AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[juanrga]

Compared to Q3-2013 the financial results for Q3-2014 show that revenue, operating income and net income have reduced. E.g. the net income reduced from $48M to $17M. Part of bad results are due to the Computing and Graphics division whose Operating Income reduced to $9M to -$17M. AMDF attributes this loss to decreased sales as compared to a year ago. The total debt at the end of this Q3-2014 is of $2.20 billion.

Evidently Lisa Su doesn't have another option than cancel projects and focus on those with higher priority. Moreover she ordered to cut costs by reducing workforce by about 7% which means around 710 people will be cut from the company by the end of Q4.

Expect further 10--15% decline in revenue for fourth quarter. But if you want say that AMD is fine, I can live with that.

About Intel atoms I said two things: first that Intel would fail due to x86 ISA disadvantage and second that Intel couldn't fight giants such as Qualcomm and Samsung.

TSMC is selling 20nm to Apple because Apple has the money to get early access to new nodes. I don't buy your "TSMC is set to produce amd 300 series gpu on 20nm"... the information that I have now is that AMD will be stuck to Glofo 28nm for the next gen GPUs.

Ok, we get it AMD aren't in the best shape. Does that mean there is no hope? I don't think we're at that point yet.

Your earlier rant about how K12 / Zen are obviously rubbish due to the announced design wins is adding a lot of unknown factors together and jumping to a baseless conclusion. AMD won't have these designs available next year, so frankly the new design wins next year are unlikely to be related to K12 / Zen. The new wins are far more likely to be related to Skybridge which is more about the infrastructure than the processor design itself (i.e. the fact you'll have mix n' match ARM and x86 for the first time). The performance of these cores won't be anything revolutionary but then I think Skybridge is more of a proof of concept / building block much like how the earlier APU's have been slowly adding in HSA capabilities with each generation.

I didn't write "obviously rubbish". I said are not the saviors that some pretend. Also the 3 billion in revenue that I mentioned is for K12/Zen and will start on 2016 not 2015.

Also your comments about HSA are unfair- AMD are trying to get a new initiative off the ground and this is one area where the majority of the industry (excluding Intel and nvidia) is fully behind them on. I agree that Kaveri still lacks bits from the spec, but with something like this there is very much the old 'chicken and egg' situation. You need hardware to develop the software on, but you need software to justify the cost of developing the hardware. In AMD's case they've pretty much bet the company on the idea and have decided to try and kick the whole thing off by *providing* some hardware to get it going. The initial snippets shown about it are promising, if a few big names take it on and run with it then AMD could stand to do very well. The main thing is ensuring they stay afloat long enough to realise the potential from their investments, which is what the latest management have been all about.

I am not criticizing the concept. I am criticizing the poor execution.

As for K12 / Zen, if I'm being realistic then I seriously doubt they will surpass Intel in the way that Athlon 64 did a decade ago. I am however quietly confident that they will both:

A: Show significant per core performance improvement over the current Piledriver fx based chips (as Intel have shown there is *lots* of room for them the expand in that area).

B: Provide a decent efficiency improvement (if not outright performance boost) in areas that their current modular uArch is already strong in.

Being better isn't the same as 'saviour' or wiping the floor with Intel, however hopefully will be sufficient to keep them in the game on the CPU side of the equation (as they need a competent CPU core to make their 'semi custom' approach really fly).

It would be weird if a new architecture for 2016 couldn't improve over the ancient Piledriver IPC. AMD cannot survive to another Bulldozer fiasco.

My point was that the new Zen architecture will be between Ivy Bridge and Haswell on performance, and very far from Skylake.

Steamroller: 8 FLOP per core
Excavator: 8 FLOP per core
Zen: 16 FLOP per core (guess)
Skylake: 64 FLOP per core

I guess AMD will try to get a relatively small efficient core for the semicustom division and then will use again the "moar cores" to try to caught Intel on desktop/HEDT. I think that is the reason why we hear weird rumors about 20-core FX chips for desktop.

 

[jdwii]

^^^ It's irrelevant to the original conversation which is simply Amd needs to improve their GCN design a bit more to stay competitive if both manufacturers were using the same node how would things look?(since nvidia can simply use a lower node as well). The 290X using the same amount of power as the 690 is just crazy i couldn't care less about the excuses. Nothing is to support my products i buy, if so i would be dissing the fx 8350 more.

