If I were the CEO of AMD... (rate)

[AnandThenMan]

How in the world does anyone think AMD could somehow divorce themselves from the ATI graphics tech? Not possible without basically starting over for the majority of the product stack. It won't be long before every processor AMD has will be a complete marriage of CPU/GPU.

You look what is going into the Playstation 4, now imagine a similar part in a small form factor desktop machine and of course a notebook. Seems very appealing to me.

 

[MaxPayne63]

My plan:

1) Spin off GPU division as 'Radeon.' This will allow AMD to focus on its historical strength - its CPUs.
2) AMD will pay Radeon royalties on any and all products with relevant IP. This payment will be based on projected sales, not actual, so the new company won't get screwed by the old company's dead weight.
3) The new company will need a leader if it wants to be king of the rapidly changing silicon jungle. A true visionary will be needed if Radeon is to distinguish itself. I will step up and fill that position.
4) The CEO of Radeon will need to be well compensated. Very well compensated. This is for the protection of the stockholders, of course.

 

[zlatan]

It won't be long before every processor AMD has will be a complete marriage of CPU/GPU.

Not just AMD doing this. Everybody take this road. Offload more and more general purpose compute to the iGPU is the only way to scale the performance.

 

[pablo87]

2timer, the biggest flaw in your plan is the Fabs. Seems like the cost is in the tens of billions and even then the outcome is uncertain. so fabless is the way to go. But then you'd have to get rid of the WSA with Global Foundries....and that could force you to file for chapter 11.

You also need a minimum of acct and marketing but yeah, you wouldn't need to dig too deep to find waste and overhead galore (see glass door employee comments). Of note, in 1985 Intel layoffs, Grove was incensed that they would layoff engineers over lawyers. jobs I believe had the same attitude. So you have the right idea.

As far as selling Radeon, nobody has a crystal ball whether the current x86 APU strategy will succeed - chance are it will not. If you sell/spin-off ATI, they probably follow the NVDA ARM SOC model, which could do well, Leaving you free to pursue your dream.

I'll give you 7/10.

 

[AnandThenMan]

It is absolutely ridiculous for AMD to offload Radeon tech, it is the one thing they have that Intel does not. Without it, no console contracts, no APU, no profitable graphics division, even if it is a modest one. So that would leave AMD with only products that directly compete with Intel, something NO ONE has been able to do consistently. Even the mighty IBM got smart and abandoned trying to compete head to head with Intel. That should tell you something right there, trying to "out Intel" Intel is moronic.

Can't believe people are actually suggesting such a thing, for AMD to be able to offer better performance (not to mention in a timely manner) they will have to have fabrication ability at least as good as Intel. How does anyone propose they pull that off, said fabs cost more than AMD's market cap.

 

[Idontcare]

2) AMD will pay Radeon royalties on any and all products with relevant IP. This payment will be based on projected sales, not actual, so the new company won't get screwed by the old company's dead weight.

This sounds familiar, it is exactly what GloFo got. The exclusive fab agreement through 2024, the take-or-pay obligation which assures GloFo gets paid by AMD regardless whether or not AMD can actually sell the chips from those wafers, etc.

And how well is GloFo doing? How well is the contractual obligations working out for AMD?

What you propose would accomplish little beyond escalating AMD's cash drain and demise.

4) The CEO of Radeon will need to be well compensated. Very well compensated. This is for the protection of the stockholders, of course.

GloFo plan too Are you Hector Ruiz's brother looking to cash in on the family plans?

 

[AnandThenMan]

GloFo plan too Are you Hector Ruiz's brother looking to cash in on the family plans?

lol

 

[mrmt]

It is absolutely ridiculous for AMD to offload Radeon tech, it is the one thing they have that Intel does not. Without it, no console contracts, no APU, no profitable graphics division, even if it is a modest one.

This is exactly what makes the idea of offloading the GPU division interesting. Right now AMD needs money, and they won't get this money with Radeon's peanuts profits.

By selling their GPU division and entering in a partnership with the new owners, AMD can both have the technology for their APU/Console/whatever and get some cash, and for that they must only give up the GPU division peanuts profits.

Sure, they would lose a lot of control over the development pipeline but at least they would have more money in their warchest and would have smaller OPEX to worry about.

