AMD CEO: We're jumping back into cost-cutting mode AMD has confirmed it is slipping back into cost-cutting mode after its annus horribilis, caused by tanking demand for consumer PCs in a quarter described by CEO Lisa Su as the “revenue trough” for 2015. As the headline figures revealed last night, there was little to cheer up AMD or investors; revenue dropped eight per cent …
The problem with APUs is that they are bound to the CPU. If the market for x86 CPU's has tanked, it makes it more difficult to sell anything.
AMD has a marketing problem too. Its difficult to tell where the chips sit in terms of power. Intel's i3/i5/i7 is easier to follow (if fouled up by all the i7 variants).
If I were AMD I'd look to use discrete graphics cards to take over the desktop. Add ARM chips (which are cheap), a NIC and some SATA ports and include a NAS on the card. Do the same for APUs - add ARM silicon to run always-on functions. I'd far rather have a NAS than try to squeeze a little extra speed out of the disks. How about a hardware button on a laptop which suspends x86 and switches to an ARM chip? That might be a favourite for watching videos on the train or just generally for providing a high-power x86 system which can run email and small stuff on ARM for long battery life.
The PC market has plateaued and portable devices are currently the hot selling products. AMD needs to have more products for these portable devices. Win10 is not going to generate any significant PC market growth as few need nor desire Win10 or even Win8, which is part of the reason for the stagnant PC market in addition to a worldwide economic meltdown that is far from over.
Zen will be a huge shot to fill the coffers at AMD but with Fab issues from TSMC forcing redesigns of a number of products, AMD has been bitten once again by a Fab that could not deliver. Zen and future CPU/APU products will be on 14/16 Nm FinFET process which is sorted and will provide a reliable growth strategy.
Without AMD consumers would be exploited dearly by Intel who likes to charge $900 for P90 performance level chips.
Everyone who has a PC capable of running Windows 7 is going to upgrade to Windows 10 free edition, so while Microsoft will be able to claim an uptake in Windows 10 that is higher than that of Windows 8, it's not like everyone is going to rush out to a store to buy a new PC just to get Windows 10. Don't expect any hardware sales magic, any time soon. The flip side is that AMD FX CPU's and graphics cards will be a bargain and those of us who built our own PC's will be able to upgrade them at lower costs than with Intel/Nvidia combinations.
Intel's recent desktop and laptop CPU sales figures have been pretty dire as well. It has been the server market which has saved their bacon lately.
AMD supposedly have 64 bit ARM chips coming out . If those turn out to be as popular as many people expect, they'll something that sells well in the the large scale data centre market. Their current Opteron x86-64 products were hugely successful until Intel was able to copy AMD's product line and offer their own equivalents. A successful ARM-64 server product line could really turn AMD's fortune around.
I'm typing this on a desktop with an AMD APU chip. It has a very good price-performance value which allows a better overall system to be built at any given price point than using something from Intel. Their new unified memory architecture looks very interesting as well. However, desktops and laptops are not where the money is these days. AMD are going to need to get more sales in the server market to survive.
Perhaps if executives at AMD didn't promise 'awesome discounts' for people giving up their Geforce 970 cards (promises which turned out to be 100% bullshit lies btw)..and when called on it offered just to send people the URLs for resellers with no actual additional discount for throwing away a perfectly working card, then AMD wouldn't be in the critical cashflow situation it finds itself?
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