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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Advanced Micro Devices [wikipedia.org] (AMD) has posted another quarter of disappointing financial results [anandtech.com]:

The Computing and Graphics segment continues to struggle, although AMD did see stronger sequential growth here with the recent launch of Carrizo. Revenue increased 12% over last quarter, although it is still down 46% year-over-year. This segment had an operating loss of $181 million for the quarter, up from a loss of $147 million last quarter and a loss of $17 million a year ago. Sequentially, the loss is mostly attributed to a write-down of $65 million which AMD is taking on older-generation products. Annually, the decrease is due to lower overall sales. Unlike Intel, AMD processors had a decrease in Average Selling Price (ASP) both sequentially and year-over-year, so there was no help there from the lower sales volume. The GPU ASP was a different story, staying flat sequentially and increasing year-over-year. Recent launches of new AMD graphics cards have helped here.

Alongside the Q3 2015 earnings release, AMD has announced that it is selling an 85% stake in its back-end manufacturing operations [anandtech.com]. ATMP, "for assembly, test, mark, and pack," is the step in semiconductor manufacturing that takes a finished wafer of chips and cuts them up into individual chips for customer use. AMD retained these operations even after the spin-off of chip fabrication in the form of GlobalFoundries in 2009. Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics (NFME) will pay AMD $371 million ($320 million after taxes and expenses), and operate a joint venture to produce chips:

As for the joint venture itself, this gives NFME the ability to further expand into the market for semiconductor assembly and test services (SATS). With AMD's lower product volumes no doubt making it harder to fully utilize their high-volume AMTP facilities, a joint venture with NFME can bring more work into those facilities by having them work for additional customers beyond AMD. Furthermore NVME also gains the R&D experience that comes with AMD's AMTP operations, which for them is a competitive advantage against other 3rd party SATS providers.

The news comes just days after AMD "Corporate Fellow" Phil Rogers departed for competitor NVIDIA [anandtech.com] after working at ATI and AMD for 21 years:

As one of AMD's high-ranking technology & engineering corporate fellows, Rogers' held an important position at AMD. For the last several years, Rogers has been responsible for helping to develop the software ecosystem behind AMD's heterogeneous computing products and the Heterogeneous System Architecture. As a result, Rogers has straddled the line as a public figure for AMD; in his position at AMD Rogers was very active on the software development and evangelism side, frequently presenting the latest HSA tech and announcements for AMD [anandtech.com] at keynotes and conferences.

[...] Meanwhile of equal interest is where Rogers has landed: AMD's arch-rival NVIDIA. According to his LinkedIn profile Phil Rogers is now NVIDIA's "Chief Software Architect – Compute Server" a position that sounds very similar to what he was doing over at AMD. NVIDIA is not a member of the HSA Foundation, but they are currently gearing up for the launch of the Pascal GPU family, which has some features that overlap well with Phil Rogers' expertise. Pascal's NVLink CPU & GPU interconnect would allow tightly coupled heterogonous computing similar to what AMD has been working on, so for NVIDIA to bring over a heterogeneous compute specialist makes a great deal of sense for the company. And similarly for Rogers, in leaving AMD, NVIDIA is the most logical place for him to go.

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