30% of AMD's Workers Getting laid off, Announcement Next Week

Things aren`t looking very promising for AMD.

Few days ago we had this news:

Now as a follow up on the bad news we have this:

SemiAccurate have also shared some insight on this. It gets worse. Who gets fired? Mostly engineers from the department that keeps the AMD ship afloat, GPU department...
They are actually willing to sacrifice the engineers, to keep themself alive.

Source:
AMD's Distressing Financial Situation Worsens, Revenues Down 10% - Softpedia

30% of AMD's Workers Getting Fired, Announcement Next Week - Softpedia

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/12/amds-layoffs-target-engineering/

 

Fired? They mean laid off. Fired is usually when you personally do something that results in your termination. Sounds like they're laying off 30% to keep them afloat. Not good news any way you look at it. Makes me wonder if they will go up for sale and someone like Samsung or Intel buys them.

 

fixed the utilization problems before leave

 

Maybe this dip is just a chance for them to restructure. It is probably a big bath that they have been wanting to take.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

This doesn't bode well for Catalyst updates.

 

Not like it could really get much worse than it already is.

 

I do not understand, their Trinity APUs are really killer... Perhaps manufacturers ain't build enough laptops to it and only poor models.

 

Of course they fire the engineers. They are only the guys that make sure your products actually work, AMD. Bravo, bravo.

 

Doesn't matter how good a product is if no one buys it.

 

I have returned two AMD APU A6 notebook`s and one A8 notebook for flickering horizontal lines across the diaplay, i have an Acer C-60 APU netbook and i have only see the horizontal lines once, fingers crossed, I now have an Samsung notebook with AMD A10 APU and i have not see the horizontal line problem at all.

By searching the net, I found that the lines problem is brought on by shutting off the display, if you keep the display on you have no problem, not very good for battery life or the enviroment, a reboot fixed the problem until the next time.

The ones with horizontal lines, were from Dell, Toshiba and Samsung, so it`s seems like an AMD problem to me.

This cannot be helping AMD`s bottom lines.

John.

 

I would rephrase that as "Doesn't matter how good your component of the product is if the product it is part of is lousy." In theory, the Trinity chips are perfect for casual use: cheap, adequate CPU, way overkill graphics, good power consumption. In practice, good luck finding one in a smaller laptop with a decent display and an SSD. AMD needed to ride Intel's coattails on the Ultrabook idea and make the OEMs provide some machines that don't consist entirely of the cheapest junk currently available. They did it to some extent with HP, but that's nowhere near enough.

It's really disappointing if they do fire the GPU engineers though -- that's the only hardware they have that's competitive with everyone else (drivers are a separate issue).

 

AMD was supposed to be offering thin and light machines at $500, but the only thing that's surfaced are primarily big and heavy 15" machines. The Trinity APU is a great component that hasn't been part of a better overall package. It's even hard to find a decent 14" with an A8 or A10 APU, the smaller ones, as few as they are include the A4 or the A6 which are way underpowered both CPU and GPU. I'd say it's more marketing than anything. They need powerful marketing to make sure their parts get included in the right products.

 

Looks like another company going silicone up?

Management must be top notch, they make the hard decisions to save their jobs

Hopefully AMD will make it, without competition we get shorted, no?

Then again, the word is out that the whole PC industry is in trouble which affects all. This is now a smart phone world as we hear.

Sent by punch card reader from my Cray mainframe..

 

Sounds like hope is lost for the GPU.

When AMD gets out of the business, who will be the next to challenge the green?

 

AMD bought ATI. And the Radeon video card brand definitely has value, so at worse case it will get sold, I doubt it will just outright disappear.

 

This is actually where the problem lays according to some rumours out now.
The ATI guys that was bought by AMD have sort of "taken over the company", and taken over "key positions", and which is why the upper management are laying off a huge part of the GPU division to regain control or concentrate more on CPUs. Again this could be all a spin, when really they are just laying off people because they HAVE to lay off people, to stay afloat and not go bankrupt or whatever...

I don`t know if this is true, but that is what they are saying. After all, there could be some truth to it considering that AMD is doing extremely well with graphics but maybe don`t have enough skilled people that work with CPUs, and we all know that CPUs isn`t their greatest attribute. IGP is, but then again, this is probably mostly the ATI guys creation.

Yeah, Trinity is great. Problem is that AMD don`t have a mass OEM support, like Intel have. I believe there was an outrage earlier where they blamed Intel for bribing and playing a dirty game to be OEM exclusive sort off.
Find one of the top performing notebooks, and you won`t find any AMD CPUs inside. There are many cheap notebooks with Trinity, but question is: Do they sell enough of these notebooks where the profit is small, when they have to compete with cheap i5 notebooks with a dedicated GPU that blows Trinity out of the water?