So again stop claiming the reason why people put down something is over fanboyism or whatever else you can think of its nothing more then what you would expect from professional reviewers.

Not to say Nvidiots don't exist but i'm not one of them i want Amd to be better in terms of efficiency but what i want and what is reality are two different things back in 2-3 years ago i was putting Nvidia down left and right over them jacking up prices and this can be found from my previous posts.

I have no idea why i'm getting attacked if anything i find it funny. I will never stop claiming Nvidia or Intel or Amd is better than one another as long as i state it with facts which are not even subjective.

Now my biggest mistake is expecting readers of this forum to look at the results and state a neutral opinion based on the evidence in front of them i have been defeated in that stance.
However i will continue to state this had nothing to do with the 970 vs anything since that is a newer design this is nothing more than rehashing my old results that the 770 uses less power while being just as fast as the 280X and also stating the 285 has caught up to the 680 series base GPU's from Nvidia in performance per watt something that isn't debatable since the results show just that in terms of benchmarks.
Now ask yourself if you were a engineer at Amd would you want to think the 285 beats Maxwell in efficiently or would you rather go with reality and make a better product? I sure would hope engineers at Amd know their product very well and want to make it better.


Now this is getting sad i hear comments from this user above who says things like the 7950 is beating a 680 over poor console ports, isthat really what we have now? Using the argument from small numbers to justify are claims? Again i use techpowerup for my evidence since it uses the majority over the small numbers to support my claims on what is better for GPU performance if for example one card is 50% better in BF4 does that make it better overall NO of course not.
It’s like claiming I won’t die over smoking since my grandpa smoked for 70 years and he is still alive even if the majority die sooner over smoking.

 

[cdrkf]

^^^ It's irrelevant to the original conversation which is simply Amd needs to improve their GCN design a bit more to stay competitive if both manufacturers were using the same node how would things look?(since nvidia can simply use a lower node as well). The 290X using the same amount of power as the 690 is just crazy i couldn't care less about the excuses. Nothing is to support my products i buy, if so i would be dissing the fx 8350 more.

So again stop claiming the reason why people put down something is over fanboyism or whatever else you can think of its nothing more then what you would expect from professional reviewers.

Not to say Nvidiots don't exist but i'm not one of them i want Amd to be better in terms of efficiency but what i want and what is reality are two different things back in 2-3 years ago i was putting Nvidia down left and right over them jacking up prices and this can be found from my previous posts.

I have no idea why i'm getting attacked if anything i find it funny. I will never stop claiming Nvidia or Intel or Amd is better than one another as long as i state it with facts which are not even subjective.

Now my biggest mistake is expecting readers of this forum to look at the results and state a neutral opinion based on the evidence in front of them i have been defeated in that stance.
However i will continue to state this had nothing to do with the 970 vs anything since that is a newer design this is nothing more than rehashing my old results that the 770 uses less power while being just as fast as the 280X and also stating the 285 has caught up to the 680 series base GPU's from Nvidia in performance per watt something that isn't debatable since the results show just that in terms of benchmarks.
Now ask yourself if you were a engineer at Amd would you want to think the 285 beats Maxwell in efficiently or would you rather go with reality and make a better product? I sure would hope engineers at Amd know their product very well and want to make it better.


Now this is getting sad i hear comments from this user above who says things like the 7950 is beating a 680 over poor console ports, isthat really what we have now? Using the argument from small numbers to justify are claims? Again i use techpowerup for my evidence since it uses the majority over the small numbers to support my claims on what is better for GPU performance if for example one card is 50% better in BF4 does that make it better overall NO of course not.
It’s like claiming I won’t die over smoking since my grandpa smoked for 70 years and he is still alive even if the majority die sooner over smoking.

The results you've put forward support your argument, however I read through *a lot* of reviews when the 285 came out and the efficiency results varied wildly. I'm going to have to dig through all the launch reviews and post a link when I have more time, as several reviews found in their own tests that the 285 was in fact *more efficient* than Kepler. There is no denying it isn't as efficient as Maxwell though, however I think some of the efficiency reviews maybe weren't all that fair- it is possible to skew results for one reason or another. Also I think it's worth noting that the card in the review you've linked is an OC card- and from what I've seen the efficiency of GCN plummets with higher clock speeds- it's at it's best efficiency wise around 900 mhz (as you maintain 90% of the performance of a 1ghz card, but save 25% on power).

