
AMD Exits Dense Microserver Business, Ends SeaMicro Brand - boyter
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9170/amd-exits-dense-microserver-business-ends-seamicro-brand
======
rasz_pl
AMD has been pathetic business wise for a long time now. Everything they do is
stupid and makes no sense, they seem to be paralysed from the inside. Even
when they manage to roll out a product it doesnt go nowhere. All their mobile
APU announcements are on paper, there is no hardware on the market(or rather
one small product that goes unnoticed and quickly discontinued). The only
solid division left is GPU, the remnants of ATI. AMD used to do great things.
They took Alpha, glued x86 decoders, married it with Motorola SOI process and
BEAT Intel leading desktop PC performance race thru year 2000.

Nowadays? They sit on ARM SoC for 2 years now, while small Chinese shops ship
new chips every 6-9 months. Even Nvidia was able to ship something (slow, too
late, and too expensive, but they SHIPPED every time). It seems like there is
someone at AMD simply deciding its not worth the effort to even try. Like this
SeaMicro - W T F? You buy 300mil company and do NOTHING?

Yes AMD, micro server business didnt sell any of your chips .. because you
DIDNT EFFIN TRIED TO SELL ANYTHING :/

This is the sign of Ivory Tower thinking at AMD HQ. They are all too smart,
too well off, to content with life and too disconnected to do anything. Only
hungry desperate people are able to make leaps, AMD forgot to be hungry.

~~~
higherpurpose
Agreed with everything you said. AMD has no long-term prospective. It would be
much better for the company if it were acquired by a cash-rich company such as
Samsung or Qualcomm that has a vision, can attract talented engineers rather
than lose them, and can actually ship products on a process that is close
enough to Intel's, not 2-3 generations behind.

I just hope they won't wait to sell until they put the company in the ground
and nobody can salvage it anymore, other than buy it for the patents. If I
were them I'd rather sell it _now_ at a discount than it can still be turned
around, rather than sell it 5-7 years from now at 30% of its current market
value. In other words, don't wait until they are Blackberry with 1% market
share.

~~~
mda
Unfortunately, existing x86 license is non-transferable. I guess it is
possible to make another contract though...

~~~
dmm
Does Intel need an amd64 license? If so it seems whoever owns amd64 will get
an x86 license.

------
transfire
A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the
PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous
PCs that have their chips in them.

It's almost sickening enough to want them just to shutter their doors and give
any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's
ass.

In anycase, the whole microserver hype seemed a bit suspect from the start.

~~~
wmf
_A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the
PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous
PCs that have their chips in them._

AMD's "Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom" division made a profit, but it
was more than wiped out by losses in other divisions. Consoles are a seasonal
business and Q1 is a slow quarter after all the holiday sales in Q4. AMD's PC
processors are so bad they generally have to sell them below cost to sell any
at all.

 _give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on
Intel 's ass._

AMD won[1] two antitrust lawsuits against Intel already, but a billion-dollar
settlement doesn't go very far when you're competing against Intel.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp).

[1] Spare us the pedantry.

~~~
MoOmer
That billion dollar settlement came after they had to close down their fabs
due to the anti-competitive moves that Intel had made. A billion doesn't come
close to the set-back it caused them. During that time, for those who don't
remember, AMD literally couldn't give their chips away, because the vendor
kickbacks from Intel still made Intel the better choice.

~~~
higherpurpose
Indeed. Precisely why it's baffling that no one is currently looking at
Intel's heavy subsidization of its mobile Atom chips. Now that they changed
their financial structure to be able to hide those subsidies/losses by _also_
selling $160 Atom-based "Pentiums" for PCs, it will be even harder to figure
out what Intel is doing. They'll just call them "mobile chips", and the $30+
mobile Atom subsidy will now be masked by the $80+ "Pentium" (but still Atom)
markup.

Whoever would be looking at "how Atom is doing" all they'll see is that "those
chips are _profitable_ " \- despite the fact in the actual _mobile /smartphone
market_ Intel is selling chips _below-cost_ against the competition to try and
steal market share from them. It's also a great way to hide billions upon
billions of losses in the smartphone market for years from shareholders,
because all the shareholders will see is that the "Client Group is profitable"
thanks to the PC profit offset.

By the time the antitrust bodies wake up to it, Intel will probably already
take out a few ARM chip makers and have a significant market share in mobile
(I'm still skeptical about that one, but that doesn't change the fact that
Intel is playing very unfair right now and those tactics _could_ help them
greatly in the long term).

