
AMD’s layoffs target engineering; Board incompetence dooms the company - tankenmate
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/12/amds-layoffs-target-engineering/
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pjmlp
If AMD goes down, Linux will be surely affected.

Down goes the only graphics manufacturer offering proper graphics cards with
documentation for open source developers.

Intel graphics card don't count if you're doing serious 3D work.

~~~
aristidb
Last I heard (very recently) the NVidia closed source drivers are still the
most practical option, because the AMD closed source drivers are fickle and
the AMD open source drivers are incomplete. Wrong?

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staticfish
No, you are dead right. Even though a lot of NVidias stuff is closed source,
the binaries have always had much better support for graphics and power
management than ever the Radeon drivers. I could never get things like
graphics hibernate to work as well as it did with those from NVidia.

I believe I read earlier that they have promised to open source a lot of their
drivers for OSS.

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mtgx
I wonder who would be interested in buying AMD if things keep going downhill.
Maybe a large Asian manufacturer like Lenovo?

~~~
revelation
I could imagine two companies who have a vital anti-trust interest in keeping
AMD alive: Intel for its processors, nVidia for the ATI graphics cards.

~~~
mtgx
Nvidia might find itself in a similar position soon if its Tegra line-up
doesn't become significantly more popular and successful. Intel is squeezing
them out of the market with its integrated graphics in laptops, and I think
that's quite a shame because I don't think Intel played fair there. They tried
to force manufacturers to use integrated graphics _even if the laptop used
discrete graphics_. Now that Intel's integrated graphics chips are becoming
"good enough" for most people, it's going to be a very smooth transition to
take Nvidia out of the laptop market.

So Intel is killing both AMD and Nvidia. Hopefully Nvidia has the last say
with its ARM-based chips, though. If ARM ends up disrupting Intel in all its
markets, and if Nvidia remains one of the best ARM chip makers, then Nvidia
will ultimately win.

That can't be said about AMD, though. They're stuck in an x86 world where
they're falling further and further behind Intel, and they haven't even begun
to enter the ARM world, and even if they do, it might be too late now, because
they lack the ARM engineering experience of their competitors. Buying the OMAP
division from TI might help, but OMAP is not doing that great now either, and
they always use overclocked last-gen GPU's to compete with the new mobile
GPU's, which I find a bit annoying. Plus, I don't know if AMD can even afford
them, or the turn-around that comes with that. Another interesting acquisition
target could be MIPS, which is for sale, but AMD would have to also promote
the benefits of that architecture on their own, which seems even harder.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
NVIDIA still owns the high-end scientific computing market. This combined with
their ARM products could save it in the future. AMD...their only advantage has
been X86 and that is just a dying market, kudos to the board at least for
dumping the CEO who wanted to focus on the high end PC market. AMD still has
really good GPU tech, enough to compete with NVIDIA on the high-end non-GPGPU
market, but that is very niche.

~~~
mtgx
Well Intel recently introduced its Xeon Phi co-processor, which according to
them offers about the same performance as Nvidia's chips, while not needing to
code in CUDA. But I never trust Intel's marketing anyway because they always
seem to exaggerate in some way or be misleading on purpose, so we'll see how
that goes. Plus, I'm interested to see what comes out of Nvidia's Project
Denver or whatever they are calling it now (Nvidia's 64-bit custom ARMv8 SoC
for HPC and servers, which should arrive in 2014).

~~~
ryanmolden
>But I never trust Intel's marketing anyway because they always seem to
exaggerate in some way or be misleading on purpose, so we'll see how that
goes.

I think you can safely remove "Intel's" from that sentence and it remains as
accurate, or perhaps more so. I really don't mean to hate on marketing, but
their job is to sell a story. Good marketers walk that fine line between
outright lying and carefully walking the "happy path" that makes whatever they
are selling the cure for what ails you and fails to mention the problems. In
general once you dig into things you almost always start finding the trade-
offs/drawbacks that marketing "forgot" to mention. Thomas Sowell was right
when he said: "There are no solutions ... only trade offs".

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seivan
Poor Engineers :/ Board untouched....

~~~
imglorp
Very good point. It's telling. Screw the company, they say, we're going to
inflate this thing, take our profits, and go to the next con.

