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posted by martyb on Saturday April 18 2015, @04:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the trying-to-turn-the-tide dept.

Two stories regarding chipmaker AMD in the news today. First, they missed their Q1 earnings target, after reporting losses of $180 million, or $0.23/share:

Revenue landed at $1.03 billion, down 26 percent on the year-ago quarter (statement) ...Non-GAAP earnings were a loss of 9 cents per share ...Wall Street was expecting a loss of 5 cents per share on revenue on $1.05 billion.

"Under the backdrop of a challenging PC environment, we are focused on improving our near-term financial results and delivering a stronger second half of the year based on completing our work to rebalance channel inventories and shipping strong new products," [said AMD chief executive Lisa Su].

Secondly, AMD is withdrawing from the high-density server business, reversing a strategy that began 3 years ago with the acquisition of SeaMicro:

AMD paid $334 million to buy SeaMicro, which developed a new type of high-density server aimed at large-scale cloud and Internet service providers ...The purchase was made under former CEO Rory Read, and has now been reversed by Lisa Su, who took over the CEO job last October ...AMD said the move is part of its effort to "simplify and sharpen" its investment focus. As a result, it is taking a charge of $75 million.

AMD still sees growth potential in the server market, but not from selling complete systems. It's returned its focus to x86 chips and to the development of its first ARM server processor, code-named Seattle.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:35PM (#172542)

    > whoever then made the decision to use the architecture line intended for server workloads in consumer CPUs really screwed up.

    Why is that? You state it like it's a given. But what does the typical consumer do with his desktop that is floating-point constrained? Maybe some filters in photoshop. But the typical workload is primarily integer - the vast majority of floats in games are on the GPU, web browsing is all integer, video decode/encode is handled by the GPU. I'm having a hard time coming up with a non-niche usage that is heavily dependent on floats. It isn't like we are all doing fluid-dynamics or signal processing.

  • (Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday April 19 2015, @04:03PM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Sunday April 19 2015, @04:03PM (#172857) Homepage Journal

    Check out this chart [cpubenchmark.net] showing AMD's market share since 2004 - the days of the old GHz races between Intel and AMD. There are three events whose dates are worth noting here. Firstly, Q2 2006 - Intel debuted the first Core architecture chips in mid-2006. Secondly, Q2 2011 - AMD debut the Bulldozer architecture with the release of the 8150. Thirdly, Q4 2012 - AMD debut the piledriver architecture with the release of the 8350.

    The first two dates are marked by a marked drop in AMD's market share. That's not even slightly surprising when benchmark reviews like this [bit-tech.net] all over the web show the new architecture, that AMD crowed would outperform the i7's by 50%, having it's butt kicked by them - even losing out to the Phenom II X6 it's supposed to succeed in some tests. The third date shows an uptick in AMD's market share, mainly because they launched the 8350 at a considerably lower price point than the 8150, effectively surrendering the high end of the market to Intel. Today? AMD have their lowest market share on record at 23%.

    The market spoke - specific usage cases not-withstanding, reviews showed Intel had the better chips and AMD overhyped Bulldozer, so people bought Intel. If that's not evidence of a mistake, I don't know what is.