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Here is the latest 6 months btw:

 

They are laying off the Canadian team of the graphics division. AFAIK the original artx team is in California and so are the key catalyst crew. I'm surprised it took them this long to cut off their Canadian ties. Personally I thought they would have done it as soon as ATi was no longer in existence.

The only way for them to survive is to keep the gpu division for further smart phone and tablet development so they won't harm that division. They should also consider licensing ARM and to become more like Qualcomm since their x86 designs are no longer competitive.

Lastly I think it's time the government stepped in and broke up Intel into smaller pieces. They harassed Microsoft for much less. All of us would suffer as consumers without AMD around.

Sent from my GT-N7000

 

Intel has them beaten with regards to cpu's for years they haven't been able to match the standards intel are setting. It's only getting worse too as intels fab labs get more advanced.

It's really their low cost GPU's which will keep them going but with the crap drivers they been putting out recently thats gonna be hurting their market share.

 

@Joker: Yeah ARM is a threat that keep closing in on x86. They had a remarkable development there.

BTW, where have you read about the Canadian team btw?
(EDIT: Saw it in the SA article. They are targeting Markham which was ATI headquarters earlier)
I know that ATI had their headquarters there before they was bought by AMD. Did they move to California? The SA also says that its engineers @ Markham which is being laid off so obviously they have some important guys there too.

 

Well "Engineer" could mean anything really. Could just be a bunch of guys with bachelors degrees that do quality assurance and testing and some low key development. That's probably why AMD decided to outsource it out (most likely to China and India) to save money. The key GPU (ArtX) team was in California a long time ago since they were originally American to begin with. There was also a Canadian GPU design team but I think they were moved to California long ago.

 

Well Semiaccurate is all doom about the whole situation and he is a bigtime AMD fan so when he says it, then there must be some really serious things about this imo.

We will see how this all turns out. Charlie from SA says he have a lot more insight about this the upcoming days

 

That SemiAccurate guy always blows things out of proportion IMO. Personally I don't think its as big of a deal as he's making it out to be. Yeah AMD is obviously in trouble but I don't think this round of lay offs will affect GPU development at all.

 

Though I will admit I have not done any research to dig into if this is truly a good idea. Maybe they should merge with TI or Samsung.. some company doing ARM.

 

Looks like I was right about AMD outsourcing to India, it explains why they're going to dump some of the Canadian engineers: Hyped Talk: AMD India developes powerful fusion chip Ontario.[Update]

One more link: About AMD India

Personally I think the smart move for AMD is to gravitate towards rapidly developing markets like China, India and Brazil. That's where most of the growth in the world is taking place and AMD can really utilize the engineering resources in India/China. By leveraging low cost engineers with high quality products, it should help them recover as long as they start focusing heavily on SoC--which they seem to be doing.

Finally, before anyone says, "but the quality is going to suffer with Indian engineers", I'd advise you to look at Intel, Microsoft and other industry giants. All of them employ a large number of Indian engineers.

 

Not gonna lie, when I saw the title thread I thought they were fired for doing a flash mob Gangnam style dance or something at work

If what 5150Joker says is true, outsourcing at its finest.

 

LOL outsourcing to India? Yep seems that Charlie is right, the Project Win is pretty much an epic Project Fail.
CEO does everything to save money, but have hurt the product development and the company ability to stay above Moore`s law (which is extremely crucial).

Man this looks pretty devastating for AMD.
SA have published an article explaining everything how they messed up:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/15/amd-is-imploding-because-management-doesnt-understand-semiconductors/

Here is also a good read:
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/10/15/amd-is-foundering-have-its-executives-forgotten-how-to-run-a-company/

 

At the end of the day guys - may AMD's days be done as we know it? Sure. But keep in mind they still hold the keys to a bunch of knowledge other companies would love to have. So there will certainly be at some point, if not already - talks of someone buying them out just for that knowledge. A company that will be able to throw money at and support a business like this in a proper way - and be able to write off the money that will be needed to get things going again - because its just going to be looked at as start up costs. At some point, what is left is going to be able to bought out at a price that will make sense financially - and someone will pick this up. There are two competitors in the GPU market after all - someone is going to see that as a way to money.

 

Fixed thread title.

LOL @ fired.

