I almost feel sorry for AMD. Like a red headed step child trying to hide the marks from the beatings it is taking at school. We know the game. The business culture accepts the risks of getting caught is far less costly than telling the truth. Someone is depositing a large check off investors.
Correct, AMD is the girl who cuts herself in the bathroom, not the redheaded stepchild, it's self inflicted. AMD is the girl who has bolemia. AMD is the skid row addict or the drunken alcoholic who won't stop ruining lives.
Now AMD has to deal with it's abusive siblings and parents, the beating is coming. Following that, expect more self inflicted wounds.
yea... it is kind of sad. imagine that the reason the r9 300 series of amd graphics chips is taking so long is that that desperately X desperately X desperatelyX10^desperately need that series of cards to do well up against nvidia for money.... their graphics division is the only thing making money!
I almost feel bad for the affluent and wealthy who have money to invest. If your money is that valuable to you, invest in yourself by starting a business of your own.
Yeah, this is too bad but it is reflective of the state of their technology vs. Intel and as a result their product. All AMD can do is ride this out until Zen gets things right for them or....... it doesn't as I don't think there will be any more chances to get it right after that.
You know, that's been the story ever since the first Phenoms came out, they weren't so great but they were good enough to ride until the Phenom II, and they were decent, at least vs a Core 2 Dual/Quad but not so great when they had to fare against the first i7, and then Bulldozer was the same story again. Each one of them was supposed to be amazing and great, but they have been ok at best. It's kinda sad because I definitely want to see AMD do well and bring the fight to Intel again, but it is pretty much apparent that that isnt going to happen again as AMD's focus is sort of in different markets than Intel these days. At least they are making their own ARM core... I have always said that the Atom was a stuuupid stuupid product, and Intel shouldn't have sold off their ARM core and kept developing that and sell it for cheap and I'm sure they would be a big player in the mobile space right now!
The horrible Eee PC was a huge hit in the market and then people realized that it was a piece of junk. The Eee PC was the tech world's equivalent of the Cabbage Patch doll. Most review sites, though, certainly didn't shy away from hyping them. Then, once their popularity dropped to nothing, they acted like netbooks weren't a great idea. Pairing the power sipping Atom with a ridiculously crappy GMA 900/950 that used like 3 times the power was something that should have gotten Intel, and Asus, laughed back to the drawing board. Then there was the 800 x 480 screen, 512 MB of RAM, 3 hour battery life, tiny keys, Xandros, and 4 GB storage.
That said, I got a Lenovo S-10 for a friend who wanted a cheap Mac laptop (Hacintoshed it) and it wasn't such a bad thing, despite the terrible color gamut netbooks had, and the extremely tiny trackpad.
Another funny story that Apple actually asked Intel to make chip for their first iPhone (Source: Otellini statement). I didn't know what happened but as the history dictates Apple went to ARM. By this story as well, if Intel had gone with Apple, the 'stupid product' atom could be powering every single phone out there. Maybe not all intel but everything could have been x86 platform. Everything would have different story.
I'm not sure what Intel would've used. Atom was still a year away, and even when it launched it was never intended for the smartphone form factor. It was too expensive, the TDP too high, and the platform too complex. But Atom was way more powerful than any mobile architecture targeting smartphones in 2008. That's probably why Apple didn't go with Intel, Intel didn't have anything compelling to offer at the time.
I believe it was an ARM chip Apple asked them to make. They didn't do it because they underestimated the number Apple would need, and thought Apple's costs were wrong. It turned out that Apple needed a lot more than Intel thought, and the costs were much less than Intel thought.
They've been paying for that mistake ever since. It would have been 300 million chips for Apple last year at an average of $20 per chip.
Intel couldn't provide them graphics nor were they flexible on letting Apple engineers build a more custom gpu. Same reason why the game consoles went to AMD instead.
Phenom and Phenom II were never meant to be amazing, they were the end of the line as far as the K8 architecture goes and considering that the Phenom II was pretty good.
