How bad of shape is AMD really in?

[TechFan@ic]

I think AMD needs a new CEO...

The last thing AMD needs right now is another change in management. Lisa Su is impeccably qualified to lead AMD to long term success.

[s3ns3]

The last thing AMD needs right now is another change in management. Lisa Su is impeccably qualified to lead AMD to long term success.

Lisa Su is focusing on mobile stuff....

[slightlyjaded]

AMD doing badly... Yes. with a caveat. The agreement that will see consoles selling in china next year. All those AMD chips shipping to the nation with the largest customer base on earth.

AMD has issues, and samsung with their manufacturing technology might be the answer to get one architecture generation behind intel (think intel is at 14nm, and samsung is 17nm, don't quote me) AMD betting on the right 3D architecture over nividea might also give it a growth spurt next year. (I know the 390 is supposed to be using it, but I can't really see all the bugs being worked out, and while it might beat the 980, even be a competitor for the titan, I can't see it matching the power figures of maxwell, with current AMD architecture).

 

A merger with samsung could be the key to an AMD revival if done right. I hope it is, because the current intel/nividea landscape isn't good for the consumer.

[TechFan@ic]

Lisa Su is focusing on mobile stuff....

Actually she's not. All the Carrizo and Godaveri stuff was conceived under Rory Read not her. A CEO can't just suddenly make a product and release it, that's not how the semiconductor industry works. Any product plans that are put in motion now will only bare fruit multiple years from now.

What Su can and has done is finance the 8 core Zen CPU die design.

[harrynowl]

I think AMD needs a new CEO...

They only recently changed all of this, they've gone through multiple CEOs since 2010

 

I think their current CEI Lisa Su has the potential to bring them back as she's willing to make the necessary decisions (e.g. getting rid of their failing teams to replace them).

[lingle98]

I wouldn't say they are on the brink of failure, but they can't really afford another flop like the FX lineup. Their GPU sector could probably be its own company and be perfectly fine (it used to be).

Flop? I just bought an FX-8350. Is it really going to be bad?

[lingle98]

Flop? I just bought an FX-8350. Is it really going to be bad?

[Sauron]

Flop? I just bought an FX-8350. Is it really going to be bad?

 

It depends what you'll do with it. I was referring more to the sales flop. AMD FX cpus don't sell nearly as well as their intel counterparts. Mainly because they aren't as good in most games and a lot of consumer programs don't properly take advantage of extra cores. In an ideal world an FX 8350 should slightly outperform an i5 4690k in almost everything. In reality stuff simply isn't optimized well. That doesn't mean you'll get a bad experience, you'll probably hardly even notice. But, if you want every last bit of gaming performance intel is the way to go. If instead you're more interested in rendering and multitasking, the FX will be great.

[KeltonDSMer]

I think AMD needs a new CEO...

 

Dr. Su has incredible qualifications for the position:

 

Dr. Lisa Su is AMD’s president and chief executive officer and also serves on the company’s board of directors. Previously, she was chief operating officer responsible for integrating AMD’s business units, sales, global operations and infrastructure enablement teams into a single market-facing organization responsible for all aspects of product strategy and execution. Dr. Su joined AMD in January 2012 as senior vice president and general manager, global business units and was responsible for driving end-to-end business execution of AMD’s products and solutions.

Prior to joining AMD, Dr. Su served as senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Multimedia at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., and was responsible for global strategy, marketing and engineering for the company’s embedded communications and applications processor business. Dr. Su joined Freescale in 2007 as chief technology officer, where she led the company’s technology roadmap and research and development efforts.

Dr. Su spent the previous 13 years at IBM in various engineering and business leadership positions, including vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center responsible for the strategic direction of IBM’s silicon technologies, joint development alliances and semiconductor R&D operations. Prior to IBM, she was a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments in the Semiconductor Process and Device Center (SPDC).

Dr. Su has bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has published more than 40 technical articles and was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) in 2009. Dr. Su was named “2014 Executive of the Year” at the EETimes and EDN 2014 ACE Awards and was honored in MIT Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators in 2002. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Analog Devices.

 

"Dr. Su spent the previous 13 years at IBM in various engineering and business leadership positions, including vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center"

 

"Dr. Su has bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has published more than 40 technical articles and was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers"

 

What could possibly make someone else more qualified to be AMD's CEO?

[Shotgun]

Not exactly dying but in a bad shape specially with those cpu's.