 

You are missing the point: it's not that they're replacing Canadian engineers with Indian engineers, but that they're replacing experienced professionals with people who will work for considerably less. That's the entire point of outsourcing: you replace your current, relatively highly-paid staff with cheaper workers abroad. To some extent, the lower cost is because of the lower standard of living in the country being outsourced to, but this is rarely the entire reason the new employees are paid less. In the case of people with specialized technical expertise (like GPU engineers), the vast majority of those with significant experience are already working for a competitor (i.e. Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm, etc.). So yes, the quality is probably going to suffer -- not because of the ethnicity of the replacements, but because of their level of experience.

 

I disagree because you don't know the level of expertise of those that got laid off had, you are just assuming that they have more vs their replacements. Remember AMD India does significant R&D for the company.

Sent from my GT-N7000

 

Agreed 100%. There are as much as 3300 people getting laid off from the GPU department. The odds that many of them have significant experience is pretty high. And like in the article I linked to earlier, this is not the first experienced people to go from AMD.
AMD can cut away the workers to keep themselves alive (they already have gone through a big lay off earlier whiched obviously didn`t help looking at AMDs financial) but the line have to go somewhere. According to SemiAccurate that line have now been crossed.

I`m curious how this will play out. Will they eventually be forced to sell the company? Any potential candidates who would want to buy them? Could they license out the ATI part out to other companies or the x86 part and then focus on either one of them?

I copied the title of this article. Blame them
http://news.softpedia.com/news/30-of-AMD-s-Workers-Getting-Fired-Announcement-Next-Week-299140.shtml

 

Hope they recover! If we fall to just one GPU dominant company...wont be good for anyone on the consumer end. Now, time to buy some NVDA.

 

So it's actually not as bad as the rumors suggested: they only laid off 15% of their employees, not 30%. On the other hand, the Q3 results are downright nasty: margins are down from 45% to 31% and they lost $157M with revenue down for both GPUs and CPUs.

 

I would imagine a significant challenge for AMD on the GPU side must be the the fact that Intel keeps improving their integrated graphics. Already, the HD4000 can run most recent games at 1366x768.

Perhaps the HD5000 or HD6000 will run everything at 1080p, triggering a collapse of the market for dedicated mobile graphics cards.

 

the mid range is going to be dominated by the igpus. AMD is already there, intel is coming each year with a good performance boost, it will reach there. Nvidia is going to be in trouble as well.

 

WAAAAY overrated guys. No way IGP will be even close to any mid range card, Intel especially. AMD Trinity's flagship A10 IGP is roughly equivalent to the lowest nVidia 620m. The Intel HD 4000 is roughly 60-70% of that performance. Every die shrink and/or tech change with GPU's ends up with roughly double the performance of the previous generation. IGP's would have to do four times with each die shrink/tech change to catch up to the mid range. Mid range right now is like a 640m/650m or 7750m/7770m. They are four times more powerful than any Intel IGP, and the bandwidth required to run at 1080p will require more than just system RAM. 4k displays are encroaching, and unless they find a better way to scale the resolution, IGP's will be hard pressed to push anything near that resolution.

Not to mention the next gen consoles due to release in a year or so, that will up the bar for minimum GPU requirements. If you look at the graphically demanding games like BF3, Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs, Max Payne 3, Crysis 2, etc the HD 4000 is pretty much unplayable at 1366x768. And those will likely be minimum requirements for games released in the next year or so once consoles hit the market.

 

Hmm doesn't seem so. The A10 has the 7660M, plenty powerful, and better than the 620M. And unless you have a 650M, I don't see much point in having a iGPU, HD4000 seems to be adaquate to me.

 

7660g. And the same thing still applies. You're lucky to break 30fps with the latest games at 720p, with minimum < 30fps. It's definitely improved, but no where near being able to game at 1080p. That would require dedicated RAM at a minimum. Of course there's always older games and less demanding games, but I'm just saying that the bar is raised double every couple years and IGP performance needs to triple or quadruple every couple years to eventually catch up to the mid range. And while laptop LCD's likely won't be 4k across the board, the minimum resolution will definitely be upped from the standard 768p we have today.

 

425m/430m/435m/525m/540m/550m/555m/620m/630m/635m

You can see that the mid range strategy from nvidia in the past year is gone to show that midrange is going down the drains. Only in this year with the 640m/650m/660m we have saw a growth that is somewhat substantial to the mid range power. Otherwise everything was concentrated in the high end spectrum.

The 7660g is roughly on par to those gpus.

 

nothing to see here. Working with a crappy computer. Sorry

 

Most AMD workers

 

If you mean the slew of GPU's at top of your post I'll agree 7660g is close to on par with those, bu those are low end GPU's not mid range. Mid range are the 640m/650m/660m.

