Reuters reported that AMD has hired a consulting firm to look at possibly breaking up/spinning off its business units.
No guarantee it will happen, but they’ve been losing position for years, which probably means they’ll have to do something, anything, because their current strategy is not working. Their entire market cap is $2 billion. Intel is $152 billion.
Their CPU business is clearly moribund and has been uncompetitive with Intel for years. The real problem is that Nvidia has taken a pretty serious lead in design this last generation, and they lack the resources on their GPU side to keep up as well.
Spinning off the GPU business would essentially kill what remained of the company.
Well i hope they do come up with a solution, it’s been really great having them around these last 15 years or so; and i still enjoy my FX-60 PC for gaming.
AMD’s CPU business is in the toilet, but actually their GPU side is doing poorly also, just not to the same degree.
SemiAccurate on their new cards
Good grief, only $2b? How much did they pay for ATi a handful of years ago?
Yeah, the 300-series are all rebrands, the fury X is a crazy watercooled monstrosity, the fury is a 980 non-Ti competitor that will probably be much hotter/power-hungry, and the fury nano is potentially interesting but no info has been released yet.
Early indications are the Fury X outperforms a Titan X and is $650 for the watercooled version. They use cutting edge stacked memory to drastically reduce card size and power requirements. They’ve also added a framelate limiter feature so if your monitor can’t display the framerate a game is running at it will scale back to save performance. You just tell it “I’m never going to need more than 100fps” and instead of running an old game at 300fps and sucking 275w it will just give you 100 at half the power consumption.
If companies like Skype, Nokia and Motorola can get ridiculous sums being sold the IP alone AMD has should be worth far more than $2 billion.
The real thing is, what company would care enough to pay? Their competitors who are already putting out more advanced products? Smartphones and mobile stuff is huge and diverse, but AMD doesn’t have the same pull as a Motorola patent portfolio or the name of Nokia, etc…
Being an also-ran for years and years does that. It’s really unfortunate because both markets should benefit from competition, but they have really not been competing in a very long time.
The x86 license alone would seem to have great value, if trying to compete with Intel didn’t seem so hopeless right now.
The Chinese should buy them perhaps?
If AMD had taken a percentage of x86 profits instead of a lump sum settlement with Intel a few years ago…
That’s a good idea for a driver! Many games include it, but not all-- and particularly not older ones.
Power consumption remains to be seen. MaxwellV2 is a tough competitor.
That Semi-Accurate article reads like an honest assessment of a shady product launch, and I’m an AMD fan. Need to replace my 6850 soon too.
Well any one else heard the rumours that MS might be interested in buying them?
Yes, but there’s not much to say. Nothing substantiated, and none of the sites repeating the rumor have anything new.
This is the original source that everyone is quoting: http://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/microsoft-is-interested-to-buy-advanced-micro-devices-source/
It would probably be bad right? And not that likely to get past competition laws, unless maybe only MS are considering a buy?
Not sure why there would be competition law issues. There’s almost no overlap in relevant market share.
Intel might get annoyed, but MS only has to say, “How about all that love you’ve been giving Apple this past decade?” Besides, Wintel is still important. Intel has to be worried that one day, sooner rather than later, that Apple will switch to its own CPUs for its laptops/desktops.