I agree the 285 *wasn't* the card we would have liked, I recently purchased a 280 instead due to the wider memory bus and larger frame buffer (and lack of compelling new features on the 285, the only one that tempted me was TrueAudio but that has virtually no support in games so far so little point). The thing is though from an efficiency standpoint it was actually quite good from the reviews I've read. I actually think a large part of AMD's problem with efficiency isn't the fundamental design of the cores or GCN, but rather the physical layout of the GPU and the design of the PCB's and such.

As for the concept of "nVidia can 'just' shrink their die as well" you are missing the point a bit here. AMD developed HBM so they have exclusive usage of it for a while. AMD have put the time in the draw up a 20nm gpu (nVidia decided not to go with this node). nVidia decided to put their engineering resources into refining their uArch on 28nm (and a large part of Maxwell's efficiency is down to a very good physical chip design as much as some 'special sauce' going on with the uArch in general imo). That means for the next round of GPU's the two companies will be competitive (with AMD having a small lead based on the leaks in performance and efficiency). After that? Well AMD will have more experience with HBM, they will also have time to refine their GPU to improve efficiency, whilst nVidia get to add HBM + die shrink. These things *aren't* insignificant undertakings so I don't see the problem. The end result is for the next couple of generations AMD and nVidia are going to be pretty even against each other- which is exactly what we need them to be as it keeps prices down. I mean I spent £140 for my R9 280 and got 3 free games with it... I can't remember ever getting so much for my money in the past!

 

[jdwii]

Also to state efficiency isn't the number 1 most important metric for a CPU/GPU engineer in 2014/15 means you know nothing when it comes to the future.

Again for the 110th time efficiency is the most important thing for future designs from either Amd or Nvidia or Intel. To state otherwise is asinine. The harder it gets to shrink our fabrication process the more every transistor counts. The future is really going to show who the big boys are.

 

[juanrga]

Spoiler

amd is fine, console revenue still growing. apu market penetration still growing. firepro apu's continue to make headway in the overseas market yielding 184 GFLOPs of double precision performance for half the cost of traditional intel workstation. only in the usa do you hear amd is on the ropes and most of them are gamers with more money than sense. nvidia wins because it is consistent with there products, nothing magical and because of this they can demand a higher price. again amd is fine, it has access to the best fabs for current and future products, low margins and a growing mobile market ripe for carrizo, no i do not own amd stock

Let us see.

The former server head abandoned the ship. Currently market share has dropped to 3%, Seattle 16-core canceled, Warsaw not wining any important design (everyone prefer Xeons), Seattle 8-core being crushed by Atoms on one side and by X-Gene 1 on the other. And Berlin APU still missing (I suspect was a paper launch).

AMD impact is supercomputers is similar. About a 5% of top-500 list uses AMD CPUs. Last big customer (Cray) abandoned AMD by Intel and last month announced that will building ARM-based supercomputers as well. Guess what? Cray will use Cavium SoCs, because AMD doesn't have anything to compete.

Laptops: it is difficult to impossible to find some of the mobile Kaveri chips. Another paper launch.

Desktops: FX-9000 series was a fiasco. The 6000-8000 series have got a niche market thanks to aggressive pricing. This pricing has as result that the CPU division is loosing money. AMD uses financial engineering to hide this fact by reorganizing itself.

And desktop roadmap for 2015? Once mentioned Excavator, but latter that was canceled and recently the plans for a Excavator E/D did appear again. Who knows maybe tomorrow will disappear again.

Phones: AMD is absent here and avoids it as the plague because is far from competitive.

Tablet: Where are the promised design wins. Nowhere. Where is the Discovery project? Ups! it was canceled a pair of weeks ago.

Graphics: AMD has lost 22% market share in last count. The pro products are nowhere. They only got the Apple design because Nvidia is now a competitor of Apple in mobile. AMD is selling Firepro cards at one half the cost because otherwise nobody want them. But this will hurt financials and I don't see clear plans for future. Unsurprisingly AMD vicepresident has admitted that the GPU business division is in bad shape

Mr. Kumar considers the performance of AMD’s graphics business to be disappointing.