 

[frozentundra123456]

If you compare AMD's CPU to AMD's GPU and then say, "AMD's CPUs are it's weakest area" then yes, logically you are correct

Point is, AMD's CPUs are still strong in multi-threaded benchmarks against Intel

They are only "strong" in multithreaded benchmarks in relation to price. A 3770K wins almost every benchmark vs 8350 except a couple. And many times when Intel wins, it is by a large margin where even when AMD wins vs HT 4 core intel it is by a small margin. And if Intel wanted to, they could lower prices on the 3770k or bring out a mainstream hexcore to counter AMDs multithreaded performance, not to mention the much lower power consumption, and Haswell will surely bring some improvements in performance as well.

AMD bet everything on buying ATI, and in my opinion, the only place they have a chance to beat intel is in the low power mobile area where they have better performance than atom and are cheaper than Haswell will be.

 

[redtruthseeker]

If I was a CEO of AMD I would:
- invest more in marketing for APU's and based it around APU and PlayStation 4
- motto: "affordable quality and performance for the masses"
- alt motto: "quality, performance, longevity and affordability in one small package"
- talk to software developer, give them the tools to work on and promote each other
- try to gather some money from investors
- make a dynamic roadmap for progress and development of the company
- sing a contract with LIMPCE to co-develop and improve Elbros and Opteron
- Invest more into Open GL since Direct X will not have regular updated(nearly dead)
- relocate to Europe or Canada in case USA collapses under its burden of foreign debt

 

[AnandThenMan]

By selling their GPU division and entering in a partnership with the new owners, AMD can both have the technology for their APU/Console/whatever and get some cash, and for that they must only give up the GPU division peanuts profits.

That would have to be one gold plated contract AMD signed with the new owners of ATI IP. Otherwise AMD will end up with a new competitor to their own graphics products in at least some sectors, new ATI owners would probably start licensing their tech out to others (maybe even Nvidia), who knows what else.

Shaky proposition at best.

edit - also because you no longer have the graphics engineers in house, you are the the mercy of how fast the new ATI company innovates. And you lose the synergy between the CPU/GPU divisions, not to mention the company has to go through another painful shift in direction.

 

[Ajay]

This is exactly what makes the idea of offloading the GPU division interesting. Right now AMD needs money, and they won't get this money with Radeon's peanuts profits.

By selling their GPU division and entering in a partnership with the new owners, AMD can both have the technology for their APU/Console/whatever and get some cash, and for that they must only give up the GPU division peanuts profits.

Sure, they would lose a lot of control over the development pipeline but at least they would have more money in their warchest and would have smaller OPEX to worry about.

I just can't think of a single company that would benefit from buying AMD's graphics division. Can you?

 

[AnandThenMan]

Intel.

 

[Sheep221]

- relocate to Europe or Canada in case USA collapses under its burden of foreign debt

Europe is in dept too, but not as bad as America, however you can't relocate 10k employees just like that.

Oh and, wasn't GloFo created basically for money-laundering? I does not make sense, spin off FABs, create subsidiary corporation and sell the stuff to them while you still technically owning it.

 

[mrmt]

I just can't think of a single company that would benefit from buying AMD's graphics division. Can you?

A company? No. But ATI might suit private equity or venture funds.

 

[mrmt]

edit - also because you no longer have the graphics engineers in house, you are the the mercy of how fast the new ATI company innovates. And you lose the synergy between the CPU/GPU divisions, not to mention the company has to go through another painful shift in direction.

You would be correct pointing out that AMD would be at the mercy of ATI too, but they are already at the mercy of GLF, and at the mercy of Intel, and will be at the mercy of ARM rather sooner than later, so I doubt that it would matter that much be at the mercy of ATI too.

As for those synergies, I don't think those are that critical. In the future, it might be, but what we have on the market today is CPU + GPU, even if they are sharing the same memory space, and this will stick for the next years. All the ARM manufacturers are going for 3rd party IPs for their GPUs, even vanilla ARM is like that. Intel is on the same boat too.

And HSA... HSA is AMD pipedream. AMD is too small to dictate the terms of GPU/CPU integration, they don't have neither the financial muscle nor the market share to push something that big on the market. CPU/GPU integration will be dictated by Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple, not by AMD.

The synergies you are stating simply doesn't exist, or at least they aren't relevant enough. What AMD has today is simply a luxury IP maker that allows better control in their development pipeline, but every other player on the market is doing better than AMD, and except for Nvidia they all license GPU IP.

