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  • #11
    Originally posted by psycho_driver View Post
    Anyhoo, I wonder if these layoffs are going to affect their linux drivers? I would think the lowly engineers would be some of the first people to go, so long as management and marketing all get to keep their jobs.
    This is what I'm worried about too. The windows driver teams have hundreds of people on them from what we've heard, and the OSS developers are far fewer in number. It sucks for anyone to have to lose their job, but it would hurt the OSS dev group much more to lose someone (especiallly since I'm not sure that AMD even has 10 developers working on open-source drivers).

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    • #12
      Originally posted by deanjo View Post
      That is why a quick respin of a design they have been making for close to a decade now would be the way to go.
      Any company should advance or die. Bulldozer I don't think is a bad CPU, but they cannot just improve what they had. It simply worked slower than the competition. I do know a lot of apps running in multithreading, so if they would launch Bulldozer just the next year and to do just a shrink of Thurban X6, with higher frequencies maybe was a better idea. Yet people thought from Phenom times, that Phenom is slow. It is or is not, they could not get from Thurban like 20% performance boost (maybe just if they would add 2 extra cores), but even they would do it, going to an improved Bulldozer, will be still slower than the 32nm Thurban core.
      At the end, 2 years from now, would I buy a 8 core based Phenom II or a 12 core Bulldozer, I think that the answer is obvious. Application vendors got the message: either low end ARM, or high end highly threaded computers. In fact without Phenom I think there was not such of an urge to go that high threaded workloads.
      For 1 core usage, few applications will need it to a such a great extent. I don't buy Bulldozer right now as I have Desktop i7 and a SB laptop when AMD was not there, but today I would prefer the Bulldozer to a Sandy Bridge desktop comparable in the price I bought at that time the desktop (in fact there was a promotion to MediaMarkt for Intel Desktop so I got it for around 100 euros less than I would assemble an AMD system with similar specs). As for laptop, SB was that good, and it works that nice, AMD yet has no answer to it.

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      • #13
        With this many layoff's I'm really questioning their ability to make a quality product. As more people get laid off company moral really begins to go down the crapper. To bad I always liked AMD.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by deanjo View Post
          Not necessarily. Especially when those wafers can be put towards a smaller faster less complex configuration that yields more chips per wafer.
          Bah, on the GPU side AMD has hit the 2 Billion transitor mark in 2009. Last years model was 2.6, and this years model will probably be more . And they've been selling quite nicely on that side of the company.

          Some of the differences are that Bulldozer is the first CPU designed but manufactured by a 3rd party foundry (okay, maybe 2nd party - or maybe 1.5 party). ATI had been doing fabless work for quite some time and had moved from first silicon back to first customer ship in around 90-120 days for most of the flagship products in each generation.

          Matthew

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          • #15
            Originally posted by Veerappan View Post
            This is what I'm worried about too. The windows driver teams have hundreds of people on them from what we've heard, and the OSS developers are far fewer in number. It sucks for anyone to have to lose their job, but it would hurt the OSS dev group much more to lose someone (especiallly since I'm not sure that AMD even has 10 developers working on open-source drivers).
            AMD has four people working on their free Linux drivers, and I am unsure how many are working on the Linux Catalyst driver.

            However, I somehow doubt that they will be targeting the graphics team. I have no real knowledge to back this up, but even though they are now branded as "AMD Graphics", the graphics team as far as I can tell as an outside observer is still very much separate from the rest of AMD, being based in the GTA rather than Silicon Valley, focusing on different projects, and just being distinct from the rest.

            Considering it is not graphics that are lagging in sales (AMD and ATI cards still dominate a large chunk of high end and consumer level graphics) it is my impression (and hope) that it is not from there that they feel they need to make cuts. Obviously any cuts anywhere are sad and awful (I like AMD CPUs just as much as their GPUs), but I would rather have the FOSS drivers keep going strong.

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