AMD Closes The Operating System Research Center

[entropy]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11...rman_osrc_lab/

As announced during our last financial earnings results on October 18th 2012,
AMD is restructuring its business and building a more efficient operating model.
As consequence and as part of a global reduction in workforce, AMD GmbH is closing
its operations in Dresden, including its Operating System Research Center (OSRC)
as part of a full site closure at this location. We will continue to support the Linux kernel,
and the software development work happening at the OSRC is being consolidated and will be
performed at other AMD locations.

I would like to emphasize that AMD’s decision is not a reflection on the outstanding strengths
of Dresden and the mutually beneficial relationship AMD and Dresden continue to share,
but was merely driven by business realties on a global scale. As a matter of fact,
AMD continues to manufacture a bulk of its global microprocessor production in Dresden,
and we continue to work closely with our foundry partner there – Globalfoundries – on improving
manufacturing and design excellence.

[boast]

Linux users turning away from AMD stuff will disincentivize them to support Linux

For the desktop. Their opterons are still popular in linux workstations/supercomputers.

[schmidtbag]

For all of you crying over AMD dropping out of the CPU market by basically failing to keep up with intel, first of all, they're not dead yet and secondly why do YOU care? We linux and free-BSD users are lucky because we can just switch to the next best platform with relatively little hassle. If you want something cost effective, go for ARM or MIPS. If you want something massively paralleled, go for SPARC. If you want raw calculation power, go for PPC. If you want gaming, well, as of right now, you're using the wrong OS. But any intel i5 is sufficient for gaming.

Nearly nobody NEEDS something like i7, its just a luxury at that point. That being said, whether or not AMD ceases to make CPUs, you have plenty of decent options to your disposal. Intel has competition, but x86 may some day be something only they control.

[RCL_]

Nearly nobody NEEDS something like i7, its just a luxury at that point.

Well, maybe for you. Single-threaded performance is still king on the desktop. Even browsers and desktop environments like KDE get smoother with fast CPU, not to mention smoother feeling in games, and if you have to use desktop software written in java or similar language that cares more about coder's convenience than performance then this becomes crucial.

[mcdebugger]

Sadly but good bye AMD! At least at CPU arena. I trusted you when you promoted Bulldozer architecture. Ok, arch is not so good. But now it's even worse: you are reducing software support.
I hope you will not drop support for graphics cards drivers cause ATI/AMD cards are good and AMD's participation in open source community is great.

[China_Guy]

Terrible CPUs + no optimizations = bankrupt

Very good saying, nice.

[Adarion]

Was für ein Scheiß-BWLer ist da durchgedreht?

This is cursing in German what fucking business admin. / economy student screwed up at AMD.

Fire the stupid managers, those bloated bunch of lawyers, economists and marketing maybe if you have to. You can't operate a business without engineers!
This is so sad. The once great enterprise, the only alternative to intel in the x86 world, the only one keeping intel from going totally crazy, the ones that started to open up specs, working nicely with FOSS cevelopment, ...

I know the financial situation was bad. For years. But why fire the devs and engineers? Where do they think they will find a replacement for the OSRC?
That means there will be no more feature enablement. No optimizations. Good night. Lol, and how do they think their ARM-x86 hybrids will work now? A CPU and chipset (esp. today) doesn't just stand on its own. I needs a lot of software to work correctly.

It looks similar to the Nokia case. Hire some managers, they make the enterprise go bankrupt, so it can be taken over for cheap. I just wonder who's behind it.


On another note: Michael, your servers are constantly "too busy".

[linuxforall]

Multi cores make a PC versatile and responsive and much superior for multitasking. Today's OS be it LINUX or Windows multi task well so even if a single or dual thread is maxxed out, there will be other threads available for use by the OS. Also multi cores in general run much cooler than dual cores. If your BIOS allows, disable the cores of your multi CPU and see how quick the temps climb.

[oliver]

While I share your passion, from what I understand, they are just consolidating resources. E.g. having all their engineers work near eachother; e.g. USA/Canada (I know ATi was located in Canada, don't know about AMD). This does make sense to be fair, even while sucky for the German developers. Having engineers in Europe can be more expensive then having engineers in the USA i'm sure. Having managers travel back and forth is expensive and having managers that aren't really needed can be let go. I would not be supprised if AMD hires some extra engineers in the USA or re-allocate some internally. We will know in a few months if commits stay up properly.

[linuxforall]

One can take a cheap dual core AMD Phenom II 560 rated at 3.3GHz and make it into a quad core just by using particular motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI and guess what, they run them four cores without a hitch. On my Ubuntu 12.04 desktop, they run whole day, do video encoding, parallel programming and there are no issues. These are priced below a comparable Intel i3 and blow the Intels in performance specially when all the cores are unleashed. I have always been partial to AMD as they were the underdogs till they introduced x43 dual core which blew the P-IV till Intel caught them up with Core2Duo and Core2Quad and sadly AMD never ever has recovered from that. As for ATI cards, yes they are very good, better speed and specs than nvidia but the driver quality is nothing to talk about in Windows and in Linux, they are a nightmare.