 

so by just looking at those slew of gpus, that are the same thing. Do you think that next year AMD offering wouldnt hit the 640m/650m/660m threshold? and Intel wouldnt it be closer to what AMD is offering today, hopefully a little bit faster?

They are more likely than not going to rebrand all those things

 

I personally think there is a limit on how much IGP performance you can shove in a CPU without sacrificing x86 performance. I think AMD is almost there.

My guess is that AMD will see a small 10% boost with their IGP in the upcoming Fusion CPUs due to the resource limits, Intel will see a much greater percentage boost because they have a lot more headroom, with the result that the Haswell will be slightly slower than AMD.

So all in all it all brew down to who got the best performance per clock that can sacrifice most there without sacrificing what is "enough" x86 performance, aka slowing down the x86 part so that it bottlenecks the IGP.
And we all know Intel is faaar ahead of AMD with performance/clock, which means that Intel will win in the long run. Unless AMD bring something to the table soon.

My 50 cents

 

I dont know when, or if we are going to reach that limit. Given that we are integrating everything again in the cpu, and the shrinking manufacturing process....

My 99 cents, now someone owns me a burger

 

I doubt it. All the low end are Fermi. They will likely refresh everything with Kepler like they did with the 670m and 675m to "mx" monikers, and bump the mid grade parts (640m/650m/660m) with a nice little boost once they refine the process.

 

Well I`ve been looking at the stocks from the 3 big companies, and it seems that everyone is experiencing a drop in stock value. So its not just AMD that is experiencing lower sales. But the differences in how much they have fallen between AMD and the rest is pretty huge.

Last 5 days. You can see when the lay offs were officially announced



Here is the most important graphs, the last 6 months of all 3 companies.

First off, AMD. The stock value have fallen by an incredible whopping 72%.



Second, Intel. Stock value is like 10x as much. But they too have felt the bad financial times everyone in the PC industry is dealing with. The stock value down by 23%.



Third, Nvidia. Doesn`t look too bad really, both ups and downs the last 6 months. But it seems that they are in a downclimb right now. Stock value down by 11%.

 

How have you normalized the data? what tool are you using? for better accuracy in forecasts you better use the golden mean ratio at various spacing and normalizations.

From what I can see all of them are in a downward trend with no support hit, although I dont know where the support would be in this case just looking at those graphs.

@HTwingnut

I know they are all fermi, I actually made the point to get fermi, why you ask? because I like the name/person better than kepler. Stupidity aside its a 3 year rebrand on mid range gpus, that are now, and only now entry to mid range (630m and 640m is mid range in nvidia world). Thing is that next year as you say and I say we are going to see a bump in clocks for the mid range, while we continue in that enormous pursuit of power from intel. Broadwell will bring a new arch in terms of gpu for intel, but maxwell should hit that year as well, so we have to wait and see.

 

If you trust Wiki it defines entry level, mid range, and high end cards:

Entry-level cards GT 605, GT 610, GT 620, GT 630, GT 640
Mid-range cards GT 645, GTX 650, , GTX 660, GTX 660 Ti
High-end cards GTX 670, GTX 680, GTX 690

I know those are desktop cards, but same holds true for mobile. Even notebookcheck refers to the 660m as a mid-range GPU.

In any case, I know IGP's will continue to improve, but they still don't hold and won't hold a candle to any mid-range GPU. Every slight bump in clock speed from a rebranded GPU just keeps the gap between IGP and mid-range out of reach. Intel HD 4000 is a disappointment in my eyes, it doesn't perform nearly as well as the Llano 6620G, and not even close to the Trinity 7660g, so AMD is already two generations ahead of Intel, and still barely competitive with entry level GPU's. AMD has to sacrifice CPU performance for GPU performance, and sacrificing CPU performance is one area that Intel will not budge on. If they start adding small amounts of dedicated vRAM on die that would help immensely but again, sacrificing some on die real estate for GPU will result in less CPU performance.

2014 brings in Maxwell, which is only two years away and it's 20nm process should blow away the Kepler performance two-fold at least.

 

Yeah those are indeed desktop gpus and the line up is, well, different.

Thing is if we measure the intel development since the implementation of the icore series, its nothing short of astonishing. Its going to continue on that path as per indication of what haswell is bringing and what broadwell with a new gpu core is going to introduce.

AMD is a complicated matter, its not going to fail, but its not going to get competitive again any time soon. And I dont think they have the necessary money to invest in R&D to get back on track, nor I believe they are willing to do that. So in terms of what I expect from their igpu is nothing short of 20% improvement, which puts them in what the 640m is.