

AMD Said to be Readying Massive Layoffs - dmoney67
http://mashable.com/2012/10/12/amd-readying-layoffs/

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mathgladiator
So sad to see AMD suck hard; I remember the day when AMD was the preferred
gamer/hacker/tinkerer solution, and now where are they?

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chubs
Seems to me like they competed with the giant (intel) on its own turf (x86)
and failed, rather than skating to where the puck was going to be (ARM).

~~~
codewright
An accurate (but incredibly biased by hindsight) analysis. If this were a
matter of ML, I'd say you way over-fitted to the working data.

It would've required forseeing the sea-change in the smartphone/mobile market
produced by the iPhone in order to predict that it would explode the market
for high performance ARM chips so wildly. This wasn't in the cards at the
time. At the time, everything but the Blackberry was a joke.

Anybody in a position to direct capital, with the faculty for this kind of
prescience, would then know the _real_ best use of capital in that
circumstance is to direct it at Apple, not for AMD to make ARM chips. It
likely would've been more profitable for AMD to sell off the entirety of its
assets and buy Apple stock in 2005 than for them to try to jump on the AMD
bandwagon.

More to the point, AMDs brief reign as the gamer/hacker/tinkerer chip maker of
choice was a byproduct of the Pentium 4 architecture, especially the Prescott
gen, being such an unmitigated disaster. The moment Intel rolled back to the
Core Solo/Duo series based on the Pentium III architecture, it was clear they
were going to retake the lead and probably keep it.

All AMD did to "succeed" was not fail as hard at chasing the megahertz demon.
In particular, by choosing not to sacrifice pipeline efficiency for higher
clock rate, AMDs chips were significantly more performant for virtually every
use-case except SSE-heavy vector operations.

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benologist
Actual source:

[http://allthingsd.com/20121012/exclusive-amd-to-cut-up-
to-30...](http://allthingsd.com/20121012/exclusive-amd-to-cut-up-
to-30-percent-of-workforce/)