Add that the financial targets for the whole company were missed and that AMD did lose more money than expected and you will understand why the president abandoned the boat. Now AMD has a new president, but there are two problems: she lacks the experience and her first move at AMD has been a sound mistake. She has been denunciated by inversors by violating the internal rules of the company regarding her salary. Good start!!!!!

Add that AMD is broken into two, with only a 60% of employers approving Lisa Su management...

And AMD continues pivoting towards semicustom market to maintain itself afloat. But there is a problem. The console market is a low margin market and the next designs (K12 and Zen) are not the saviors that everyone expect. According to AMD the new designs won two semicustom designs and AMd expect to get 3 billions in revenue from those, during a period of 3 years. Pardon? 1 billion per year? That is peanuts. Currently Nvidia spends more than 1 billion per year only in R&D. And Intel spends 1 billion per quarter on incentives for mobile OEMs.

This seems to imply that K12/Zen are not so good and it seems that AMD only got the design wins thanks to aggressive pricing.

Mantle: Where are the dozens of games promised by Huddy for this year? Where is the promised Mantle for linux? Not many time ago someone tried to convince us that Ubuntu was full MANTLE. Bla bla bla bla bla bla. And when DX12 was here Mantle will vanish in the air.

HSA: Where are the half dozen of HSA applications promised? Nowhere because AMD had the smart idea of pushing HSA without the spec being finished and without hardware ready. Only Carrizo will be full HSA. Therefore, we could start seeing developers to consider HSA seriously by 2016/2017 or so.

It looks as everything is rosy. Isn't?

Looks who's suddenly come around to my line of thinking. Wasn't I the one who said years ago that console sales wouldn't generate much revenue? Or that AMD has missed it's chance at Mobile? Or its disappearing act in the lucrative server market? Or the lack of widespread Mantle adoption? And so on.

The problem AMD has is simple: They need people to realize there are alternatives to Intel and NVIDIA. They needed to win SIGNIFICANT OEM products to remind the masses there are alternatives. When's the last time you've seen an AMD advertisement on TV?

I said it when smartphones became a thing: AMD was in unique position to succeed because of the ATI merger. For reasons that still boggle the mind, they simply NEVER MADE AN ATTEMPT. Likewise, the high margin server market they basically ignored. And so on. Left with desktops, which isn't high margin at all.

So no matter how you spin it, AMD's long term future is not very bright.

I have always maintained that consoles maintained AMD affloat, but nothing more. We agree.

I always criticized AMD myopia regarding mobile. When all the signs pointed to a collapse of the PC market, companies as Intel and Nvidia started to pivot towards mobile, whereas AMD remained stagnant and now the collapse of the PC market is directly affecting the finances. We agree.

I always criticized AMD ridiculous server strategy, starting by that nonsense called Bulldozer arch. Some time ago I posted here my analysis of why CMT was a very bad idea. I always criticized AMD myopia regarding ARM. I mentioned that their K12 was late and that their launch of Seattle was an attempt to have something to compete before K12 is ready. I did applaud their plans to replace jaguar servers by Seattle servers, because jaguar servers are uncompetitive (slower and power hungry).

What I never imagined is that AMD would try to sell Piledriver Opterons again, but renamed as Warsaw. What I never imagined is that their execution of Seattle plans would be so poor that the initially announced 16-core would be canceled months after being announced. The idea behind Seattle and the use of standard Cortex A57 core was to be the first to hit the market before others would release custom cores. Well APM is already selling its custom X-Gene 1 and we have still no word of the promised 8-core Seattle. It seems AMD has canceled this as well, because who will buy it when better alternatives are available? No surprise that several companies are already selling X-Gene servers.

I never imagined that near one year after announcing Berlin, the APU is nowhere. It sounds as another canceled product, probably because nobody would purchase a HSA server, when the HSA spec is not finished and there is no software to run on the server.

We agree.

Mantle was a good idea. Initially AMD promised us support for linux and lots of games. Now Mantle is windows only stuff and, unsurprisingly, the dozens of promised games are nowhere. Mantle would have a future if was multiplatform, but being limited to windows, what developer will use it when DX12 was ready?

We agree.

We disagree about advertisement on TV. I think real problems are the poor execution, the silly management decisions, and the more than evident lack of a long term plan.

