AMD Cuts Its Workforce by 10% to Fund New Strategies

[palladin9479]

Slow down there. Who bought DEC Alpha?

Are you really advancing an argument on one occurrence, and an occurrence that didn't even happen? That's a pretty weak argument.

Intel bought the manufacturing facilities from DEC, and HP owns the Alpha and all the other stuff from Compaq (Compaq bought DEC). So, if you've got a problem, blame it on HP.

The only thing AMD has to do with the Alpha is the Athlon used the EV6 bus, which was also used on the Alpha. It's not clear how using that ruined the Alpha.

Also, just so people get the right impression, the Alpha was nothing special, until it died. Then it became a legend. Most of the life of this processor it was a Pentium 4, but better. Very high clock speeds, huge amounts of power and heat, and low IPC. It eventually changed that, with lower clock speeds (relatively) and higher IPC. It changed leadership with the POWER chips from IBM all the time, and was not a clearly superior product, at all. There was nothing special about the instruction set; the processor was built by humans creating almost all the circuits instead of being done by computer. At this level of complexity, they'd never be able to do it anymore, anyway. By the time they were done hand coding it, it would be obsolete.

AMD licensed the EV6 bus protocol from DEC yes, but they also hired the entire (nearly) Alpha engineer team right as DEC was discontinuing it's processor business. The internals of the original Athlon are based heavily on the Alpha processor design, their so similar that you could drop an Alpha CPU into the Irongate chipset and it would work. HP actually made a few systems built this way. As a processor Alpha's were actually pretty good, they just couldn't keep up with IBM or Sun + Solaris in the specialized processing world and x86 had taken over the commodity server world. The Stars architecture is a direct descendant of the older Alpha design's.

 

[palladin9479]

yea and people thought CYRIX CPU''s would be around forever too

They still are, their now called Nano's and are one of the best CPU's for industrial and point of sale systems.

 

[fwupow]

This probably means that they've canceled the 'Bunker-Buster' and 'Ex-wife' cpu development.

 

[Guest]

Heres a strategy from me:

1. Develop 2 new platforms designed around everything you got:

Platform 1
1. Develop higher end APUs with better GPUs eg HD6900 series (your doing it supposedly)
2. Enable it to do hybrid crossfire with HD6900 series GPU & AMD chipset
3. Put it in at a reasonable price & swallow the middle of the market

Platform 2
1. Develop HD7000 series GPUs which act as vector coprocessors
3. Develop the next generation for APUs with HD7900 GPU hopefully
4. Enable hybrid crossfire options for the newer APUs with HD7900 GPUs.
5. Use the vector coprocessors to help boost CPU performance as much as possible by elevating workload to the now very beefy looking GPUs.
6. Get Mobo partners to put more PCI express slots on there APU boards
7. Make this 1 abit more expensive & use it to take the higher end of the market

Hybrid Crossfired Coprocessors handling much of the workload should hit intel guys pretty hard. Thanks to buying ATI your now better at making GPUs then Intel ever will be & if Intel want's to use your GPUs or NVIDIAs to do the same they can pay a kings ransom to do it & become nothing but your cash cow. Your also generally better at scaling then NVIDIA is so you should still have the edge when compared to them.

For the future after this I think you should focus making your APUs even better & improving the vector coprocessors that help them out.