Bulldozer was an ambitious start from scratch ground up redesign and yeah that was supposed to amaze and bring AMD on par with Intel though via a completely different approach. Instead of amaze it fell flat on its first outing and never really caught up, it only really ever got to "good" under ideal work loads. AMD was never going to catch up to Intel in pure CPU performance with Dozer tech, but they haven't left the performance market vacant, just stagnant.
Right now they starting over with Zen and I'm sure they will target as much of the high performance market as they can as that's where the margins are.
the problem with bulldozer and again with piledriver is they were hedging their bets on the market pushing for multithread. The prob is as it seems with AMD they pushed way too early. The I5 4 years later has only just caught up with the FX-8350 in multithread (comparing price point). Not saying the FX chips are better but they set out to do exactly what AMD intended and built very powerful multithreaded chip using a clustered multithread configuration. The problem is they are <20% of the market and they don't get to push what standards get adopted... Intel do. As a result hardly anyone programmed to match the multithread capabilities of the bulldozer/piledriver series as it was too hard to do so for the amount of people that used AMD chips at the time. Don't get me started on games as we all know why AMD aren't strong in most games. If you don't know its due to only supporting 1-4 threads meaning most games could only utilise less than half the processor. Morale of this story and with Piledriver and bulldozer is AMD read the market wrong. They produced a powerful chip that was ahead of its time that no one wanted to adopt because it was too hard for developers to program for little gain. The issue is they had to ride it out because they spent a lot of money developing a chip no one wanted on a platform that was already around for too long (AM3+). I moved from the 8350 to a 2600 (little bit slower in multithread but way faster in single thread and most games). The AMD is in my home server which it is fantastic in. Its a multithreaded environment and it loves it the Intel is in my gaming PC which is mostly a single threaded environment and it thrives in it. This is why AMD is starting with a new CPU design. They will go from clustered multithread to simultaneous multithread like Intels hyper threading. Anyhow my rant over. AMD's APUs for the record (both desktop and laptop) are brilliant.
That's just total crap. Piling the lipstick on the quad piglets with half siamese twin deformities on all them and calling it a great hog farm. AMD blew it, they couldn't even get their turbo working correctly, and right now the G3258, a $70 chip smokes them OC'ed for dirt cheap in all but a few cases. So desperate AMD was an is, that they took the 8350, OC'ed it to 220watts 300+ actual, and marketed it to fanboys for $900.00 released. At least the monster electric housefire 290x can, doubled up, and sometimes singly, be respectable and cannot be entirely discounted, because it actually performed without unrealized gimmicks and blaming everyone else, some industry, some "lack of multithreading realized by others doing coding" or some other pathetic excuse. Note - AMD actually tried to claim a profit from their discrete graphics division a couple quarters.
So, looks like AMD just cannot produce single thread performance, and you know what ? If they did, they could just add cores... and WIN.
Instead, that's what Intel did.
AMD failed, 20, 30, 100 cores won't do it, when 1 core can't hang.
If you compare the design goals of Intel Sandy Bridge (4 core) vs. AMD Bulldozer (4 module), we have:
1) AMD designed a 315mm^2 die containing 1200 million transistors, whereas Intel went with a smaller design (216mm^2, 995 million transistors, including an iGPU). So AMD is going for raw processing power whereas Intel is aiming for lower manufacturing costs.
2) AMD emphasized raw CPU power whereas Intel placed more emphasis on CPU power per watt (125W vs. 95W TDP).
3) Intel placed more emphasis on floating point performance than AMD.
4) Intel uses hyper-threading to get to 8 threads, whereas AMD has dedicated integer processing units for each thread. So the AMD is oriented towards work loads with 8 or more threads, whereas the Intel design will do relatively better on workloads with 4 or fewer threads.
So Bulldozer tends to be faster than Sandy Bridge on heavily threaded integer workloads, but that's because each of the four design goals listed above point in that direction. But if your needs differ in any way from the optimal target for Bulldozer--for example you want to run lots of threads doing floating point computation, or you don't care about floating point perfomance but your software only uses a few threads, or you are looking for an energy-efficient way to run lots of integer threads--Bulldozer's advantage disappears.