[slightlyjaded]

 

What could possibly make someone else more qualified to be AMD's CEO?

 

A degree in business management..... Not bagging her. She's pretty brilliant, but a CEO post is a business decision as much as a figurehead. The people successful at that level of the stratosphere tend to have a background in business, or they stumbled into it when the industry was more forgiving, and learnt on the way up. a certain level of technical expertise is always a positive, and if she can parly that into the time she needs to develop other skills (or is she's managed to do so in her previous postings) She'll do well.

[othertomperson]

They still own the worlds fastest dual GPU, the 295x2.

 

Only with their stock cooling. Under water the Titan Z wins.

 

And my main issue with the price to performance argument is that most of AMD's CPUs and GPUs are approaching their third year now. I'm pretty sure you could get a GTX 580 or 660 Ti pretty cheaply. That's essentially what you're doing when you buy a 280X anyway. Nvidia blew price to performance away with the GTX 970, but more generally Nvidia are more expensive because you're actually buying a current gen product (bar specific exceptions like the GTX 770, and their extreme low end products).

 

As for leadership, I'm all for letting Su do her job for a little while before calling on her to go. A revolving door of CEOs is disastrous to the stability of AMD, and more than anything she seems to be the first voice arguing for a return to form as far as mid to high end processors go. If Zen ends up being anything like what she's said it will be, AMD CPUs will be worth buying again, it's as simple as that.

[ManWithBeard1990]

I'm a bit worried about them putting a lot of their eggs in the basket that is HSA, a standard that Intel, so far, has chosen to ignore and for good reason: If they don't support it with their CPUs and compilers the adoption will probably remain quite low, denying AMD the return on their investment in the technology on the desktop market. It's a dick move but I'm sure that's the reason.

[slightlyjaded]

I'm a bit worried about them putting a lot of their eggs in the basket that is HSA, a standard that Intel, so far, has chosen to ignore and for good reason: If they don't support it with their CPUs and compilers the adoption will probably remain quite low, denying AMD the return on their investment in the technology on the desktop market. It's a dick move but I'm sure that's the reason.

Intels going to be stuck soon. Nividea's alternative failed spectacularly. They've switched to HSA as well. If the only two players in the graphics hardware environment are using the same tech, intel will have to follow suite. The only question is how long they will delay it.

 

EDIT: my apologies, couldn't remember the acronym. Nividea's 3d architecture failed miserably. AMD's was a little more primitive, but works. It's a little bit of an equalizer, and intel will have no choice but to support it.

[KeltonDSMer]

A degree in business management..... Not bagging her. She's pretty brilliant, but a CEO post is a business decision as much as a figurehead. The people successful at that level of the stratosphere tend to have a background in business, or they stumbled into it when the industry was more forgiving, and learnt on the way up. a certain level of technical expertise is always a positive, and if she can parly that into the time she needs to develop other skills (or is she's managed to do so in her previous postings) She'll do well.

 

Well that's why I put the whole bio in the spoiler. She does have vast business/marketing experience:

 

"Prior to joining AMD, Dr. Su served as senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Multimedia at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., and was responsible for global strategy, marketing and engineering for the company’s embedded communications and applications processor business. Dr. Su joined Freescale in 2007 as chief technology officer, where she led the company’s technology roadmap and research and development efforts."

 

"Dr. Lisa Su is AMD’s president and chief executive officer and also serves on the company’s board of directors. Previously, she was chief operating officer responsible for integrating AMD’s business units, sales, global operations and infrastructure enablement teams into a single market-facing organization responsible for all aspects of product strategy and execution. Dr. Su joined AMD in January 2012 as senior vice president and general manager, global business units and was responsible for driving end-to-end business execution of AMD’s products and solutions."

 

I'm not claiming she is the saving grace for AMD or what not, but that she has well suited qualifications for the job compared to her predecessors. R.R. for example helped Lenovo turn around, but Lenovo is not a chip designer. What good is a CEO if he/she doesn't even understand the company's products on a technical level? Dr. Su is even a talented speaker and shows a sense of excitement about what the company does; I personally really enjoyed watching her interviews.

 

I don't disagree that a CEO requires more than an engineering background to be successful. I believe her positions prior to becoming CEO gave her that background.

