Saturday, January 17th 2009

AMD to Slash its Workforce by 9 Percent, Initiate Temporary Pay Cuts

The Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices said on Friday that it plans to layoff 1100 of its workers on a global scale and reduce the month payments for the remaining employees of the company. This is the third round of major layoffs in the last year and represents a reduction of the working personal by 9 percent. AMD cut 600 workers last month, and earlier in 2008 jettisoned 1600 employees of the company. Payments of the workers and the head-staff will also be temporary reduced. AMD's CEO Dirk Meyer and executive chairman Hector Ruiz, the former CEO, will see their salaries slashed by 20 percent. Vice presidents and other top management will have their pay cut 15 percent, other salaried workers will go down 10 percent, and pay for hourly workers will fall 5 percent. After it bought ATI, AMD is in the middle of a big company restructuring that in some ways leads to all these unfortunate events. Additionaly, the world financial crisis makes everything even worst. Yesterday, Intel also reported a drop in its forth-quarter financial results.
Source: Yahoo! Tech
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29 Comments on AMD to Slash its Workforce by 9 Percent, Initiate Temporary Pay Cuts

#1
Flyordie
Thanks for posting it here... bout time. lol. Read it on R3D yesterday... *sobs* At least AMD is trying to stay afloat at the cost of workforce reductions.
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#2
Fitseries3
Eleet Hardware Junkie
im waiting for "Ati files for bankruptcy"
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#3
KBD
fitseries3im waiting for "Ati files for bankruptcy"
unlikely since they are an integral part of AMD now, i think that if things get really bad they will sell off the graphics division.
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#4
timta2
"world financial crisis makes everything even worst."

Maybe they are even laying off proofreaders these days.
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#5
Assimilator
If there's a bankruptcy filing, it'll be AMD making it not ATI. ATI seems to be the only division that's capable of developing competitive tech (R700 vs GT200 as opposed to Phenom II vs Core 2/Core i7).
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#6
Fitseries3
Eleet Hardware Junkie
ati has been fed HUGE amounts of money from asian investors for years. the money is running thin now. they dont make enough to cover the manufacturing costs let alone any profit. thats why it was sold to amd. amd will make a valid attempt but seeing how they are having troubles themselves ati may get the plug pulled on them.
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#7
ShadowFold
fitseries3ati has been fed HUGE amounts of money from asian investors for years. the money is running thin now. they dont make enough to cover the manufacturing costs let alone any profit. thats why it was sold to amd. amd will make a valid attempt but seeing how they are having troubles themselves ati may get the plug pulled on them.
If that's true then we better start upgrading.. I would imagine Nvidia would crank their prices up an arse load if they didn't have competition. Maybe if ATi fails Intel will jump in?
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#8
Fitseries3
Eleet Hardware Junkie
intel already has plans to do gpu's in the future. although... their plans where to integrate gpu into cpu. i dont know how well that will take off.

im not saying ati will die but its starting to look like it.
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#9
Binge
Overclocking Surrealism
Impossible for ATi to die this year. They did so well with the 4800 series they've got to get through these next 4 years, but then again so does everyone.
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#10
Fitseries3
Eleet Hardware Junkie
if they died right now no one would really "feel" it for at least a year.... or until nvidia releases a few more cards and ati isnt there to respond.
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#11
Binge
Overclocking Surrealism
nV also has such expensive cards because of the cost of materials. They're still using old power regulation instead of digital vRegs and they're always multiple phase. Huge chips and a large memory bandwidth. I'd say nV is still losing money on their cards, but not as much since they went 55nm
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#12
v12dock
Block Caption of Rainey Street
The only good card I bought from ATI was a 9800XT, bought two cards after that.... x850xt wasn't to bad but my x1950xt just kill me now. Now I haven't bought any of there products since AMD bought them out.
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#13
phanbuey
Hopefully they cut the marketing department only, never liked AMD marketing anyway.
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#14
eidairaman1
The Exiled Airman
v12dockThe only good card I bought from ATI was a 9800XT, bought two cards after that.... x850xt wasn't to bad but my x1950xt just kill me now. Now I haven't bought any of there products since AMD bought them out.
sorry for your loss, my 1950 Pro is a Strong Workhorse COD4, UT3, etc runs fine on this card.
KBDunlikely since they are an integral part of AMD now, i think that if things get really bad they will sell off the graphics division.
AMD has already sold it off apparently to the Company in what Dubai? At least some manufacturing
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#15
3870x2
AMD/ATI is doing alot better, so we can deduce that at this point, they are only losing now because of poor management. This move might help.
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#16
KBD
eidairaman1AMD has already sold it off apparently to the Company in what Dubai? At least some manufacturing
not entirely accurate, they did receive an investment from a UAE company but they spun off their own production facilities (not ATI's) and created the Foundry Co with both AMD and the Dubai company owning a share of it. This new company is supposed to make ATI chips also and take orders from others.
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#17
eidairaman1
The Exiled Airman
KBDnot entirely accurate, they did receive an investment from a UAE company but they spun off their own production facilities (not ATI's) and created the Foundry Co with both AMD and the Dubai company owning a share of it. This new company is supposed to make ATI chips also and take orders from others.
i have a feeling if AMD does bite the dust, Almighty better forbid, they will probably sell the whole Division to The Foundry/Dubai, or Possible Chance ATI will become its own corp, and trust me ATI was doin actually well before AMD bought them,i think they had a DX10 part working before AMD bought them, probably would of actually worked and gave NV a run for their money. I just hope this year leads to prosperous waters and leave 2008 in the past.
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#18
KBD
eidairaman1i have a feeling if AMD does bite the dust, Almighty better forbid, they will probably sell the whole Division to The Foundry/Dubai, or Possible Chance ATI will become its own corp, and trust me ATI was doin actually well before AMD bought them,i think they had a DX10 part working before AMD bought them, probably would of actually worked and gave NV a run for their money. I just hope this year leads to prosperous waters and leave 2008 in the past.
yea, thats a likely outcome. other possibility is that the whole company (AMD + Foundry) may be bought by some investment consortium.