I agree with you on that the management has been miope to stuff such as smarphones, regarding management decisions it looks as if they are specialist on either taking always the poor decision possible or taking the good decision too late.

 

[con635]

^^^ It's irrelevant to the original conversation which is simply Amd needs to improve their GCN design a bit more to stay competitive if both manufacturers were using the same node how would things look?(since nvidia can simply use a lower node as well). The 290X using the same amount of power as the 690 is just crazy i couldn't care less about the excuses. Nothing is to support my products i buy, if so i would be dissing the fx 8350 more.

So again stop claiming the reason why people put down something is over fanboyism or whatever else you can think of its nothing more then what you would expect from professional reviewers.

Not to say Nvidiots don't exist but i'm not one of them i want Amd to be better in terms of efficiency but what i want and what is reality are two different things back in 2-3 years ago i was putting Nvidia down left and right over them jacking up prices and this can be found from my previous posts.

I have no idea why i'm getting attacked if anything i find it funny. I will never stop claiming Nvidia or Intel or Amd is better than one another as long as i state it with facts which are not even subjective.

Now my biggest mistake is expecting readers of this forum to look at the results and state a neutral opinion based on the evidence in front of them i have been defeated in that stance.
However i will continue to state this had nothing to do with the 970 vs anything since that is a newer design this is nothing more than rehashing my old results that the 770 uses less power while being just as fast as the 280X and also stating the 285 has caught up to the 680 series base GPU's from Nvidia in performance per watt something that isn't debatable since the results show just that in terms of benchmarks.
Now ask yourself if you were a engineer at Amd would you want to think the 285 beats Maxwell in efficiently or would you rather go with reality and make a better product? I sure would hope engineers at Amd know their product very well and want to make it better.


Now this is getting sad i hear comments from this user above who says things like the 7950 is beating a 680 over poor console ports, isthat really what we have now? Using the argument from small numbers to justify are claims? Again i use techpowerup for my evidence since it uses the majority over the small numbers to support my claims on what is better for GPU performance if for example one card is 50% better in BF4 does that make it better overall NO of course not.
It’s like claiming I won’t die over smoking since my grandpa smoked for 70 years and he is still alive even if the majority die sooner over smoking.

The 770 being just as fast as 280x while using a little less watts means a hell of a lot less than £100 more it costs and keplers poorer performance than gcn in newer aaa games. Kepler looks so dated now there was a conspiracy theory that nv was gimping it via drivers to make maxwell look better (completely debunked of course). Anyone who bought 7970ghz *years ago must be laughing, what a buy.
@cdrkf Yes we too got an msi 280 for £140 with 3 games recently for my younger brother, games he was going to buy anyway I might add, what a deal, amd have this price point well sewn up.

 

[-Fran-]

Theory: AMD is preparing itself for a buyout.

I won't get into details, but the similarities with Nokia and other companies before "selling themselves" are there.

Cheers!

 

[Rafael Luik]

Graphics: AMD has lost 22% market share in last count.

Do you mean in that count that left APUs out? It's a near useless statistic.

 

[etayorius]

Theory: AMD is preparing itself for a buyout.

I won't get into details, but the similarities with Nokia and other companies before "selling themselves" are there.

Cheers!

I been thinking about this too... if so, i hope it`s Samsung the one who buys them.

 

[Cazalan]

What I never imagined is that their execution of Seattle plans would be so poor that the initially announced 16-core would be canceled months after being announced. The idea behind Seattle and the use of standard Cortex A57 core was to be the first to hit the market before others would release custom cores. Well APM is already selling its custom X-Gene 1 and we have still no word of the promised 8-core Seattle. It seems AMD has canceled this as well, because who will buy it when better alternatives are available? No surprise that several companies are already selling X-Gene servers.

Anyone not drinking the coolaid saw this coming from miles away. X-Gene had beta hardware in FPGAs the minute ARMv8 was announced.

http://armdevices.net/2011/11/09/applied-micro-x-gene-armv8-64-bit-server-on-chip-shown-on-fpga/

Several mentioned it here that AMD was coming late to the ARM party. Some hyped it way more than others. It still fits with their semi-custom strategy and ultimately I don't think it cost them a whole lot. Much of the work they needed to do anyway. Just another item to add to the check list.