So the suit claims that AMD misrepresented Llano chips as being produced in high quantity than was reality, which then lead AMD producing too many chips, which then lead to the writedown. No maybe I'm missing something, but that seems that what is being claimed is that one thing lead to the exact opposite and opposing thing you would expect it to lead to.
It doesn't seem that consistent an argument really.
Also, it's shares. Value can go down as well as up. Anyone doing a bit of research into the market would have seen that Intel had a strong proposition at the time, and AMD was at the end of a product line and behind Intel technology-wise.
I'm not experienced in stocks but what I got from the article was that amd made it seem that they were able to produce more than they were capable at the time in order to draw investors. By the time they were able to produce the amount of chips they claimed they could, competitors already had a steady hold on the market and in order to keep their chips competitive amd had to reduce the prices of them, lowering the value of the company and thus the investors' stocks - had they known amd's chip production wasn't as profound as amd stated they likely wouldn't have made the investment in the first place. I could easily be reading this the wrong way but that's just what I got from it
This is just a case of incomplete reporting, from the actual transcripts and original stories on the lawsuits it goes like this:
AMD and most of their executives of the time (including former CEO Read and CFO Seifert ) are on record in conf calls to shareholders saying that Llano *DEMAND* was impossible to meet due to overwhelming response from the channel/market. They did cite some production issues, but the key was that they misrepresented *DEMAND* of the Llano APU, leading investors to believe these things were flying off the shelves and as soon as production ramped, there would be a significant spike in AMD's revenues/profits. Indeed, there was press coverage of this that gave AMD shareholders and supports alike hope that they may have turned the corner and that the APU was a successful venture for AMD. Given they paid so dearly for ATI, that was the hope, anyways.
However, once manufacturing/supply issues were sorted out, the reality was that there was very LITTLE DEMAND for the chip, leading to huge inventory surplus and ultimately, the write downs detailed in the article above. Llano chips were probably put into the same landfill as Atari's ET game because there was no demand for these chips and AMD quickly replaced it with Trinity shortly afterwards.
Also I should add, I do believe this lawsuit was a major factor in the departures of both Seifert and Read from AMD. Just a huge black cloud hanging over company, and not something you want your current CEO/CFO dealing with while trying to run the company.
There is a window of opportunity when demand will be high. Manufacturing delays destroys that opportunity, not a CEO embellishing as if to drive the stock up.
I guess the court proceedings will bear this out, the shareholders are saying the demand never existed, regardless of mfg delays. The fact none of these chips sold even after mfg issues were resolved and resulted in tons of excess inventory would bear this out, especially since their primary competitor, Intel, still did not have a competitive iGPU product.
All of this points to the probability demand was overstated/misrepresented and never really existed.
Criminals have been running and ruining AMD as long as I have been watching. They have liars and frauds at the top, and that trickles down the whole schmear of them.
When I watch nVidia employees in public they strike me as honest and confident and straight shooters, the exact opposite impression AMD persons deliver.
People do notice these things, no matter how many times AMD swears it's holier than intel or nVidia, writes up a Gamer's Manifesto and brags about it, claims it would never stoop so low as it's competition, then rebrands like a true maniac, writes up proprietary crap, and breaks every rule it swore against twice as bad. That's what cons and criminals do.
They do have a horrible take or pay arrangement and that has certainly helped sandbag AMD's fortunes over the last few years, but if they said nothing and wrote down the inventory giving the reason: "We had to pay for them no matter what" then no one would complain. But the CEO misrepresented demand for these chips and that did drive up stock price and investor expectations. That's why they're no the hotseat, no other reasons.
The real fault here lies with wall street investors who think that companies selling off assets means there is value to extract without knowing anything about the business. They have a scewed idea of the world where they manage to make money from destruction of jobs and value.
