AMD Is Restructuring Again, Losing 7% Of Employees

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Is Restructuring Again, Losing 7% Of Employees

AMD reported their Q3'2014 results yesterday and they weren't good for the company. AMD will be restructuring again and will be slashing their global headcount by about 7%...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgxNzE

[mark45]

Hopefully Intel picks the Linux devs to be fired from AMD, if any.

[profoundWHALE]

If I were them, I would have 3 products:
Embedded/Mobile (Phone, Tablet)
Consumer (Cool, quiet, enough to play modern games at 720p)
Enthusiast/Professional/Server (Fast, expensive, top of the line support and warranty. No integrated graphics, or if so, very basic.)

These would all be on the x86/ARM shared socket. For graphics I would assume the same.
Embedded/Mobile (Graphics with Passive Cooling)
Consumer (Cool, quiet, enough to play games at 1080p @ 60 fps or better)
Enthusiast (Fast, expensive, top of the line support and warranty. Able to play with 4k resolution @ 30fps or better.)

Of those three, there will be three variants, all placed by TDP:
- Low power, 50% less than balanced. Model number ends with M, comes with low profile cooler
- Balanced, 50% less than high power. Model number ends with nothing, comes with standard cooler
- High Power, guaranteed performance. Model number ends with X, comes with a nice cooler (think triple fans or water cooled)
(bonus, once a year or two release a super high performance card like the 290x2)

So that's what I would do. People building HTPCs would go for the low power models, 50% of everyone would get the standard version, the rest would go for the top of the line high power ones.

Right now, AMD is best at being the best price/performance, but we all know that's a race to the bottom. Hopefully they get up and running good soon.

[BSDude]

If I were them, I would have 3 products:
Embedded/Mobile (Phone, Tablet)
Consumer (Cool, quiet, enough to play modern games at 720p)
Enthusiast/Professional/Server (Fast, expensive, top of the line support and warranty. No integrated graphics, or if so, very basic.)

These would all be on the x86/ARM shared socket. For graphics I would assume the same.
Embedded/Mobile (Graphics with Passive Cooling)
Consumer (Cool, quiet, enough to play games at 1080p @ 60 fps or better)
Enthusiast (Fast, expensive, top of the line support and warranty. Able to play with 4k resolution @ 30fps or better.)

Of those three, there will be three variants, all placed by TDP:
- Low power, 50% less than balanced. Model number ends with M, comes with low profile cooler
- Balanced, 50% less than high power. Model number ends with nothing, comes with standard cooler
- High Power, guaranteed performance. Model number ends with X, comes with a nice cooler (think triple fans or water cooled)
(bonus, once a year or two release a super high performance card like the 290x2)

So that's what I would do. People building HTPCs would go for the low power models, 50% of everyone would get the standard version, the rest would go for the top of the line high power ones.

Right now, AMD is best at being the best price/performance, but we all know that's a race to the bottom. Hopefully they get up and running good soon.

Seems like you've put a couple of hours in this idea of yours.

[EthraZa]

Everytime I see some news about AMD going not so well I remember stupid people saying that doing things for Linux is not a good business because they are just about 1% of the market and there is no money there.
What that old people can't see is that this 1% of Linux users are opnion formers and when Windows users search for their opinion on GPUs, they find out that AMD drivers gives a lot of problems but the nVidia ones are very fast and reliable.

[johnc]

Everytime I see some news about AMD going not so well I remember stupid people saying that doing things for Linux is not a good business because they are just about 1% of the market and there is no money there.
What that old people can't see is that this 1% of Linux users are opnion formers and when Windows users search for their opinion on GPUs, they find out that AMD drivers gives a lot of problems but the nVidia ones are very fast and reliable.

I'm not sure that's a major opinion-swayer though. Their x86 business isn't competitive with Intel's, and AMD historically had subpar drivers on Windows as well (probably not now though), so people on Windows were well familiar with the situation and didn't need feedback from Linux users.

But I do think that not paying sufficient attention to Linux allowed AMD to completely miss the mobile / Android revolution. Intel missed it because they were tied to their own architecture of course. Not that I'm sure there's much money in mobile chips these days.

But if Steam Machines were to take off, we'll see that AMD is going to be behind the eight-ball in terms of favorable opinion.

[boffo]

Where are the products?

Last year I went to look for a new laptop. Almost all the laptop were intel. The amd laptops were all A4 and A6. I found my laptop in a small pc shop, an amd a8. I wanted to buy the a10, but I could not find it. So maybe amd has also a distribution problem.

[AJSB]

Hopefully Intel picks the Linux devs to be fired from AMD, if any.

To do WHAT ?

As *if* Intel add a iGPU that was decent without the need to me sell my body organs to pay it

[vitalif]

The biggest problem is that their CPUs are just slower than Intel and consume more power especially mobile ones. That's probably why laptops with AMD CPUs are rare
And even more, there was a rumor they are going to discontinue FX processors next year... And FX are their only powerful desktop CPUs. Kaveri is rather slow, its integrated GPU is faster than integrated Intel HD****, but on par with Iris Pro and of course slower than any discrete card... there is probably some hope for HSA and zero-copy driver support (as I understand it's not yet supported neither in Windows, nor in Linux), and for integrated RAM in newer APUs (like in Iris Pro...) - I'm looking forward for any news about it
On the other hand, AMD was behind Intel most time, but they're still with us

[torsionbar28]

Everytime I see some news about AMD going not so well I remember stupid people saying that doing things for Linux is not a good business because they are just about 1% of the market and there is no money there.
What that old people can't see is that this 1% of Linux users are opnion formers and when Windows users search for their opinion on GPUs, they find out that AMD drivers gives a lot of problems but the nVidia ones are very fast and reliable.

Remember that Linux holds the majority of Smart Phone market, in Android.

Apache is the #1 web server on the internet.
BIND is the #1 DNS server on the internet.
Linux is the #1 host of these two services.

Linux owns the super computer market. The top 500 supercomputers list is mostly Linux.

The biggest of the big in E-commerce and social media are all powered by Linux : Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Ebay, all running on millions of Linux servers.

AMD participates in all of these markets. Talking about Linux users as "one percent" of market share is very misleading. I assume you're talking about *desktop peecee* marketshare?