How bad of shape is AMD really in?

[Opcode]

AMD will never die. They will be bought out long before they close their doors. They have been making positive revenue for the past several years so the company is doing very good actually. They have a multiple billion dollar contract that will dig them out of their debt hole. They hope to return to a profitable company by 2020.

[BlazingGunnerFTW]

I see the 3xx series being a success, and the planned Zen architecture being competetive to Intel. AMD needs to get out of dominance of mid range and low end, but to reach out to enthusiasts and high end users. If they do the practice that intel does (simular or lower cost per new gen cpu), I could see Intel being in huge trouble. When AMD pushes another architecture for GPU's, this could devastate NVIDIA. If they get bought by samsung, it could cause problems as they are mainly focused on mobile competicity, not deliviering desktop preformance. So it all depends if they push arcitectural changes to the CPU and GPU. If they bail, they will fail.

[Briggsy]

Until this whole Samsung story I just assumed they were well off without a problem. Then I was doing research on Zen and everyone on the internet is acting like if Zen doesn't deliever, AMD will die. Are they really in that bad of shape?

The fact that their processors are in just about every low end PC on the market, PS4, and Xbox ONE makes it seem like they would be doing pretty good. Are they really dying?

 

AMD are fine. The company are 40+ years old with a metric butt tonne of patents and copyrights, with funds spread out everywhere. Right now they are making big moves internally, which costs money. Worst case scenario would be a company buying them. The rumours swirling around Samsung buying out AMD are mostly to do with the HSA Foundation that AMD started, and Samsung's heavy involvement within the foundation (among other companies that are contributing as well). It's entirely possible that AMD are licensing out technology to Samsung, and people are seeing the movement of money as a sign of preliminary acquisition deals. 

[LAwLz]

AMD will never die. They will be bought out long before they close their doors. They have been making positive revenue for the past several years so the company is doing very good actually. They have a multiple billion dollar contract that will dig them out of their debt hole. They hope to return to a profitable company by 2020.

Well, it's impossible for a company to make negative revenue so that's not a surprise... What really matters is net profit.

Revenue = How much money the company has received.

Net profit = revenue minus expenses like salary, marketing and so on.

 

In that area AMD is doing pretty poorly. They are basically breaking even at this point. The times they do make a profit they are counted in single or low double digit millions. Nvidia are counting their net profits in triple digit millions and Intel are counting their net profits in billions.

They could benefit greatly (economically and R&D wise) from being acquired by for example Samsung.

 

With that being said, they won't go under if Zen is a flop. I mean, they have already survived the disaster that was Bulldozer.

[Shadyss]

As the title says;

 

What happened to AMD making processors? Intel is like monopolizing the CPU market imo.

 

I mean their FX series are like 2 years old now, maybe I just haven't seen anything?

 

I'd like some competition between AMD and Intel so we can have some good prices on electronics.

[thekeemo]

because they decided APUs are the future

[SImoHayha]

When they start getting their heads out of the ground and wake up that having more CORES is not as important compared to the IPC

[gilm0re3]

As of right now they've been putting all their time and money into actually some pretty decent apu's. Maybe they have a super amazingballs enthusiast class cpu up their sleeve coming out in a year or two, and right now they're just biding their time. That would actually be kinda interesting

[gilm0re3]

When they start getting their heads out of the ground and wake up that having more CORES is not as important compared to the IPC

 

[techguru]

LMFAO

[TechFan@ic]

The answer to that deserves its own editorial. Maybe I'll write one some day.

But here's what happened in a nutshell. 2002 Jerry Sanders founder of AMD decided to retire after achieving the goal that everyone else believed impossible for decades. Beating Intel at their own game. At the time AMD was making record profit and revenue, thier CPUs were both faster and more efficient than their Intel counterparts and in two short years AMD controlled up to 50% market share in the x86 CPU business.

Hector Ruiz succeed Jerry as President and CEO. Ruiz decided that AMD should now involve itself in the graphics business. AMD began negotiating an acquisition between Nvidia and ATi. It was later decided that ATi should be acquired. AMD vastly overpayed for the acquisition. ATi was finally acquired for 6 Billion dollars in 2006, nearly what AMD is worth today.

Overbidding on ATi quickly began to show its financial effect on AMD, the company began to lose the momentum it once had. 1 billion dollar profits every year turned into 1 billion dollar losses.
Ruiz then decided to sell AMD's manufacturing to save the day, in 2008 AMD's manufacturing was spun off as Globalfoundries. Hector Ruiz was then quickly dispensed with after allegations of insider trading and after destroying what Jerry worked so hard to achieve in over three decades.

Dirk Meyer was hired to replace Ruiz. Meyer was a brilliant engineer and one of the two AMD engineering legends, the other being Jim Keller. Together with Keller, Myer contrived AMD's most successful CPU architectures in recent history, the original Athlon and the Athlon64. Under Meyer as CEO two CPU architectures were designed and introduced. A low power core code named Bobcat which was a resounding success and a high performance core code named Bulldozer which turned out to be a major flop.

Unfortunately the board of directors saw that Bulldozer flop as Meyer's fault. They pressured him to invade the mobile space with haste to redeem what they saw as his mistake. He however disagreed. He believed that AMD should first regain the strong foothold it once held against Intel in the market that AMD knows best, before attempting to break through an even tougher market that AMD had no previous experience in and a market that's controlled by multiple competitors just as strong as Intel. This disagreement spilled over to a disaster and Myer left in January of 2011.

8 months passed with no CEO leading AMD. Finally Rory Read was brought in by the board. He was seen as the hero that will resurrect AMD just as he helped Lenovo climb to the top. While Read was a brilliant manager he unfortunately had no prior experience in semiconductors. He was responsible for cancelling AMD's high performance CPU only designs. But he did bring Mark Papermaster on board as the Chief Technology Officer. Who by some miracle convinced Jim Keller to rejoin AMD and he's been designing AMD's future CPU architecture ever since.