 

[juanrga]

What I never imagined is that their execution of Seattle plans would be so poor that the initially announced 16-core would be canceled months after being announced. The idea behind Seattle and the use of standard Cortex A57 core was to be the first to hit the market before others would release custom cores. Well APM is already selling its custom X-Gene 1 and we have still no word of the promised 8-core Seattle. It seems AMD has canceled this as well, because who will buy it when better alternatives are available? No surprise that several companies are already selling X-Gene servers.

Anyone not drinking the coolaid saw this coming from miles away. X-Gene had beta hardware in FPGAs the minute ARMv8 was announced.

http://armdevices.net/2011/11/09/applied-micro-x-gene-armv8-64-bit-server-on-chip-shown-on-fpga/

Several mentioned it here that AMD was coming late to the ARM party. Some hyped it way more than others. It still fits with their semi-custom strategy and ultimately I don't think it cost them a whole lot. Much of the work they needed to do anyway. Just another item to add to the check list.

I suppose Feldman abandoning AMD server division would be a sign something was going wrong. My mistake.

 

[jdwii]

Amd almost always has great price performance its why they make so little and yes even take loses.

 

[juanrga]

Theory: AMD is preparing itself for a buyout.

I won't get into details, but the similarities with Nokia and other companies before "selling themselves" are there.

Cheers!

I been thinking about this too... if so, i hope it`s Samsung the one who buys them.

I have a strong feeling that AMD is preparing itself to split into two different companies; the current computing and graphics business group would give one company and the enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom business group would give another company.

 

[colinp]

What is more likely is a private equity takeover. AMD will then be sliced and diced, with IP being sold off to the highest bidders and any remaining business units "streamlined" for a re - floatation.

On the other hand we'll probably be here in 12 months having exactly the same discussion.

 

[gamerk316]

Graphics: AMD has lost 22% market share in last count.

Do you mean in that count that left APUs out? It's a near useless statistic.

If we count GPUs on the CPU die, then Intel owns like 60% of the GPU market.

Just saying, your metric makes AMD look even worse by comparison.

 

[gamerk316]

What is more likely is a private equity takeover. AMD will then be sliced and diced, with IP being sold off to the highest bidders and any remaining business units "streamlined" for a re - floatation.

On the other hand we'll probably be here in 12 months having exactly the same discussion.

Heres the problem: Who would WANT AMD's assets? Lets face it, the X86 license simply isn't attractive due to smartphones/ARM. Especially when you factor in the cost of competing with Intel and making their own proprietary X86 design. Much simpler and profitable to just license an ARM (or even MIPS) design. The GPU unit would be a hard sell as well, simply because other manufactures are now competitive in mobile. Same basic idea here: Simpler to license a design then build one and compete against NVIDIA.

So here's my question: With Samsung being dominant on ARM/Mobile, why would they WANT any part of AMD?

 

[gamerk316]

One thing to point out when comparing GPUs: the amount of VRAM is becoming a major bottleneck. For example, the 770 GTX 2GB version is faring a lot worse then the 4GB variants. So when comparing cards, it might be worth specifying the amount of VRAM we're talking as well. Because right now, 770 GTX 2GB < 285x < 770 GTX 4GB.

 

[etayorius]

Theory: AMD is preparing itself for a buyout.

I won't get into details, but the similarities with Nokia and other companies before "selling themselves" are there.

Cheers!

I been thinking about this too... if so, i hope it`s Samsung the one who buys them.

I have a strong feeling that AMD is preparing itself to split into two different companies; the current computing and graphics business group would give one company and the enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom business group would give another company.

I really hope AMD is still around for a while, i really don`t want to see them go... but they been acting in the most Idiotic ways for the last 4 years... if they Split or Die, it will fall under own Doing.

 

[juanrga]

What I never imagined is that their execution of Seattle plans would be so poor that the initially announced 16-core would be canceled months after being announced. The idea behind Seattle and the use of standard Cortex A57 core was to be the first to hit the market before others would release custom cores. Well APM is already selling its custom X-Gene 1 and we have still no word of the promised 8-core Seattle. It seems AMD has canceled this as well, because who will buy it when better alternatives are available? No surprise that several companies are already selling X-Gene servers.