[8uhbbhu8]

If Jim Keller can pull some crazy trick out of his bag and create a whole new architecture as amazing and powerful as is needed to finally bring AMD back in the CPUgame it would be really nice. The problem I see is that if they decide to put there focus on APUs and not high end powerful CPUs it could back fire on them. That is unless there APUs are somehow so incredibly  powerful that they can actually compete GHz for GHz and core for core with intel or said APUs have some sort of function that would greatly boost the performance of there GPUs like a processing splitter lets unused said APU cores to augment one of there separate GPUs if installed. That or they need to reinvent the cpu or gpu game entirely.

[Fgtfv567]

They only recently changed all of this, they've gone through multiple CEOs since 2010

 

I think their current CEI Lisa Su has the potential to bring them back as she's willing to make the necessary decisions (e.g. getting rid of their failing teams to replace them).

 

 

Dr. Su has incredible qualifications for the position:

 

Dr. Lisa Su is AMD’s president and chief executive officer and also serves on the company’s board of directors. Previously, she was chief operating officer responsible for integrating AMD’s business units, sales, global operations and infrastructure enablement teams into a single market-facing organization responsible for all aspects of product strategy and execution. Dr. Su joined AMD in January 2012 as senior vice president and general manager, global business units and was responsible for driving end-to-end business execution of AMD’s products and solutions.

Prior to joining AMD, Dr. Su served as senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Multimedia at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., and was responsible for global strategy, marketing and engineering for the company’s embedded communications and applications processor business. Dr. Su joined Freescale in 2007 as chief technology officer, where she led the company’s technology roadmap and research and development efforts.

Dr. Su spent the previous 13 years at IBM in various engineering and business leadership positions, including vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center responsible for the strategic direction of IBM’s silicon technologies, joint development alliances and semiconductor R&D operations. Prior to IBM, she was a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments in the Semiconductor Process and Device Center (SPDC).

Dr. Su has bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has published more than 40 technical articles and was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) in 2009. Dr. Su was named “2014 Executive of the Year” at the EETimes and EDN 2014 ACE Awards and was honored in MIT Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators in 2002. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Analog Devices.

 

"Dr. Su spent the previous 13 years at IBM in various engineering and business leadership positions, including vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center"

 

"Dr. Su has bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has published more than 40 technical articles and was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers"

 

What could possibly make someone else more qualified to be AMD's CEO?

Ok, I didn't know they already swapped out CEOs. But they still need to step up their CPU game BADLY

[harrynowl]

Ok, I didn't know they already swapped out CEOs. But they still need to step up their CPU game BADLY

That's what Zen is. I hope. Either way a new design is a step in the right direction.

 

I'd rather them take their time than bring a rushed architecture out anyway

[theelitegamer]

AMD can't die. Look at it like McDonalds vs BK, they hate each other but can't live without each other. 

[Cyberspanner]

there ok as far as GPU's go but they just need a CPU boost but Im still not giving up on my AMD system as future gen gaming seems to like the extra cores so im excited to see if AMD will come out with a new cpu with lots of cores to a custom this or will they lag behind and keep going with the FX's which arnt bad which I have in my system but the i5's are running away with the money bag.

[Mushious]

there ok as far as GPU's go but they just need a CPU boost but Im still not giving up on my AMD system as future gen gaming seems to like the extra cores so im excited to see if AMD will come out with a new cpu with lots of cores to a custom this or will they lag behind and keep going with the FX's which arnt bad which I have in my system but the i5's are running away with the money bag.

 

More cores does not mean better. They could release a 16 core chip that still gets stomped by a quad. They need to start producing stronger cores instead of taking the more is better approach.

[Cyberspanner]

More cores does not mean better. They could release a 16 core chip that still gets stomped by a quad. They need to start producing stronger cores instead of taking the more is better approach.

For now but some games are benefiting more of the more cores so for now its still Faster cores but we dont know yet

[Mushious]

For now but some games are benefiting more of the more cores so for now its still Faster cores but we dont know yet

 

Name said games that run better on more weaker cores than a few strong ones.

[FuzzyYellow]

Well, if rumors prove to be true and the 390x is faster than the Titan x, Amd could be in a really good spot.

[swifty7]

all of you making fun of AMD won't be laughing much longer when dx12 flips the table on intel...LOL!!

 

that's what AMD is hoping for and when Zen comes out, it will be the icing on the cake.

 

Also, I truly hope the rumors of AMD 300 series beating Titan X are true which will force Nvdia to release Pascal a lot sooner.