AMD could slash up to 30 percent of its workforce according to reports!

its true about the Intel monopoly.. Computers are progressing to tablet and mobile phone devices. Intel have huge competitors, ARM, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and others.

Intel are not the best cellphone processors.

^NOT true^

anyway as the world global economy stagnates what can you expect.

People loose their jobs, less shit gets purchased.

If you ask me i think its just 2012 end of the world looming. And if we pass into 2013 the economy will come storming back again.

It's important to understand AMD made their own bed. They are in terminal decline, because of bad management.

The first major error: selling their silicon manufacturing plants, relying on buying chip as a customer. This gave a quick cash boost, at the price of relinquishing control over manufacturing. Since that happened, AMD has been forced to make chips made with older silicon technology than Intel uses, because those who own the factory are optimizing their own profit, and going too fast forward is costly. It's been said Intel's chip technology is about three years ahead at this point. This makes it IMPOSSIBLE for AMD to compete in top performance, and performance per watt.

The second major error: thinning the herd of engineers at all levels. This was done to save on payroll costs, but came at a tremendous opportunity cost. To make CPU's with less manpower, AMD stopped doing manual chip layout by experienced professionals, and went with automatic chip generation by software tools. These tools give 80% performance at 120 % power draw, compared to manually optimized chips.

The third major error: firing their top CPU design engineers, thinking they weren't worth their salaries. The guys who took over the work of making architectural decisions just weren't as smart as the ones they fired. The latest design, nicknamed "Bulldozer" has inherent flaws, like sharing the instruction decoding front-end between two cores to save some silicon area. The front-end can decode four instructions per cycle, but this only means two instructions per core. No matter what they do with such a flawed base design, it will obviously have limited performance potential.

Taken together, these bad decisions mean a quadruple loss in competitiveness:


1. Older chip tech means fewer transistors to work with.

2. Auto layout means less top performance.

3. Auto layout also means higher power consumption.

4. Inexperienced designers mean sub-optimal architectural design.


There's just no chance in hell to stay competitive in a cutting-edge tech business with that kind of handicap!

P.S. AMD still makes competitive graphics chips, probably because that division was bought and hasn't been trashed by AMD's management yet (this division used to be ATI).

AMD missed the boat on mobile possessors for smartphones and instead chose to compete toe to toe with giant Intel. Love their chips, 90% of the power at half the price compared to Intel.

This is about the only accurate post in this thread.

Buy your own DEV kit for Android and Iphone devices and program apps.

Start producing good apps that people want for like 50cents.

Thread: PC-Laptop Market in Trouble....

It's coming for Intel as well, consumer spending is in the shitter and craptops are high ticket items that no one is buying.

Oh, and by the way, someone one starred my thread. Why? It's from a reputable source and it's a solid indicator of the real economy.

Last Edited by Mad Scientist (aka AmJedi) on 10/13/2012 07:31 AM

My laptops A6-3400m can overclock to double its advertised speed without overheating, and never any trouble with drivers.

I like AMD, I hope they rehire those people they let go. Not only is it AMD, I have to remind myself, but ATI too.

It mostly due to the horrible pc market at this moment.

Why buy a power consumption monster, less performance CPU, when every i5 in Combination with a decent GFX Card beats the shit out of any AMD CPU-GFX Card Combination in gaming performance and less power consumption, and no I´m not a Intel Fanboy, my last two Computers had an AMD CPU but I effin had it with AMD not to be able getting head on with Intel, yes you can have a good budget Computer with AMD CPU´s, but thats about the only advantage.

Need to start making processors with are desktop speed into tablet type devices. That would be the real deal.

I used to buy AMD CPU's because they were cheap. AMD forced Intel to keep their prices down too. We should all support AMD.

Sadly their CPU's were power hungry, so required wind tunnels to keep them cool.

Now processor speed is not that important in most applications, but energy efficiency (cool running and low power) is far more important. In today's computers small, quiet, cool, long battery life with reasonable performance is all that is required - with lightweight functional software.

A very good appraisal of the issue written by someone who clearly understands both silicon chip technology and computer architecture.


1. Older chip tech means fewer transistors to work with.

Indeed. Depends on the sector you are aiming for. Sometimes an older process is better as the wafer pricing can be substantially cheaper. However, if you are in the performance sector (speed or energy efficiency) you usually need to be on the latest generation hideously expensive process. AMD clearly need to be in this sector.

2. Auto layout means less top performance.

It is getting the balance right. The old 80/20 rule. Optimise the 20% of the chip that is responsible for 80% of the performance! The non speed critical areas can be less optimised (at the expense of silicon area). However tools are getting better. In software land, optimising compilers can do a much better job than humans when you have complex piplelines (out of order instructions, multiple issue, register optimisation etc.)


3. Auto layout also means higher power consumption.

In most cases. However tools are developed to minimise interconnect lengths etc.

4. Inexperienced designers mean sub-optimal architectural design.

This is usually the single biggest issue. Some of the old timers know so much more about how to squeeze performance out of systems. You need a mix of wise old timers and young eager hard working engineers to deliver the optimum solution. Bean counters who look at salaries and work rate of the old timers fail to understand the real crucial benefit these experienced engineers deliver is sailing the highly complex ship of a large System On Chip project through to successful completion.

My teams always had a mix of wise old timers and keen and enthusiastic hard working young engineers. They always delivered right first time silicon on a fraction of the budget of big corporate flag ship projects!

total bs....

Overprices Intel shit.

AMD made a top of the line processor very stable with high performance at a lower cost , back in the day. Haven t really looked at their prices lately.

The problem is companies changing CPU sockets on mother boards.Then discontinuing Old sockets.Im not buying a new motherboard every time i turn around for a upgraded CPU.