I just think that whole aqusition of ATI was a big mistake for AMD and they did it at the worst possible time. Right after Core2 was launched and AMD dominance ended. If anything they should've done it a year or two earlier. But not buying ATI at all would've been the best move. Thats what literally put them in the financial hole they are in today. I mean if they needed a chipset division they could've built one up themselves and it would've cost them a lot less than $5 billion ATI cost em.
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#19
WarEagleAU
Bird of Prey
Hell ATI isnt going anywhere and neither is AMD, its pure speculation. Every company is either closing, liquidating, waiting for a buyout or laying off workers. No matter how good you are the economy is hurting everyone.
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#20
KBD
WarEagleAUHell ATI isnt going anywhere and neither is AMD, its pure speculation. Every company is either closing, liquidating, waiting for a buyout or laying off workers. No matter how good you are the economy is hurting everyone.
yea, i agree. at this point its still too early to tell whats going to happen to AMD. I guess what we were talking about earlier are pure hypothetical what if scenarios.
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#21
Haytch
You guys missed that maybe ATi sold itself for 5 Billion to AMD, and is now buying itself back for a lot less with the bonus of buying out AMD. . .

I think AMD/ATi is here to stay. With Intel planning on holding back CPU launches and various motherboard manufacturing company issues, AMD/ATi have plenty of time to focus on the research they need to contend on an even playing field.
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#22
FordGT90Concept
"I go fast!1!11!1!"
fitseries3im waiting for "Ati files for bankruptcy"
ATI doesn't exist (hasn't since the buyout). It is merely a trademark owned by AMD. Place AMD in that statment and it makes sense but I don't see them going away in the near future...
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#23
AddSub
Wow, another workforce cut at AMD? Pretty soon there will be like 12 people left working at AMD.
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#24
Rebo&Zooty
AddSub, anybody who knows you knows you hate ati/amd now that you went intel/nvidia and you clearly dont know the history of amd, they have been in "bad" possitions b4 and havent died off, they dont just make cpu's you know that dont u ?

AMD makes alot of products, they have sold off less profitable devisions in the past, they have had layoffs in the past.

amd isnt on top in the ENTHUSIST MARKET today, but the OEM market and server markets are looking much better for them.

go check places like bestbuy, many times the amd quadcore systems cheaper then intels, and has better componants, its not selling at a loss, and many people i know have relitives who have picked up the amd quads because the price was ALOT better then the intel systems that where offered.

Why do people think the enthusist markets really so important, its a SMALL % of the buisness for eather company, yeah it gets more word of mouth and reviews in mags, but most people who run out and buy a computer do not read such mags or reviews, they just go to the store, and mess with display models and buy whatever looks best to them and what the sales person recomends.

Im not worried about AMD dieing, Intel dosnt even want that, IF that happened intel would be sued for monopoly again since there are no other cpu makers with any meaningfull % of the market.

Intel needs AMD they just want them to be beat down so they cant pull another athlon out of the box
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#25
FordGT90Concept
"I go fast!1!11!1!"
The enthusiast market is important because it gets people talking. Let me phrase it differently: word of mouth advertising comes from the enthusiast market. When the FX processors started beating up on EE processors, FX and by association, AMD were mentioned far more frequently. The more people hear about it, the more people are likely to buy other products made by the same company. Given about a year of solid performance lead in the enthusiast market, the consumer and server markets are likely to also shift in their favor. This is what happened with the Athlon 64 line back in the 2004-2006 area. The reverse happened when everyone involved with computers started to point at how Core 2 spanked Athlon 64.

Simply put, if you are the leader of the pack for an extended period of time, it translates to better sales up and down the product lines.
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