AMD lays off another 1400

[Qaridarium]

They are also wasting silicon building a 2 billion transistor dud. Less is more, especially when it comes to AMD's current processor offerings.

2 billion transistors in an selling cpu is better than 2 billion transistors in an not selling cpu.

[deanjo]

2 billion transistors in an selling cpu is better than 2 billion transistors in an not selling cpu.

Not necessarily. Especially when those wafers can be put towards a smaller faster less complex configuration that yields more chips per wafer.

[Qaridarium]

Not necessarily. Especially when those wafers can be put towards a smaller faster less complex configuration that yields more chips per wafer.

sure but in the end they need something to sell. right now they try to sell old socks .

[deanjo]

sure but in the end they need something to sell. right now they try to sell old socks .

That is why a quick respin of a design they have been making for close to a decade now would be the way to go.

[Zetbo]

I don't understand why AMD is moving to a different architecture AND shrinking the cpu die to 32nm at the same time. They should do it like Intel does. First design the architechture with process technology you all ready know(45nm), then you shrink it to 32nm with small modifications. Tick Tock like Intel does it. Unless they(Intel) have patented it or something.

[psycho_driver]

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...workforce.aspx

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21947

Still sinkin. AMD should just apply for not-for-profit status. That way I could just write my shares off as charitable donations.

I bought in near the recent-term low at $4.66/share. I lost faith in any sort of long-term positive outlook after the Bulldozer launch, and I started getting nervous with the stock fluctuations. I sold at $5.03, three days before the stock hit $6.00

Anyhoo, I wonder if these layoffs are going to affect their linux drivers? I would think the lowly engineers would be some of the first people to go, so long as management and marketing all get to keep their jobs.

[Veerappan]

Anyhoo, I wonder if these layoffs are going to affect their linux drivers? I would think the lowly engineers would be some of the first people to go, so long as management and marketing all get to keep their jobs.

This is what I'm worried about too. The windows driver teams have hundreds of people on them from what we've heard, and the OSS developers are far fewer in number. It sucks for anyone to have to lose their job, but it would hurt the OSS dev group much more to lose someone (especiallly since I'm not sure that AMD even has 10 developers working on open-source drivers).

[ciplogic]

That is why a quick respin of a design they have been making for close to a decade now would be the way to go.

Any company should advance or die. Bulldozer I don't think is a bad CPU, but they cannot just improve what they had. It simply worked slower than the competition. I do know a lot of apps running in multithreading, so if they would launch Bulldozer just the next year and to do just a shrink of Thurban X6, with higher frequencies maybe was a better idea. Yet people thought from Phenom times, that Phenom is slow. It is or is not, they could not get from Thurban like 20% performance boost (maybe just if they would add 2 extra cores), but even they would do it, going to an improved Bulldozer, will be still slower than the 32nm Thurban core.
At the end, 2 years from now, would I buy a 8 core based Phenom II or a 12 core Bulldozer, I think that the answer is obvious. Application vendors got the message: either low end ARM, or high end highly threaded computers. In fact without Phenom I think there was not such of an urge to go that high threaded workloads.
For 1 core usage, few applications will need it to a such a great extent. I don't buy Bulldozer right now as I have Desktop i7 and a SB laptop when AMD was not there, but today I would prefer the Bulldozer to a Sandy Bridge desktop comparable in the price I bought at that time the desktop (in fact there was a promotion to MediaMarkt for Intel Desktop so I got it for around 100 euros less than I would assemble an AMD system with similar specs). As for laptop, SB was that good, and it works that nice, AMD yet has no answer to it.

[cliff]

With this many layoff's I'm really questioning their ability to make a quality product. As more people get laid off company moral really begins to go down the crapper. To bad I always liked AMD.

[mtippett]

Not necessarily. Especially when those wafers can be put towards a smaller faster less complex configuration that yields more chips per wafer.

Bah, on the GPU side AMD has hit the 2 Billion transitor mark in 2009. Last years model was 2.6, and this years model will probably be more . And they've been selling quite nicely on that side of the company.

Some of the differences are that Bulldozer is the first CPU designed but manufactured by a 3rd party foundry (okay, maybe 2nd party - or maybe 1.5 party). ATI had been doing fabless work for quite some time and had moved from first silicon back to first customer ship in around 90-120 days for most of the flagship products in each generation.

Matthew