AMD has been quite a disappointment especially after the bulldozer fiasco. I remember the day that it came out I was so torn that it was complete garbage that I went and bought an X6 1150 instead. I've finally upgraded again and got an 8350, and luckily the upgrade path (especially with windows 8.1) didn't even require new memory or an OS reinstall. But Alas, the enthusiast desktop market is dead and the whole Megahurtz myth has derationalized the consumer purchasing process. Even Intel is scared about the lack of "giving a hoot" about processors especially since the real performance is now being moved to things like Nvidia's Tesla, and related GPU compute. The markets have just dried up though, as there is really no significant gain to me between my X6 and my 8350 or an i7, apart from gaming.
Its the sad truth. I'm trying to look for a decent 17" laptop, but there isn't anything good out there for under $1200. For some reason most of dells consumer laptops, even 17" ones use ULV chips! What in the world? They don't give a damn about performance anymore because everything is just good enough.
Welcome to intel having very little competition from AMD right now. Really hoping zen gives intel a bit of a kick in the butt. I feel broad well and skylake are intel making it look like they are innovating and hardly any performance gap from haswell just lower TDPs which half the time they get by just under clocking the stupid things. Fanless coreM, ya they run at 1Ghz wonder how they hit that TDP...
I have to say that I would put this in the whiney investors category - they lost money, poor them. IIRC, AMD never said they would have a chip that would outsell the equivalent Intel chips. They touted what they were doing, but they never said anything remotely like "this chip is going to kill Intel." The whiney investors with lots of money lost a few dollars, too bad. It happens in investments all the time. Is there a follow up to this article? I would love to hear whether the whiney investors got their way.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
35 Comments
Back to Article
Regs - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
I almost feel sorry for AMD. Like a red headed step child trying to hide the marks from the beatings it is taking at school. We know the game. The business culture accepts the risks of getting caught is far less costly than telling the truth. Someone is depositing a large check off investors.Wreckage - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The problem with your analogy is that these are self inflicted wounds.FlushedBubblyJock - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Correct, AMD is the girl who cuts herself in the bathroom, not the redheaded stepchild, it's self inflicted.AMD is the girl who has bolemia.
AMD is the skid row addict or the drunken alcoholic who won't stop ruining lives.
Now AMD has to deal with it's abusive siblings and parents, the beating is coming.
Following that, expect more self inflicted wounds.
austinsguitar - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
yea... it is kind of sad. imagine that the reason the r9 300 series of amd graphics chips is taking so long is that that desperately X desperately X desperatelyX10^desperately need that series of cards to do well up against nvidia for money.... their graphics division is the only thing making money!JonnyDough - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
I almost feel bad for the affluent and wealthy who have money to invest. If your money is that valuable to you, invest in yourself by starting a business of your own.Operandi - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
Yeah, this is too bad but it is reflective of the state of their technology vs. Intel and as a result their product. All AMD can do is ride this out until Zen gets things right for them or....... it doesn't as I don't think there will be any more chances to get it right after that.extide - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
You know, that's been the story ever since the first Phenoms came out, they weren't so great but they were good enough to ride until the Phenom II, and they were decent, at least vs a Core 2 Dual/Quad but not so great when they had to fare against the first i7, and then Bulldozer was the same story again. Each one of them was supposed to be amazing and great, but they have been ok at best. It's kinda sad because I definitely want to see AMD do well and bring the fight to Intel again, but it is pretty much apparent that that isnt going to happen again as AMD's focus is sort of in different markets than Intel these days. At least they are making their own ARM core... I have always said that the Atom was a stuuupid stuupid product, and Intel shouldn't have sold off their ARM core and kept developing that and sell it for cheap and I'm sure they would be a big player in the mobile space right now!Oxford Guy - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The horrible Eee PC was a huge hit in the market and then people realized that it was a piece of junk. The Eee PC was the tech world's equivalent of the Cabbage Patch doll. Most review sites, though, certainly didn't shy away from hyping them. Then, once their popularity dropped to nothing, they acted like netbooks weren't a great idea. Pairing the power sipping Atom with a ridiculously crappy GMA 900/950 that used like 3 times the power was something that should have gotten Intel, and Asus, laughed back to the drawing board. Then there was the 800 x 480 screen, 512 MB of RAM, 3 hour battery life, tiny keys, Xandros, and 4 GB storage.That said, I got a Lenovo S-10 for a friend who wanted a cheap Mac laptop (Hacintoshed it) and it wasn't such a bad thing, despite the terrible color gamut netbooks had, and the extremely tiny trackpad.
duploxxx - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
AMD Brazos was a way better CPU/GPU for that netbook purpose. but off course it is not from the djingle company......WorldWithoutMadness - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Another funny story that Apple actually asked Intel to make chip for their first iPhone (Source: Otellini statement).I didn't know what happened but as the history dictates Apple went to ARM.
