In overall terms it's quite a good quarter, much better than I had thought it would. The JV with the other company will see them through to Zen easily, which is all that matters now.
This.
1) We also know that AMD won ~ $1B of Revenue from two semi-custom design wins, the first of which should start hitting their financials in 2H of 2016. A good guesstimate of that is the Nintendo NX product(s).
2) Their turn-around strategy across the board cannot start until a new line-up of CPUs (Zen) and a perf/watt focused GPU strategy required to regain massive losses in mobile dGPU market segment since 2010. This also cannot start until 16nm Arctic Islands because there isn't much more AMD can do on 28nm / GDDR5 and it's highly unlikely they will sink any more $ into outdated node/tech redesigns. This means over the next 12 months AMD has to spend most of its energy and financial resources on making sure Zen and 16nm graphics generation are a big improvement over their existing line-ups.
None of these next gen product guarantee a spectacular turn-around because Intel and NV have great products, but without Zen and 16nm GPUs, there cannot even be a discussion of any serious turn around. We probably won't see the impact of the new 16nm GPUs and Zen until Q3 2016-Q1 2017. For now AMD just has to focus on engineering designs internally, execution and marketing strategies. With existing products they cannot really do much other than cut prices on Fury/Fury X/Nano in due time and possibly bring out a 370X/380X level product.
Something to ponder about:
-> Outside of the last console generation, which lasted way too long due to the Great Recession, generally speaking the console life-cycle has been about 5 years, maybe 6 years. That means by the end of 2016/early 2017, the existing Xbox One/PS4 consoles will be roughly at their mid-point and that means the bidding process/work on next generation Xbox Two/PS5 successors will be well under way. That gives AMD a chance to secure semi-custom design wins for the successors of the existing consoles.
It's not that. The stuff they wrote down was older gen stuff that they probably deemed unsaleable. If it were just a question of lower PC demand then they would have just cut back production of current generation product to keep inventories at healthy levels.
Chances are they would have incurred even larger penalties due to the horrendous WSA Agreement with GloFo than writing down oversupply of inventory. It's a miracle AMD was even able to survive the Bulldozer architecture disaster. It has now been
more than 4 years since Bulldozer launched, which means for the last 4 years, Intel basically just had to show up. Technically, Intel could have gotten away just shrinking Sandy Bridge and raising clocks over the last 4 years and even the 9590 wouldn't have kept up. That's the scary part for Zen -- by the time it launches, Cannonlake will be around the corner and in that time Intel will have gone through SB, IVB, HW, BW, SKL and then CNL.