AMD loosing money, uncertain free software development funding?

[bridgman]

The costs are lower for an open source approach (although the difference are less than you might expect if you include the time of all the senior technical folks that need to be involved in reviews), but the financial risks are higher.

The problem is that for some markets you need the closed source driver *anyways*, so supporting open source development ends up as an additional cost, not a savings.

[pedepy]

maybe i'm missing something here but .. is releasing technical specifications and working collaboratively with the open source community not cheaper than hiring extra staff to work extra hours on developing a closed sourced solution behind closed doors ?

[rbmorse]

Stock is up about 1/3 over last year, too (yea! another $25/share and I'll be even).

I did my part...I bought a Sapphire HD 5850 card. I'm hopeful the vendor (Amazon/Tiger Direct) will actually get stock and ship it to me, someday.

[pvtcupcakes]

And I did my part! First my current A770 based board, then only a few month ago my PhenomII 955... yeah!

Did my part too by buying the super cheap Athlon II X4 620 ($99) on Saturday.

Oh, and I bought a motherboard with that with an AMD chipset which will have my 4850 hooked up to it.

[energyman]

Glofo got a nice deal with ARM, Apple is buying massive amounts of 48XX cards. And when you can pay of 130m debt paying 50m then you are doing something right Future is not that bleak. They are the only ones selling Dx11 hw at the moment and AMD server cpus are doing pretty well.

[Veerappan]

Not only is AMD paying back debt, which is leading to lower overall numbers, but there's also the fact that they're combining design and manufacturing numbers for both AMD and Global Foundries.

AMD/ATI made money in the product design business, but Global Foundries operated at a net loss for the quarter. The good thing about that is that Global Foundries is able to pick up future contracts from outside customers to manufacture stuff other than AMD CPUs, which means better fab utilization for Global, and hopefully more revenues/profit. And I guess it wouldn't be impossible to imagine the ATI division transferring some of its own manufacturing from TSMC to Global's bulk silicon process once its up and running.

Yes, it will possibly require some redesign if they do this with an existing chip, but if they start designing their next architecture with manufacturing at Global Foundries in mind, it might be feasible. Keeps more of the money in house that way at least, instead of giving it to TSMC...

I'm not sure who's going to use the Global Foundries SOI process in the near future (besides AMD of course). It's not that it can't be done, but it seems as if most people design with bulk processes in mind, not SOI, and those that do already have their own manufacturing facilities. Anyone who knows more about this can feel free to correct me, I'm just going off what I remember from various tech sites detailing the Global Foundries spin-off and subsequent announcements.

[energyman]

oh - and whoever is responsible for the pm features in Phenom2 - I want to shake their hands. With my old X2 6000 I had to set 'performance' before starting a game or it would suck. With the Phenom I don't need to anymore. The differences are too small. So f* yeah! And despite the fact that both have the same TDP the Phenom 2 runs cooler even under load, so triple F* yeah!

[energyman]

And I did my part! First my current A770 based board, then only a few month ago my PhenomII 955... yeah!

[tmpdir]

Dudes nice try, but come on... also read the stuff below the headlines.

My money is on bridg

[joshuapurcell]

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091015-716579.html

AMD actually did better than expected in their recent earnings. I'm glad to see this company doing well if these latest earnings are an indication of a future trend. That means there will continue to be a strong competitor to Intel, which is good for everyone, including Intel fanboys, because it means more choices for the consumer and less cost.