It's also already too late to fix the damage Intel has done with its "bundled"
GPUs in laptops against Nvidia and also AMD. In the first few years nobody
cared because "Intel graphics suck anyway, and you'll _need_ an Nvidia
dedicated GPU for your laptop". So the fact that Intel essentially coerced
OEMs into putting their crappy GPUs in laptops that nobody asked for or
wanted, so that consumers get used to them, was completely ignored by
antitrust bodies.

But it was quite obvious to me even then that it would be just a matter of
time before those GPUs got good enough to replace most Nvidia GPUs from
laptops (hello disruptive innovation theory!).

Now you see consumers everywhere actually _ask_ to have the latest integrated
Intel GPU - i.e. the damage is already done by its anti-competitive bundling
tactics, and no fine will fix that unless we're talking $5+ billion given to
Nvidia and AMD, or the antitrust bodies outright ban Intel from bundling its
GPU with its CPUs anymore (highly unlikely, especially as now Intel will argue
that doing so would cause "great harm to the performance/cost of its chips").

------
brianbreslin
AMD has a fascinating history in relationship to Intel. Intel effectively
propped them up in the early 1980s because IBM insisted on having multiple
manufacturers available for x86 chips and not be reliant on a sole supplier.
Intel handed AMD that business, then slowly chipped away at them. There is a
case study out on the web about this. This isn't the exact one, but worth
reading as well. [http://davidamerland.com/seo-blog/676-amd-business-
failings-...](http://davidamerland.com/seo-blog/676-amd-business-failings-
case-study.html)

------
nwah1
A lot of negative comments about AMD here, but I don't see a lot of reason for
it.

There's been some talk of Moore's Law slowing down, because die-shrinks can't
go much further on silicon. This means Intel's biggest advantage cannot
continue indefinitely. The market will have to make some kind of paradigm
shift to continue seeing improvements.

Heterogenous computing may end up being the way forward, and AMD is leading
the way. Sadly, the software stacks aren't capable of easily making use of it.
AMD needs to invest heavily in their HSA initiatives, and they are, but maybe
not enough.

Apparently Java 9 is supposed to be able to make some use of HSA features, and
various other apps and libraries are slowly making use of OpenCL. There could
be some big wins in the server space for JVM apps on AMD hardware.

In the mobile space, their new moves to use Stacked DRAM look very
interesting. And their Mantle API was the basis for the new Vulkan graphics
API. And they are now selling graphics technology to other embedded
chipmakers, like MediaTek. All three big gaming console makers chose AMD,
because they have the best GPU tech. This can one day translate into the best
GPGPU tech for servers.

Back when Cray computers were still a thing, and Richard Feynman was helping
invent vector processors, people thought vector processing was the way
forward. But writing parallel code is hard, as we all know.

Perhaps it is finally getting realistic enough to move beyond niche
applications. Or maybe physics and the nature of silicon will simply force us
to use it.

------
seesomesense
So they pissed away $300 million?

Brilliant management move.

Confuse the opposition into thinking that you are incompetent.

~~~
ableal
Unfortunately common outcome in Merger&Acquisition stories.

------
fapjacks
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I wonder how much business they could generate by open-sourcing the driver for
ATI hardware.

~~~
qb45
In some recent HN discussions of the new graphics APIs (Mantle, Vulkan) it has
been claimed that OpenGL and DX3D are too detached from actual hardware to
program efficiently and hence GPU manufacturers hire engineers whose sole job
is running popular games, finding out what they try to achieve with particular
API calls and writing special, game-specific implementations of some API
calls, optimized for particular game's needs.

Add to this the fact that scoring few FPS more in online reviews can convince
many customers to choose one GPU over another, and you can start to imagine
why GPU vendors are reluctant to release their sources.

~~~
4ad
Releasing open specifications would be better than releasing the drivers.

~~~
Narishma
They already release those.

[http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-
articles/de...](http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-
articles/developer-guides-manuals/)

------
chiph
_However as it turns out that first design was also the last design; SeaMicro
did not release any additional products prior to today’s announcement from
AMD._

So, did the SM15000 not sell? Or was it internal issues that prevented a
follow-on product?

------
BinaryIdiot
Wow, $334 million just 3 years ago and now simply shutting it down? Did the
people controlling AMD get changed out or did the same people who bought them
also killed them?

~~~
boulos
Rory Read
([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Read](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Read))
was CEO when AMD acquired SeaMicro but left suddenly in October to Dell. Sadly
for AMD, they're now on their 3rd CEO in just over four years.

~~~
raverbashing
Looks like they're "Yahooing" until they hire someone who actually knows how
to connect their computer to the projector.

Marissa Mayer may have a lot of issues, but lack of will and technical
knowledge is not one of them.

To be fair Intel lost a lot of time and money with the GHz race as well

------
joelthelion
Is this related to the massive move to the cloud?