 

[Sheep221]

Apple and Samsung are definitely not the companies which will direct the integration of GPU and CPU, i'm not denying they are not developing stuff, but hey, data processing is not their hamburger.

 

[Agent11]

The future is fusion.

 

[ShawnD1]

1/10...

AMD just needs good marketing, look at what they done in India...

http://www.crn.in/news/hardware/2013/03/05/amd-gains-20-percent-market-share-in-q42012---idc

Very true. You can have the best product in the world and still go tits up because your marketing sucks. Some companies entirely rely on marketing. Look how successful Apple has been with good marketing. The iPad costs several hundred more than competitors, but they still sell very well, and that extra few hundred per unit is all profit.
Does AMD even have marketing? Does anyone know this company exists? I remember seeing TV advertisements for Intel Pentium 2 and 3 processors, and I still remember the 4 tone sound thing played at the end of each commercial.

Bose is another good example of marketing. I don't know a damn thing about speakers, but apparently Bose is good. Is that even true? I don't know, but that's what I heard, and that's what lots of other people hear. For all I know, Bose sells crap products that are expensive due to marketing alone.

 

[hans007]

so basically you'd try to turn AMD back into ... the pre ATI AMD.

this would be the worst plan ever given how much the industry has changed since then.


amd has a lot of debt. but they know where computing is going. all SOC all the time. and given performance is close enough in that space that you dont always have to have the absolute leading edge process, they are fine fabless.


fighting a stupid CPU war, that most people don't even care about the exact speed of their cpu is stupid.

and if anything they need MORE marketing.

hell theres barely any difference between say a dual core i3 / i5 / i7 on say a laptop. but people pay way way more for an i7 because marketing told them it was worth way way more money.

 

[AnandThenMan]

You would be correct pointing out that AMD would be at the mercy of ATI too, but they are already at the mercy of GLF

Not at all. They are now able to use TSMC (part of the new Intel/AMD agreement). You may have not noticed, but AMD is slowly digging themselves out of the GloFo hole they've got themselves into.

And HSA... HSA is AMD pipedream. AMD is too small to dictate the terms of GPU/CPU integration, they don't have neither the financial muscle nor the market share to push something that big on the market. CPU/GPU integration will be dictated by Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple, not by AMD.

In x86, I completely disagree with you. Don't forget AMD dictated how Intel proceeded when they copied DCA, and were forced to adopt AMD64, and also followed AMD's lead in multi core.

The synergies you are stating simply doesn't exist, or at least they aren't relevant enough. What AMD has today is simply a luxury IP maker that allows better control in their development pipeline, but every other player on the market is doing better than AMD, and except for Nvidia they all license GPU IP.

Don't agree at all.

 

[mrmt]

Very true. You can have the best product in the world and still go tits up because your marketing sucks. Some companies entirely rely on marketing. Look how successful Apple has been with good marketing. The iPad costs several hundred more than competitors, but they still sell very well, and that extra few hundred per unit is all profit.

Marketing is strong in Apple, but their supply chain management is, well, awesome (I hate this word). They also have a superb management of the retail channel, and they have nice add-ons for their customers, and the package is shinning... All those things are out of AMD reach.

 

[2timer]

Well everyone it looks like the OP (that's me) is taking a beating.

OP sad. OP takes a timeout from his thread now.

 

[tipoo]

OP seems like a terrible idea to be honest. Raising a few billion in cash and betting everything on x86 processors would still leave Intel with billions in R&D advantage to continue to crush them with, maybe AMD would win for a generation or stay close for a few but if anything seriously threatened Intel they would throw more money at the problem and crush it. AMD having nothing else to fall back on in this plan, they'd be toast. And even with AMD putting all that cash into R&D they are reliant on others for fabs, which Intel will be ahead in for a long time.


If I were them, I would ramp up investment into low power chips for tablets and smartphones, that train is gaining speed and they just aren't on it in any meaningful way. ARM is going to be a formidable competitor as mobile devices keep getting more popular and standard PC growth slows. Intel sees this. I'm not sure AMD does. That's what I would change first off.

 

[AnandThenMan]

I don't think you can compare most any other company to Apple. Steve Jobs found the exact combination of marketing, usability, looks, "must have" factor and a whole bunch of other intangibles. Apple products sell because they do exactly what people want them to do. They are not really for me, but I can appreciate why they sell.

The original iPhone still amazes me to this day, it didn't actually bring much new tech to the table, but it did it in a combination and form factor that changed every mobile device we see now.