By this story as well, if Intel had gone with Apple, the 'stupid product' atom could be powering every single phone out there. Maybe not all intel but everything could have been x86 platform. Everything would have different story.
dragonsqrrl - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
I'm not sure what Intel would've used. Atom was still a year away, and even when it launched it was never intended for the smartphone form factor. It was too expensive, the TDP too high, and the platform too complex. But Atom was way more powerful than any mobile architecture targeting smartphones in 2008. That's probably why Apple didn't go with Intel, Intel didn't have anything compelling to offer at the time.melgross - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
I believe it was an ARM chip Apple asked them to make. They didn't do it because they underestimated the number Apple would need, and thought Apple's costs were wrong. It turned out that Apple needed a lot more than Intel thought, and the costs were much less than Intel thought.They've been paying for that mistake ever since. It would have been 300 million chips for Apple last year at an average of $20 per chip.
Thermalzeal - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Intel couldn't provide them graphics nor were they flexible on letting Apple engineers build a more custom gpu. Same reason why the game consoles went to AMD instead.Operandi - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
That assessment is pretty wrong.Phenom and Phenom II were never meant to be amazing, they were the end of the line as far as the K8 architecture goes and considering that the Phenom II was pretty good.
Bulldozer was an ambitious start from scratch ground up redesign and yeah that was supposed to amaze and bring AMD on par with Intel though via a completely different approach. Instead of amaze it fell flat on its first outing and never really caught up, it only really ever got to "good" under ideal work loads. AMD was never going to catch up to Intel in pure CPU performance with Dozer tech, but they haven't left the performance market vacant, just stagnant.
Right now they starting over with Zen and I'm sure they will target as much of the high performance market as they can as that's where the margins are.
Coreyscomputerstuff - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link
the problem with bulldozer and again with piledriver is they were hedging their bets on the market pushing for multithread. The prob is as it seems with AMD they pushed way too early. The I5 4 years later has only just caught up with the FX-8350 in multithread (comparing price point). Not saying the FX chips are better but they set out to do exactly what AMD intended and built very powerful multithreaded chip using a clustered multithread configuration. The problem is they are <20% of the market and they don't get to push what standards get adopted... Intel do. As a result hardly anyone programmed to match the multithread capabilities of the bulldozer/piledriver series as it was too hard to do so for the amount of people that used AMD chips at the time. Don't get me started on games as we all know why AMD aren't strong in most games. If you don't know its due to only supporting 1-4 threads meaning most games could only utilise less than half the processor. Morale of this story and with Piledriver and bulldozer is AMD read the market wrong. They produced a powerful chip that was ahead of its time that no one wanted to adopt because it was too hard for developers to program for little gain. The issue is they had to ride it out because they spent a lot of money developing a chip no one wanted on a platform that was already around for too long (AM3+). I moved from the 8350 to a 2600 (little bit slower in multithread but way faster in single thread and most games). The AMD is in my home server which it is fantastic in. Its a multithreaded environment and it loves it the Intel is in my gaming PC which is mostly a single threaded environment and it thrives in it. This is why AMD is starting with a new CPU design. They will go from clustered multithread to simultaneous multithread like Intels hyper threading. Anyhow my rant over. AMD's APUs for the record (both desktop and laptop) are brilliant.FlushedBubblyJock - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
That's just total crap. Piling the lipstick on the quad piglets with half siamese twin deformities on all them and calling it a great hog farm.AMD blew it, they couldn't even get their turbo working correctly, and right now the G3258, a $70 chip smokes them OC'ed for dirt cheap in all but a few cases.
