Grrrrr.....
It is so much easier to just fire and hire new people instead of spending the same severance pay on re-training your existing engineers. In addition, an 11% RIF also greatly enhances loyalty from your remaining work force. /sarcasm off/
Seen this movie before - after a 10+% RIF, whoever was not let go will look around, and jump ship if given an opportunity to do so. Without the RIF, a lot less people would even dream of looking for other positions. And the people who leave, are usually your best performers, not the next in line at the bottom of the barrel, as they are the ones asked to pick up extra work for no extra pay and reduced job security.
AMD already has some nice products - their APUs are in very high demand, and there is a reason for it. So, instead of focusing on what works (like fixing performance issues in "Bull-dozer" CPUs and further improving the APUs, maybe adding ECC memory support to their video engines so they have a better chance of catching up with NVIDIA in HPC applications), they want to go chase a low margin, already crowded market, in which they have no prior experience, like ARM. BRILLIANT! I can now see that the new CEO is really earning his pay....
Re ARM-64 servers - they look more like a solution looking for a problem, given the current state of virtualization and capability of moving workloads on demand across physical nodes, then a highly desirable, high growth and high profit margin market. They will certainly find some buyers, but percentage wise, compared to Xeon or Opteron based servers, I doubt they will amount to much. You need a very compelling $$$ argument for a new architecture, and for ARM, cost savings are questionable - the delta in CPU cost is a very small number compared to the total hw and sw cost associated with a new server, and power savings are largely negated by the advances in virtualization, given the delta in processing power between ARM and Xeon / Opteron CPUs. If you can consolidate 3-5 ARM servers on a single Xeon / Opteron server, I highly doubt there are any price or operating energy savings, and you have more possible points of failure.
AMD making ARM CPUs for phones or tablets - it does not make any sense, it makes a lot more sense to push for even lower power APUs which are x86 compatible (which they already have on the horizon).
The only reason ARM is on the map AT ALL, are low power battery operated applications where you can get by with fairly small computing power (anybody remember RCA 1802 CPU? - low power is a niche market ignored by most CPU makers, with low volumes, at least until smart cell phones exploded) . Intel stronghold on x86 architecture prevented low power x86 alternatives to be developed by others, which gave ARM a chance. This does not mean that ARM is a good chip for high performance computing, and once you get into server territory, you have to use performance enhancing tricks already patented by established players. Cache coherency and parallel out of order code execution have enough patents around them to make life really interesting for anybody new to the field.
Pushing for higher end CPUs is a must for AMD, but the latest CPUs performed poorly compared to their prior generation Phenom II, as they have much longer pipelines (like Intel's Pentium 4). They need to either fix the architectural issue (kind of hard, short of major surgery) or quickly increase the clock speeds. They seemed to have the right focus on this, at least before this news set the organization in turmoil.
I really like AMD, and used their CPUs in all my home computers for 20 years (since their 286 CPUs), but I am highly skeptical of this new direction. They may loose focus as their best people will be shifted away from core products to chase money-loosing propositions dreamed up by marketing drones and a new CEO eager to show that he is "doing something to fix the company" (clue - AMD is not a dog or a cat, and "fixing it" may require a different set of skills).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
