AMD to Cut its Workforce by About Four Percent
According to CRN, AMD is looking to make some cuts to its workforce of approximately 26,000 employees. The company hasn't announced a specific number, but in a comment to the publication AMD said that "as a part of aligning our resources with our largest growth opportunities, we are taking a number of targeted steps that will unfortunately result in reducing our global workforce by approximately 4 percent". In actual headcount numbers that should be just north of a thousand people that the company will let go. It's not clear which departments or divisions at AMD will be affected the most, but the cutback appears to be a response to AMD's mixed quarterly report.
AMD's statement also doesn't make it clear on exactly what the company will be putting its focus on moving forward, but CRN seems to suggest that the embedded and gaming business is where AMD is struggling. That said, it's not likely that AMD will put an increased focus on those businesses, but instead the company is more likely to invest more into its server products, least not to try and catch up with NVIDIA in the AI server market. According to CRN, AMD has also seen a strong demand in AI PCs, such as the Ryzen AI 300-series of mobile SoCs, so it's possible AMD will put an extra effort into is mobile product range. The Ryzen 9000-series is thankfully also doing well, so it's unlikely there will be any big cutbacks here. We already know that AMD is not going after NVIDIA with a new flagship GPU to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5000-series flagship SKU, so it's possible that the company will cut back on some people in its consumer GPU team for the time being, but this should become clear come CES in January.
AMD's statement also doesn't make it clear on exactly what the company will be putting its focus on moving forward, but CRN seems to suggest that the embedded and gaming business is where AMD is struggling. That said, it's not likely that AMD will put an increased focus on those businesses, but instead the company is more likely to invest more into its server products, least not to try and catch up with NVIDIA in the AI server market. According to CRN, AMD has also seen a strong demand in AI PCs, such as the Ryzen AI 300-series of mobile SoCs, so it's possible AMD will put an extra effort into is mobile product range. The Ryzen 9000-series is thankfully also doing well, so it's unlikely there will be any big cutbacks here. We already know that AMD is not going after NVIDIA with a new flagship GPU to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5000-series flagship SKU, so it's possible that the company will cut back on some people in its consumer GPU team for the time being, but this should become clear come CES in January.