So desperate AMD was an is, that they took the 8350, OC'ed it to 220watts 300+ actual, and marketed it to fanboys for $900.00 released.
At least the monster electric housefire 290x can, doubled up, and sometimes singly, be respectable and cannot be entirely discounted, because it actually performed without unrealized gimmicks and blaming everyone else, some industry, some "lack of multithreading realized by others doing coding" or some other pathetic excuse.
Note - AMD actually tried to claim a profit from their discrete graphics division a couple quarters.
So, looks like AMD just cannot produce single thread performance, and you know what ? If they did, they could just add cores... and WIN.
Instead, that's what Intel did.
AMD failed, 20, 30, 100 cores won't do it, when 1 core can't hang.
KAlmquist - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Misreading the market was one of AMD's problems.If you compare the design goals of Intel Sandy Bridge (4 core) vs. AMD Bulldozer (4 module), we have:
1) AMD designed a 315mm^2 die containing 1200 million transistors, whereas Intel went with a smaller design (216mm^2, 995 million transistors, including an iGPU). So AMD is going for raw processing power whereas Intel is aiming for lower manufacturing costs.
2) AMD emphasized raw CPU power whereas Intel placed more emphasis on CPU power per watt (125W vs. 95W TDP).
3) Intel placed more emphasis on floating point performance than AMD.
4) Intel uses hyper-threading to get to 8 threads, whereas AMD has dedicated integer processing units for each thread. So the AMD is oriented towards work loads with 8 or more threads, whereas the Intel design will do relatively better on workloads with 4 or fewer threads.
So Bulldozer tends to be faster than Sandy Bridge on heavily threaded integer workloads, but that's because each of the four design goals listed above point in that direction. But if your needs differ in any way from the optimal target for Bulldozer--for example you want to run lots of threads doing floating point computation, or you don't care about floating point perfomance but your software only uses a few threads, or you are looking for an energy-efficient way to run lots of integer threads--Bulldozer's advantage disappears.
Frenetic Pony - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
So the suit claims that AMD misrepresented Llano chips as being produced in high quantity than was reality, which then lead AMD producing too many chips, which then lead to the writedown. No maybe I'm missing something, but that seems that what is being claimed is that one thing lead to the exact opposite and opposing thing you would expect it to lead to.psychobriggsy - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
It doesn't seem that consistent an argument really.Also, it's shares. Value can go down as well as up. Anyone doing a bit of research into the market would have seen that Intel had a strong proposition at the time, and AMD was at the end of a product line and behind Intel technology-wise.
( mojah ) - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
I'm not experienced in stocks but what I got from the article was that amd made it seem that they were able to produce more than they were capable at the time in order to draw investors. By the time they were able to produce the amount of chips they claimed they could, competitors already had a steady hold on the market and in order to keep their chips competitive amd had to reduce the prices of them, lowering the value of the company and thus the investors' stocks - had they known amd's chip production wasn't as profound as amd stated they likely wouldn't have made the investment in the first place. I could easily be reading this the wrong way but that's just what I got from itchizow - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
This is just a case of incomplete reporting, from the actual transcripts and original stories on the lawsuits it goes like this:AMD and most of their executives of the time (including former CEO Read and CFO Seifert ) are on record in conf calls to shareholders saying that Llano *DEMAND* was impossible to meet due to overwhelming response from the channel/market. They did cite some production issues, but the key was that they misrepresented *DEMAND* of the Llano APU, leading investors to believe these things were flying off the shelves and as soon as production ramped, there would be a significant spike in AMD's revenues/profits. Indeed, there was press coverage of this that gave AMD shareholders and supports alike hope that they may have turned the corner and that the APU was a successful venture for AMD. Given they paid so dearly for ATI, that was the hope, anyways.