In this new world we're watching unfold, boards no longer do what is in the
interest of the company. This guy puts it well:

 _2)"Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners."
Shareholders are the most mobile of corporate stakeholders, often holding
ownership for but a fraction of a second (high-frequency trading represents
70% of today's trading). Shareholders prefer corporate strategies that
maximize short-term profits and dividends, usually at the cost of long-term
investments. (This often also includes added leverage and risk, and reliance
on socializing risk via 'too big to fail' status, and relying on 'the
Greenspan put.') Chang adds that corporate limited liability, while a boon to
capital accumulation and technological progress, when combined with
professional managers instead of entrepreneurs owning a large chunk (eg. Ford,
Edison, Carnegie) and public shares with smaller voting rights (typically
limited to 10%), allows professional managers to maximize their own prestige
via sales growth and prestige projects instead of maximizing profits. Another
negative long-term outcome driven by shareholders is increased share buybacks
(less than 5% of profits until the early 1980s, 90% in 2007, and 280% in 2008)
- one economist estimates that had GM not spent $20.4 billion on buybacks
between 1986 and 2002 it could have prevented its 2009 bankruptcy. Short-term
stockholder perspectives have also brought large-scale layoffs from off-
shoring. Governments of other countries encourage longer-term thinking by
holding large shares in key enterprises (China Mobile, Renault, Volkswagen),
providing greater worker representation (Germany's supervisory boards), and
cross-shareholding among friendly companies (Japan's Toyota and its
suppliers)._

source - [http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-
Capitalism/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-
Capitalism/dp/1608191664/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top)

~~~
jeremyjh
Really, high-frequency trading is the most common sort of trading? That is
absolutely astonishing. Do you think that says anything about how much stock
(by valuation) is invested long-term?

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thaumasiotes
Even if, say, 95% of stock is held in long-term investments, high-frequency
trades will dominate the metric "% of trades executed", since high-frequency
trading holds the stock for less than 1/20th of the time long-term trading
does.

Suppose num_long shares of stock are held in long-term investments, as a
permanent feature of the economy. Suppose further that the average duration of
a particular long-term investment is two years. Then every two years, num_long
trades will occur under the banner of "long-term investing".

Suppose num_hft shares of stock are held in HFT investments, and that the
average duration of an HFT investment is one day. Then every two years, 730.5
* num_hft trades will occur under the banner of "high-frequency trading".

~~~
jeremyjh
But who cares what the % of trades are? They don't get more weight as a
stakeholder because they are trading a lot. In fact they have absolutely none,
but that doesn't diminish the control held by the 95%.

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anakanemison
News like this worries me because I've always imagined the world's
improvements in mass market technology being driven by competition between
major players like Intel and AMD.

In other words, I'm afraid that the loss of competition for Intel will slow
the approach of the future.

The other sources of competition that Intel faces might be strong enough to
motivate it, but I'm not as familiar with the influences that, say, ARM chips
and Apple's own CPU development have had on Intel.

~~~
flyinglizard
In desktop and servers, for about 5-6 years now Intel has mostly been in
competition with itself. If it can't engineer faster parts, it can't get
people to upgrade, which means no sales. I wouldn't worry about that too much.

~~~
CamperBob2
_Intel has mostly been in competition with itself._

This is more true than you'd think, unless you know how Intel is organized and
operated.

When someone from Intel visits your company to discuss future product
directions and you sign an NDA, they give you some documents with scary-
looking bright yellow "CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DUPLICATE" covers.

The thing is, though, they don't much care if you turn the document over to
AMD, Samsung, or whoever. They might yell at you or sue you or take you off of
their Christmas card list, but they'll get over it. What the program manager
is absolutely _terrified_ about is that another manager at _Intel_ will hear
about the project and knife it.

Intel is a Darwinian dystopia. When Andy Grove titled his book, "Only the
Paranoid Survive," he wasn't joking around or being overdramatic. It's an
interesting company, quite unlike any other I've ever heard about.

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malkia
all nextgen game consoles would rely on amd for cpu (2 of them) and gpu (3 of
them)

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caycep
uh oh Apple better hire Jim Keller back...

