Actually consoles are pretty profitable. R&D mostly paid by customer, just the margin is around 15~20% now. Unfortunately server sits in the same BU and they spend a lot on server R&D with negligible revenue in return, for now.
How much does it cost for 14nm 100mm^2, 150mm^2, 200mm^2 cpu chips?
Intel had been enjoying the fat margin on those high end parts.
People buy them because of no competition.
My friends in AMD told me they have 14nm&16nm chips in their lab several months ago. They did mention something running @ 4Ghz without any problem. haha.
Let's say you are thinking about to improve your cpu performance by 5%.
The first and easiest way to do so is increase clock frequency by 5%.
And in order to reach that 5% higher clock rate, the supply voltage has to go up by 10%, for example.
Then your overall power consumption goes up by...
For the size of their cpu/apu revenue, even 10% of x86 server is a huge thing for them, ~400M a quarter.
AMD did realize HSA is still really far away. AMD also realized they cannot relying on OEM. So apu is no longer their high priority. And also now ogpu's performance is really limited by...
Because people don't really understand what AMD was and is focusing on.
When they were focusing on game consoles, were they able to deliver on time?
Now they do mention Zen is the highest priority.
Rory Read was hired to fulfill the board's mobile dream, back in 2011.
Mobile meant arm and arm server became another plan.
Later they acquired seamicro, which only met <50% of their revenue target after the merge.
Skybridge and CMO and seattle were fine. Every AMDer knew those were joke and...
The R&D reduction is kind of always misleading. AMD sold >80% of their analog/IO group to Synopsys, and outsourced their south bridge to ASmedia. It's about 20% or more of AMD's R&D workforce.
Now Intel's DCG has >3B revenue each Q, and >60% of Intel's overall profit. It's a super high margin market.
If AMD manages to take 1% of it with ZEN, that means >300M each Q. And most likely good enough for them to stop losing money.
Something interesting to share:
1. AMD seems to be working on 14nm bulldozer series APU:
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=AAEAABW52VkBgQUOCWyFlDCLTHMdvUjtXMHvh28&authType=name&authToken=ZufU&trk=prof-sb-browse_map-name
2. TSMC claimed 16FF+ "can provide above 65 percent higher speed...
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