The new CPU core will allegedly debut next year. AMD's long term x86 success relies entirely on this new core, code named Zen. So here's hoping for the best.

[crystal6tak]

Nothing they had after Phenoms could compete with Intel in the CPU department.

 

However, during 2016, AMD is releasing CPU codenamed "Zen" which will supposingly bring back competition.

[Uphorics]

LOL

 

"MORE CORES MEANS BETTER"

 

Edit: In all seriousness, AMD just doesn't have nearly as much money to spend on R&D compared to Intel.

[Megahurt]

They went on the wrong direction with the FX CPUs, they even admitted it, now they need to developp a new one almost from scratch, and that takes time. Intel just improves on theirs since sandy bridge.

[Aniallation]

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/337191-interesting-find/

[Kermit]

or AMD with an LGA socket? whaaaaaaat?

[Embattled]

In terms of CPU if they don't catch up with their next gen then Intel probably has too much of an advantage in the high end desktop space for AMD to keep pace. Mobile might be AMDs refuge in that case. In terms of GPUs, AMD and NVidia are still trading blows no matter what fanboys either side might tell you. If the 300 series is as good as the rumours right now, AMD might put up a serious fight to NVidia in the GPU space.

I'm praying really hard tho that they can finally fix their driver mess. I just got a 290x for my new build and so far I'm loving it but what really kills me is the mess of CC and their drivers in general. AMD might be the price/performance king, but if their software and optimization game doesn't improve I might go with NVIDIA for my next build. Plus they kill AMD in other software like shadowplay and gamestream.  Heat is an actual issue too, MSI's Twin Frozer II can barely keep the temps in check so I'm forgetting about getting any meaningful OC on it.

 

But other than that, heck no, AMD is not dying anytime soon. Despite me panning them a fair bit right now I like their philosophy a lot more than NVIDIA or Intel. If Zen manages to keep up reasonably to Intel and they are all unlocked like the FX line(loved that) then I'm sure that would get them back into the desktop market. 

[Fgtfv567]

They've not really made money since like 2010.

They overpaid for ATi.

They spent loads of money making a new architecture.

They are making very little money on their graphics cards, but they are selling well.

So unless Zen is a big success I see AMD being bought out by another silicone semiconductor manufacturer.

I think AMD needs a new CEO...

[KemoKa]

AMD isn't going anywhere, though they really need to get their act together on the CPU side of things, because this next CPU lineup, if it fails, will not totally kill them, but it will be a rather crippling blow. I have high hopes for the Zen architecture. I want it to be then next Athlon X2, but I just don't know yet. All I'm saying is that they've had so much R&D time to redeem themselves from the horror that is the FX lineup, and it had better not be for nothing, given that i) they're taking an entire extra year to make the chip, and ii) one hyperthreaded Haswell core beats a couple of Piledriver cores.

As soon as Zen comes out, Bulldozer and Piledriver must be disposed of, because they are just embarrassing at this point.

[chamath]

AMD GPUs are giving good competition to Nvidia. But they should pay more attention to Processors. Intel is way ahead of them.

[airdeano]

question then, is the new ZEN architecture more of a consumer platform or

enthusiast platform? consumers really don't care about speed, gigaflops,

and DDR4 they want the life-like experience, but don't really want to spend

big money for it; on the other hand, enthusiasts will pay more to get more,

but there are less enthusiasts than consumers.

[kraken]

I can't really guess but even after the release of gtx 9xx series and titan x AMD hasn't responded with their gpu's. That must mean something

[Dabombinable]

AMD will be just fine as long as the keep getting bailed out of trouble.

[s3ns3]

http://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-attempts-to-buy-amd-speculation-discussion/

 

''AMD stopped actual fabrication in 2009 as it had to sell its production factories, which meant that what was once a giant of innovation had to cease their integrated production process. It is said that at this point, Intel keeps AMD afloat instead of killing them off simply to not be deemed a practical monopoly in the business. Regardless, Intel’s usual share of around 85 percent of shipped desktop chips and more for laptops shows that they are, indeed, the leading company with quite a hold. Last year AMD had to cut 7% of its workforce as Intel had close to 95% of the revenue in the game for the second quarter. If AMD does too poorly, Intel eases up to allow them to continue in the business. They catch a break every now and then (they even got inside the most popular gaming consoles in the latest generation), but ultimately they have been in a bleak position.

Despite their competitive performance:price ratios, AMD is object of market predation and is seemingly kept alive for Intel’s own benefits, and to create the illusion of competition''

 

so amd is there just to create the illusion of competition?

[Dabombinable]

http://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-attempts-to-buy-amd-speculation-discussion/

 

''AMD stopped actual fabrication in 2009 as it had to sell its production factories, which meant that what was once a giant of innovation had to cease their integrated production process. It is said that at this point, Intel keeps AMD afloat instead of killing them off simply to not be deemed a practical monopoly in the business. Regardless, Intel’s usual share of around 85 percent of shipped desktop chips and more for laptops shows that they are, indeed, the leading company with quite a hold. Last year AMD had to cut 7% of its workforce as Intel had close to 95% of the revenue in the game for the second quarter. If AMD does too poorly, Intel eases up to allow them to continue in the business. They catch a break every now and then (they even got inside the most popular gaming consoles in the latest generation), but ultimately they have been in a bleak position.

Despite their competitive performance:price ratios, AMD is object of market predation and is seemingly kept alive for Intel’s own benefits, and to create the illusion of competition''

 

so amd is there just to create the illusion of competition?

Pretty much, Intel has a lot more financial backing than AMD does after all of the screw ups.