Anyone not drinking the coolaid saw this coming from miles away. X-Gene had beta hardware in FPGAs the minute ARMv8 was announced.

http://armdevices.net/2011/11/09/applied-micro-x-gene-armv8-64-bit-server-on-chip-shown-on-fpga/

Several mentioned it here that AMD was coming late to the ARM party. Some hyped it way more than others. It still fits with their semi-custom strategy and ultimately I don't think it cost them a whole lot. Much of the work they needed to do anyway. Just another item to add to the check list.

I suppose Feldman abandoning AMD server division would be a sign something was going wrong. My mistake.

feldman and the dragon lady (su) have been at odds for yrs, feldman's comment on arm not being interesting for seamicro server use in 2012. set the stage for his exit.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2204425/idf-amds-seamicro-head-is-not-interested-in-arm-chips

He says that the ARM hardware available then (he explicitly mentions an ancient 32 bit Cortex A9 core) was not suitable for servers (which was true), but that ARM would release something for 2013--2014 and adds "When there is a good ARM part we will look at it."

The Cortex A53--A57 cores available today are the minimum for a half decent microserver. Not only Feldman was one of the visionaries on ARM servers but he correctly predicted that advantages of ARM big.LITTLE on HPC

http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/04/18/a_new_breed_of_heterogeneous_computing/

I like his vision for heterogeneous compute. It is the second in my favorite list.

 

[juanrga]

Theory: AMD is preparing itself for a buyout.

I won't get into details, but the similarities with Nokia and other companies before "selling themselves" are there.

Cheers!

I been thinking about this too... if so, i hope it`s Samsung the one who buys them.

I have a strong feeling that AMD is preparing itself to split into two different companies; the current computing and graphics business group would give one company and the enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom business group would give another company.

I really hope AMD is still around for a while, i really don`t want to see them go... but they been acting in the most Idiotic ways for the last 4 years... if they Split or Die, it will fall under own Doing.

+1

 

[anxiousinfusion]

What is more likely is a private equity takeover. AMD will then be sliced and diced, with IP being sold off to the highest bidders and any remaining business units "streamlined" for a re - floatation.

On the other hand we'll probably be here in 12 months having exactly the same discussion.

Heres the problem: Who would WANT AMD's assets? Lets face it, the X86 license simply isn't attractive due to smartphones/ARM. Especially when you factor in the cost of competing with Intel and making their own proprietary X86 design. Much simpler and profitable to just license an ARM (or even MIPS) design. The GPU unit would be a hard sell as well, simply because other manufactures are now competitive in mobile. Same basic idea here: Simpler to license a design then build one and compete against NVIDIA.

So here's my question: With Samsung being dominant on ARM/Mobile, why would they WANT any part of AMD?

I don't think another entity could acquire their x86 division even if they wanted. Isn't that license non-transferable through mergers/buyouts/IP sell offs?

 

[colinp]

I'm not sure that if that were the case, whether it would apply to PE owning AMD. I mean, AMD is already owned by a mix of other companies (pension funds and the like ) and casual investors.

 

[cdrkf]

Having followed AMD back from the 386 days, I can tell you they've been here before. They're one of those companies that perpetually have a bad time, get a little win, then go down again. What they are if anything is resilient however, and also a necessity for Intel.

If they did ever go down I could see Intel being forced to make big changes (eg open up their advanced fabs for everyone) as otherwise they'll have sole domination of to many markets (ok not phones, but the whole pc platform which is still very important for business especially, along with the majority of the server market).

As for an AMD buyout, I think they do have some valuable ip, Samsung have to licence their gpu tech for example so gcn would be tempting to them. Also I think the hsa stuff is potentially very important long term and amd are so far furthest ahead. Thing is tough any suitor probably wouldn't be interested in running the company as is, so they would allow it to really collapse and then get the bits they want as cheaply as possible.

 

[Cazalan]

company politics juan, su is a control freak and probably went ballistic hearing that comment. that and the restructuring in June giving more control to su would be enough to make me want to leave amd.
I doubt andrew left his baby because amd or seamicro is in trouble I expect andrew to wind up at Texas instruments, they could really use him.

Or they're just trimming the fat. I'm guessing the SeaMicro deal still hasn't earned them a penny considering what they paid for it.

 

[Cazalan]

So here's my question: With Samsung being dominant on ARM/Mobile, why would they WANT any part of AMD?

GPU patents/IP, but that wouldn't be worth the price of a full buy out. They could just work out a license with how desperate AMD is right now.