However, once manufacturing/supply issues were sorted out, the reality was that there was very LITTLE DEMAND for the chip, leading to huge inventory surplus and ultimately, the write downs detailed in the article above. Llano chips were probably put into the same landfill as Atari's ET game because there was no demand for these chips and AMD quickly replaced it with Trinity shortly afterwards.
chizow - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Also I should add, I do believe this lawsuit was a major factor in the departures of both Seifert and Read from AMD. Just a huge black cloud hanging over company, and not something you want your current CEO/CFO dealing with while trying to run the company.mdriftmeyer - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
There is a window of opportunity when demand will be high. Manufacturing delays destroys that opportunity, not a CEO embellishing as if to drive the stock up.chizow - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
I guess the court proceedings will bear this out, the shareholders are saying the demand never existed, regardless of mfg delays. The fact none of these chips sold even after mfg issues were resolved and resulted in tons of excess inventory would bear this out, especially since their primary competitor, Intel, still did not have a competitive iGPU product.All of this points to the probability demand was overstated/misrepresented and never really existed.
melgross - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Reads just like what Blackberry has said for their phones the past three years. Same result too.FlushedBubblyJock - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Criminals have been running and ruining AMD as long as I have been watching.They have liars and frauds at the top, and that trickles down the whole schmear of them.
When I watch nVidia employees in public they strike me as honest and confident and straight shooters, the exact opposite impression AMD persons deliver.
People do notice these things, no matter how many times AMD swears it's holier than intel or nVidia, writes up a Gamer's Manifesto and brags about it, claims it would never stoop so low as it's competition, then rebrands like a true maniac, writes up proprietary crap, and breaks every rule it swore against twice as bad.
That's what cons and criminals do.
toyotabedzrock - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
I thought they where bound by contract to buy a certain number of chips from GF, so either way they had to buy them.chizow - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
They do have a horrible take or pay arrangement and that has certainly helped sandbag AMD's fortunes over the last few years, but if they said nothing and wrote down the inventory giving the reason: "We had to pay for them no matter what" then no one would complain. But the CEO misrepresented demand for these chips and that did drive up stock price and investor expectations. That's why they're no the hotseat, no other reasons.toyotabedzrock - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The real fault here lies with wall street investors who think that companies selling off assets means there is value to extract without knowing anything about the business. They have a scewed idea of the world where they manage to make money from destruction of jobs and value.anolesoul - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
AMD IS LOSING THEIR CUSTOMER SUPPORT!!!! AND falling behind(WAY BEHIND...)---every single day!Thermalzeal - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
AMD has been quite a disappointment especially after the bulldozer fiasco. I remember the day that it came out I was so torn that it was complete garbage that I went and bought an X6 1150 instead. I've finally upgraded again and got an 8350, and luckily the upgrade path (especially with windows 8.1) didn't even require new memory or an OS reinstall. But Alas, the enthusiast desktop market is dead and the whole Megahurtz myth has derationalized the consumer purchasing process. Even Intel is scared about the lack of "giving a hoot" about processors especially since the real performance is now being moved to things like Nvidia's Tesla, and related GPU compute. The markets have just dried up though, as there is really no significant gain to me between my X6 and my 8350 or an i7, apart from gaming.Byte - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Its the sad truth. I'm trying to look for a decent 17" laptop, but there isn't anything good out there for under $1200. For some reason most of dells consumer laptops, even 17" ones use ULV chips! What in the world? They don't give a damn about performance anymore because everything is just good enough.Crunchy005 - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Welcome to intel having very little competition from AMD right now. Really hoping zen gives intel a bit of a kick in the butt. I feel broad well and skylake are intel making it look like they are innovating and hardly any performance gap from haswell just lower TDPs which half the time they get by just under clocking the stupid things. Fanless coreM, ya they run at 1Ghz wonder how they hit that TDP...mikato - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Yeah, this is a major problem for me. No ULV chip thanks. Never had a laptop but I may be doing most of my work on one soon and am dreading it.wiyosaya - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I have to say that I would put this in the whiney investors category - they lost money, poor them. IIRC, AMD never said they would have a chip that would outsell the equivalent Intel chips. They touted what they were doing, but they never said anything remotely like "this chip is going to kill Intel." The whiney investors with lots of money lost a few dollars, too bad. It happens in investments all the time. Is there a follow up to this article? I would love to hear whether the whiney investors got their way.