After three years, AMD is finally getting around to merging it’s microprocessor and graphics divisions, another stab at reaching profitability after more than two years of losses. On Wednesday afternoon the company said it would consolidate the two divisions into one–platforms and products–led by SVP Rick Bergman.
“Sponsors of Tomorrow” is the new “Intel Inside.” The chipmaker is gearing up to launch a massive new advertising campaign, and that slogan is to be its anchor. Its purpose: to make us all more familiar with the Intel brand–as if it wasn’t ubiquitous enough already.
Apple has fleshed out its chip design group with another key hire. The company has recruited Bob Drebin, former CTO of AMD’s Graphics Products Group, as a senior director. Apple won’t say what it is exactly Drebin’s going to work on, though it’s a safe bet it’s related to the multicore graphics processors in which Drebin has his expertise.
Billionaire Warren Buffett says the economy will be in a shambles throughout “2009–and, for that matter, probably well beyond.” The same can apparently be said for the PC market. Research outfit Gartner on Monday warned that PC sales will suffer the “sharpest unit decline in history” this year.
With IBM quietly contributing another 2,800 or so employees to the next Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment report, this seems like a fine time to pay respects to those who’ve gone before them. And there are many. In the past six months, thousands of workers have been right-sized and offboarded. Rebalanced and rationalized. “Smartsized.” Sacked. A quick scan of the carnage.
2008 hasn’t quite proven to be the “phenomenal transition year” AMD believed it would be. Despite new leadership and a restructuring of its manufacturing assets, the company was not able to return to profitability by the third quarter of 2008 as it had hoped. And now, AMD has reported a greater-than-expected net loss for the fourth quarter of 2008—its ninth consecutive one.
AMD may have written down its acquisition of ATI for the last time. On Tuesday, the company said it will sell the underperforming handset business it acquired with its 2006 purchase of ATI to Qualcomm for $65 million. The transaction follows the August 2008 sale of AMD’s digital television business–also acquired as part of its costly and troubled merger with ATI.
“Difficult, but prudent, actions.” That’s how AMD describes its decision to sack 1,100 employees and reduce the base pay of those who remain. Come February, the chipmaker will reduce its workforce by roughly nine percent. It will suspend its 401(k) match for employees and slash their salaries.
Tech may be done with layoffs for 2008, but 2009 is another matter entirely. Now that the souring economy has had its way with Yahoo and AMD and Palm and Sun and Nortel, it’s moving on to bigger fare. We’ve already heard predictions that Google will sack as much as 15 percent of its workforce next year. Now come rumors that Microsoft is steeling itself for large-scale job cuts as well.
Oh, they’re all piling on now. This week has brought with it bad news from Palm, Research In Motion, Adobe, AT&T, and Nokia. Now AMD has joined them as well. In a terse statement issued this morning, the company warned that its fourth-quarter revenue will come in significantly lower than previously expected, thanks to souring computer sales.
If it’s true that “real men have fabs,” as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Chairman W. J. “Jerry” Sanders III once said, then AMD is the semiconductor industry’s latest eunuch. This morning the chipmaker said it will spin off its manufacturing operations, splitting itself into two companies–one to design chips and one to make them.
For a while there, it looked like Advanced Micro Devices was really going to take Intel to the mat, didn’t it? But not lately. After seven consecutive quarterly losses, AMD shares fell to a six-year low last month, down 50 percent in the past year. Good thing, then, that the company has chosen to sell off its digital television business, which these days is more of a distraction than anything else.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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