Well This Can't Be Good: AMD Axes Carrell Killebrew & Other Employees

[ViRGE]

I guess things must be really rough at AMD? They just fired 10%-12% of their workforce as a cost cutting measure. Carrell Killebrew, one of their top GPU engineers, was on that list.

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/11/03/amd-cuts-10-of-workforce-leaves-one-group-untouched/

According to Icrontic, the list of ‘optimized’ employees is going to hurt. Carrell Killebrew, the man credited with Eyefinity, probably the largest advantage AMD has in the graphics market right now, VP of corporate strategy Patrick Moorhead, and many others. Add to this the brain drain that has happened over the last few months, people like Dr. Gamal Refai-Ahmed, David Hoff, and dozens of others, you have to wonder who is left.

 

[Annon2255]

Ugh... Things just get worse and worse...

 

[badb0y]

They probably don't have money and they just got a new CEO who's probably shaking things up a little.

 

[PCboy]

I'm going to be infuriated if ATI ends up dissolving.

 

[busydude]

The future looks bleak for AMD. I wonder how CGN performs.

 

[Vesku]

Wow, didn't realize who Killebrew was. Can't imagine giving that guy the pink slip, he was able to completely blindside NVIDIA with eyefinity. Does this mean the GCN architecture is not doing so hot in testing?

 

[exar333]

ATI pays for the missteps of the AMD cpu division, sad.

 

[RussianSensation]

I think it's obvious why the new CEO was hired. He is a pawn of the board. They want to go full force into tablet/smartphone/mobile offerings. They could care less about anything else because AMD has struggled to get shareholder value off the ground in the last 10 years.

It probably doesn't even matter what Bulldozer II or AMD HD8000 will be like. I think the board is determined to completely change direction. Since the firm has very little resources, it's not really feasible for them to keep investing the same amount of $ into GPU and CPU design. If they are going to move into an entirely new market, then the $$$ has to be taken from somewhere, right? Something will likely be getting less priority at AMD, whether its CPUs or GPUs or a combination remains to be seen.

I hope I am wrong on this but if AMD goes all ARM on us and waves goodbye to producing competitive x86 CPUs, it's going to be a full blown Intel monopoly at $200+ price level.

 

[akugami]

Well I'm excited about the future of GPU's.

 

[SickBeast]

I hope I am wrong on this but if AMD goes all ARM on us and waves goodbye to producing competitive x86 CPUs, it's going to be a full blown Intel monopoly at $200+ price level.

AMD holds the x86 license. If they're not going to create anything interesting with it, they might as well sell it off (if they're even allowed to).

AMD still has decent products for the laptop market and their GPUs are excellent. I think they'll skate by ok despite Bulldozer turning out so badly.

I think AMD should try teaming up with IBM to create more powerful x86 CPUs.

 

[Red Hawk]

Owww...the immediate concern of this is the quality of AMD's upcoming products. Hopefully the 7000 series is near enough to completion that this won't really affect it, but this will probably affect the 8000 series. Also in question is the quality of AMD driver releases from this point.

More concerning is that this could be the first sign of AMD's collapse, or as Russian Sensation suggested, shifting focus away from x86 CPU and GPU development. Either way, that means the dominance or monopoly of Nvidia and Intel. I don't have anything against those companies, but monopolies are nearly always bad for the consumer.

 

[SickBeast]

A 10% workforce reduction isn't that much, and it's probably prudent given the fact that Bulldozer is really bad and their market is perpetually shrinking.

It's wise of them to focus on the emerging markets. Hopefully they'll make boatloads on money at it which can then fund better high end CPUs and GPUs.

 

[videogames101]

It's sad ATI is being pulled down with AMD...

 

[blackened23]

ATI pays for the missteps of the AMD cpu division, sad.

This really does suck. Even for nvidia fans, I can't imagine anyone being happy about this news, competition really does drive the market forward.

 

[3DVagabond]

It's sad ATI is being pulled down with AMD...

Is the GPU division doing better or worse since AMD bought them? Was their market penetration better before or now? Were their products more successful then or now? Were they more competitive before?

 

[greenhawk]

Starting to sound like Voodoo.

Just before the release of the Voodoo 4 and voodoo 5 (multiple voodoo 4's IIRC), they parted ways with most of the development team.

Though in the end, voodoo was a dud, hope that part of the "history repeating itself" is not true.

 

[videogames101]

Is the GPU division doing better or worse since AMD bought them? Was their market penetration better before or now? Were their products more successful then or now? Were they more competitive before?

It has nothing to do with ATI's performance, that's the point. ATI can be doing awesome, and all their success will finance... bulldozer. =/

 

[3DVagabond]

It has nothing to do with ATI's performance, that's the point. ATI can be doing awesome, and all their success will finance... bulldozer. =/

I don't think BD has anything to do with this. New CEO. New sheriff in town, and all that. He's just setting things up the way he wants them to be. There's always the possibility that GCN sucks. That would get graphics management let go. Let's hope it's not that.

