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.
Advanced Micro Devices has tapped Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer as its new CEO, replacing Hector Ruiz. Ruiz will become executive chairman of AMD and executive chairman of the board of directors.
Ruiz announced the leadership change during AMD’s second-quarter financial earnings conference call. “The time is right to turn the company over to a new leader,” he said.
Apparently, someone forgot to tell Intel (INTC) about the recession. The company reported a sharp rise in profit on Tuesday in the face of a flaccid U.S. economy.
It’s likely a challenge to program and a bitch to debug, but IBM’s new Roadrunner supercomputer is the most powerful in the world. With 12,240 cell processors typically found in Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and another 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips, Roadrunner has been benchmarked at 1.026 petaflops (1.026 quadrillion calculations per second).
What a lousy week for Intel, yeah? First Korea’s Fair Trade Commission fines the company $25 million for abusing its dominant market position in the country and offering discounts to PC makers in an effort to drive rival AMD out of the market. And now Federal Trade Commission has opened a formal investigation into its pricing practices.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was right. It didn’t quietly shed 5% of its work force in mid-March. How could it when it was busy preparing to shed twice that number in April?
This afternoon AMD said it will lay off 10% of its work force, or about 1,600 employees, by the third quarter of 2008 in [...]
There’s a reason Intel’s processors are in more than four out of five x86 computers sold in the global market and–like the European Union, Japan and South Korea–New York’s attorney general thinks it might be an anticompetitive one.
Empire State AG Andrew Cuomo today opened a formal antitrust investigation against Intel to determine if it violated [...]
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. Read more »
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 use of the Beeker “meee” ever.
While the technology behind the Telephone is new, the design is reassuringly old-fashioned, reminiscent of a phrenologist’s horn or ear-candle in form. We found the experience far more comfortable than the one we had with the Telegraph.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
