AMD Is Restructuring Again, Losing 7% Of Employees

[scottishduck]

If I were them, I would have 3 products:
Embedded/Mobile (Phone, Tablet)
Consumer (Cool, quiet, enough to play modern games at 720p)
Enthusiast/Professional/Server (Fast, expensive, top of the line support and warranty. No integrated graphics, or if so, very basic.)

These would all be on the x86/ARM shared socket. For graphics I would assume the same.
Embedded/Mobile (Graphics with Passive Cooling)
Consumer (Cool, quiet, enough to play games at 1080p @ 60 fps or better)
Enthusiast (Fast, expensive, top of the line support and warranty. Able to play with 4k resolution @ 30fps or better.)

Of those three, there will be three variants, all placed by TDP:
- Low power, 50% less than balanced. Model number ends with M, comes with low profile cooler
- Balanced, 50% less than high power. Model number ends with nothing, comes with standard cooler
- High Power, guaranteed performance. Model number ends with X, comes with a nice cooler (think triple fans or water cooled)
(bonus, once a year or two release a super high performance card like the 290x2)

So that's what I would do. People building HTPCs would go for the low power models, 50% of everyone would get the standard version, the rest would go for the top of the line high power ones.

Right now, AMD is best at being the best price/performance, but we all know that's a race to the bottom. Hopefully they get up and running good soon.

The problem with your big plan here is you think AMD is capable of competing in these markets. They simply cannot and are only getting worse.

[MartinN]

Hopefully Intel picks the Linux devs to be fired from AMD, if any.

One can definitely fire devs, particularly those who can't earn their keep...but if that took on any larger scale, there will not be any AMD left. No devs, no AMD. So it's safe to assume they will cut everywhere else first before they lay off even a sub-par dev. Oh and I've also heard that AMD exists only because Intel lets it (although this is straight from the mouth of an Intel employee, who is a dev).

[Luke_Wolf]

Oh and I've also heard that AMD exists only because Intel lets it (although this is straight from the mouth of an Intel employee, who is a dev).

By which he meant:
If we completely banned OEMs from using AMD parts through strongarm tactics instead of just using said tactics to force them to use mostly Intel parts and to only produce subpar AMD machines the FTC and EU would bring the hammer down on us.

[bridgman]

I really don't care about CPU speed that much these days. I would totally buy an AMD laptop if it could have the same screen and weight as my Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus.

You can buy an ATIV Book 9 with AMD APU, thought it was same form factor as the Plus:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/pcs/NP915S3G-K02US

[MartinN]

By which he meant:
If we completely banned OEMs from using AMD parts through strongarm tactics instead of just using said tactics to force them to use mostly Intel parts and to only produce subpar AMD machines the FTC and EU would bring the hammer down on us.

way you put it, sounds like amd and intel are in a dysfunctional marriage ... for a very long time.

[dungeon]

You can buy an ATIV Book 9 with AMD APU, thought it was same form factor as the Plus:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/pcs/NP915S3G-K02US

I think dbont want one with 3200x1800 screen that one is 1366x768

[Luke_Wolf]

way you put it, sounds like amd and intel are in a dysfunctional marriage ... for a very long time.

The problem is Intel is not a very nice company at all, x86 CPUs are currently a duopoly because Intel was able to force everyone but VIA and AMD out of the market through the use of patents. VIA because they won the lawsuit against Intel due to their reverse engineering techniques, and AMD because IBM demanded it, and then later through today because the FTC and EU would have an absolute field day if they didn't let AMD in the market.

However that doesn't mean that Intel hasn't been slanting things in their direction and making under the table deals with OEMs in order to solidify their position. In fact Intel has been found guilty in multiple anti-trust suits and I for one have no reason to believe that they've mended their ways as opposed to changed them to get around the FTC regulators. Much like when the payday loan places here were shut down by law they all turned into title loan places.

[user82]

I hate AMD radeon driver support. I hope they go under. Or at least the GPU division.

Good luck paying $600 for an entry level Nvidia card in that case and waiting 10 years until some other vendor catches up.

[stevenc]

When can we start 3D-printing our own hardware?

Or, maybe there's enough scrap hardware in the world that would be just fine if only the software became more efficient.

[torsionbar28]

Uh, no. FX 8350 <> i7 2600k. Once you hit the 3770k, performance is pretty much always in Intels favor. Heck, we still see plenty of benchmarks where the i3 3220 matches the 8350, and that's just sad.

Oh you're talking desktop peecee chips. That's not so relevant these days. Compare Xeon and Opteron price/performance and see who the clear winner is. Hint: not intel. You can buy a pretty decent used car for the price of a high end Xeon chip - i.e. not a good value.

Not to mention that i3 does not even have AES-NI instruction set. Full disk encryption is so slow it's unusable on an i3. Even AMD's cheapest bottom of the barrel chips do AES acceleration.

* in heavily multi-threaded benchmarks

Yes, in workstation and server workloads. Desktop peecee's are largely irrelevant these days, outside of the l33t peecee gamer living in his parents basement crowd.