 

[blackened23]

Is the GPU division doing better or worse since AMD bought them? Was their market penetration better before or now? Were their products more successful then or now? Were they more competitive before?

Their GPU division is doing fine. Nvidia has a lead in high end discrete GPU addon cards, but thats a very small market compared to total sales. Their sales are very good, they have more headway in non discrete markets than nvidia, and have contracts lined up to power both PS-next and xbox 720. They also obviously power every xbox 360. They have a good 2-3 month head start on kepler.

Unfortunately, their CPU division that seems to be dragging all parties down.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I think it's obvious why the new CEO was hired. He is a pawn of the board. They want to go full force into tablet/smartphone/mobile offerings. They could care less about anything else because AMD has struggled to get shareholder value off the ground in the last 10 years.

It probably doesn't even matter what Bulldozer II or AMD HD8000 will be like. I think the board is determined to completely change direction. Since the firm has very little resources, it's not really feasible for them to keep investing the same amount of $ into GPU and CPU design. If they are going to move into an entirely new market, then the $$$ has to be taken from somewhere, right? Something will likely be getting less priority at AMD, whether its CPUs or GPUs or a combination remains to be seen.

I hope I am wrong on this but if AMD goes all ARM on us and waves goodbye to producing competitive x86 CPUs, it's going to be a full blown Intel monopoly at $200+ price level.

If they are going full bore into ARM, tablet, smartphone it is a very risky move in my opinion. They cant come close to keeping up with Intel on the CPU side, but are at least pretty much equal with nvidia on GPUs. If they cant excel in their core competence, how will they be able to compete in an already established market that they have no experience in?

 

[Nintendesert]

If they are going full bore into ARM, tablet, smartphone it is a very risky move in my opinion. They cant come close to keeping up with Intel on the CPU side, but are at least pretty much equal with nvidia on GPUs. If they cant excel in their core competence, how will they be able to compete in an already established market that they have no experience in?

The same way they are doing well with the Fusion stuff, they'll try to leverage their graphics in the mobile space.

 

[Obsoleet]

The same way they are doing well with the Fusion stuff, they'll try to leverage their graphics in the mobile space.

Exactly. I don't even care that Bulldozer isn't that great, it doesn't need to be, it's fast enough in a market where the CPU's importance has dwindled.

They should go full force with Fusion products from top to bottom, and do the same in ARM. They've all kinds of chips in the past, including tv chips, they need to get into other markets.
Intel is too big to compete against, so let them do their thing. I think we're seeing a major shift with ARM/Apple
I think they wanted Bulldozer to be a huge success, of course. But it wouldn't have done anything for them if it was. Sad truth.
BD is a forward looking design that can do well in the more multicore oriented server market, and will integrate just fine with their Fusion parts. With a little better bang/buck, I'd build my next rig with one.. they're faster than what I have now.

 

[Fox5]

ATI tech powers Wii, Wii U, and Xbox 360. ATI tech is the basis of Qualcomm's Snapdragon. And ATI has ~50% of the PC gpu market, as well as the promising Bobcat based netbook/tablet chips.

If AMD wants any future as a consumer electronics company, it lies in ATI.

 

[RussianSensation]

ATI tech powers Wii, Wii U, and Xbox 360. ATI tech is the basis of Qualcomm's Snapdragon. And ATI has ~50% of the PC gpu market, as well as the promising Bobcat based netbook/tablet chips.

If AMD wants any future as a consumer electronics company, it lies in ATI.

Market share #s and dominance in the consoles tell us little about actual profitability of the ATI division though. You can have 50% market share in PC GPUs but if you are only making $20 off each HD6950 sold, it counts for little (I just made that # up to illustrate a point).

I am not denying that ATI is very important for AMD, but keep in mind that while AMD paid $5.4B for ATI as a stand-alone firm, even discounting say a 30% premium they paid (giving us an adjusted ATI value of $3.78B), the entire market cap of AMD is now just 4.18B. Clearly, even the ATI part isn't doing as well as it did 5 years ago. Remember, the ATI of old sold their high-end cards for $499, they had a chipset revenue stream with Intel, they sold graphics chips for TVs/mobile devices; and also GPU sales aren't what they used to be.

I think AMD needs both the CPU and GPU sides. The question is where are they going to get the $ to jump-start their new "low-power, emerging markets, cloud computing" strategy?

 

[Grooveriding]

If they go down in flames I'd wager someone is going to want to buy out the GPU division, since they are actually putting out competitive products.

My vote goes to Intel buying out ATI from AMD. :thumbsup: Opening them up to their fab facilities. Once the ATI people were up to speed on what Intel is using, they would probably take over the GPU market in no short order making use of Intel's better process tech over what they had with TSMC.