.
Intel had to use contra-revenue literally to make x86 enter into mobile world.Intel had and perhaps still has a severe disadvantage in BoM vs ARM based competitors.
Now what makes one think that AMD didn't have any such BoM disadvantage or even had substantially lower BoM than intel?.Also intel had prior experience in mobile and tablet market way before bay-trail and also had experties in sensors and was making products with newer 4g/3g basebands.I don't see much proof how AMD would have been as good or better than intel wrt BoM.
Just performance means nothing if it isn't suitable enough to fit in a mainstream tablet size in a suitable price.Price,performance and power all three are important in portable form factors like tablets.If anything,Intel was seems to be better in BoM aspect than AMD.Still it took contra-revenue to enter.I don't think AMD had that much chances as some make out to be.
All we had seen was one single tablet design win that too wasn't available in most regions.
Also if we go by just pure numbers then AMD A10-micro 6700T was quite far ahead of the bay-trail flagship then especially in graphics performance.In fact if such a chip could have been used in sub 9 inch slim tablets of the class at least some OEMs would have got some designs with it and it could have been priced higher as well because of superior performance.But nothing happened,that points towards the possibility that power-consumption and BoM wasn't inline for those smaller form-factors. 🙂
 
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Arachnotronic said:
NVIDIA is doing well because they are the best at what they do. AMD has not yet learned the simple but powerful lesson that focus is the difference between a mediocre company and a great company.
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Indeed. I've always maintained that ATI was an excellent hardware company, but the drivers were god awful. I would pick Nvidia over ATI every time just because the drivers actually worked. AMD has done a better job than ATI, but that bridge has already been burned. The people paying $4000 for workstation video cards were burned by AMD/ATI a long time ago, so they are Nvidia customers for life. Every computer in my office has an Intel CPU and Nvidia video card.

Newegg tells you everything you need to know about the market.
workstation cards, sorted by price
Most expensive Nvidia card: $5000, and there's a limit of 3 per customer (were people trying to buy more than 3?)
Most expensive AMD card: $1600
They charge that much because they can charge that much.

Intel has a similar position in the workstation and server markets. Here's a product I didn't know existed until 2 minutes ago:
61 core Intel processor - $4300
 
AtenRa said:
Wrong, in the tablet market that AMD had a better product Contra-Revenue destroyed any AMD competition against Intel.
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Nonsense. Bay Trail was far more power efficient in CPU workloads and integrated more of the critical tablet-oriented IP (i.e. image signal processor) than Temash/Mullins did.
 
Layoffs suck. Even if you survive, you're basically looking at an ever greater work load. Then again, what has America been these past 15 years if not more and more work for less and less pay?
 
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