AMD comes to grips with the ATI merger fallout
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Investors and consumers were warned the bad news would come, and it came as predicted. AMD took a stunning charge of $1.6 billion in one quarter, to account for value from the ATI merger it now realizes may not materialize.
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Blog: The former head of ATI Technologies, acquired by AMD last year, resigns amid troubled times for the chipmaker.
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Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday reported a heavy loss for its fourth quarter, due mostly to charges connected to its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI.
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Intel racked up some serious karmic debt when it schemed to run AMD out of the PC processor business. Xeon now languishes in Opteronâs shadow, which strikes me as just desserts for some nasty business.
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Recent months have seen AMD taking an upper hand over Intel in the chip market. And the latest news is another new indication that Intel is struggling to keep up with the pace they once spearheaded.
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Groovy graphics card, and a snip at Â£45 Review Since it bought ATi last year, AMD has been busy rebranding any number of chipsets and graphics chips in its range. Some of the instances make perfect sense while others are a cynical rebranding of an old chip.â¦
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Once more, with feeling: Why is AMD on the lam, and how can it get back up?
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) said Wednesday it has gained approval from key U.S., Canadian, and German antitrust regulators for itsÂ $5.4 billion plan to buyÂ Canadian chip set developer ATI Technologies.
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December 01, 2004 - ATI Technologies today officially unveiled its new lineup in its RADEON X800 family of add-in graphics boards, including both a new flagship board as well as new, more wallet-friendly incarnations of its current crop.
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To judge by the shift in the headlines, the processor war is nearly over. Who&#39;s in? Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD). Out? Intel (Nasdaq: INTC).
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After a bout of good fortune, AMD finds itself coming to grips with a resurgent Intel. Plus: Can software keep up with multicore technology?
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Advanced Micro Devices reported a heavy loss for its fourth quarter, due mostly to charges connected to its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI.
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GPGPU for U and me Even before its merger with AMD closes, ATI plans to charge the server market with a new type of graphics product that could shake up the high performance computing market. Advocates of ATI's technology say it could create a lucrative new revenue stream for the company and add some weight to the ATI/AMD marriage.â¦
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Concerns over AMD's succession planning come at a difficult time for the company, and revive that old tug-of-war between marketing and engineering.
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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(InfoWorld) - The former chief executive of ATI Technologies has resigned from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) just nine months after the two companies combined in aÂ $5.4 billion merger. AMD said Tuesday that David Orton will resign as executive vice president after working through the end of this month. AMD had convinced Orton to remain with the company byÂ signing him to a $1.7 million contractÂ in October, shortly before completing the merger. As the president and CEO of ATI, Orton led efforts to compete with rival Nvidia in the building of high-end graphics boards for PCs, as well as cellphones, smartphones, and gaming consoles. By acquiring ATI, AMD hoped to become more competitive with Intel by creating aÂ single "Fusion" chipÂ that integrates its x86 microprocessor with ATI's graphics processor on a single piece of silicon. AMD wanted to retain Orton along with his ATI colleagues because of his ability to push ATI to success in the graphics, chip set, and consumer-electronics markets, said Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and chief operating officer, in a statement released Tuesday. However, AMD expects it will take until 2009 to complete the engineering necessary to bring the new Fusion chip to market. In the meantime, the chip vendor has been suffering from the effects of aÂ price warÂ that has made just a small dent in the profits of its much larger rival Intel. By contrast, AMD has watched its profits sink into the red, reportingÂ losses of $611 millionÂ and $574 million for its past two fiscal quarters. In a search for operating cash, AMD even decided to sell off a stake of the company,Â raising $2.2 billionÂ through the sale of convertible notes to institutional investors. That financial pressure may have been one factor contributing to Orton's departure. In a statement released Tuesday, Orton said he still had faith in the companies' merger strategy. "It is with mixed feelings that I am leaving AMD," Orton said. "I am very optimistic about AMD's future. I believe strongly in the strategies that brought AMD and ATI together and the talented employees of the 'new AMD' who are committed to winning in the market." In the wake of Orton's departure, AMD said that its CEO Hector Ruiz would now be the direct supervisor of Adrian Hartog, senior vice president and general manager for the consumer electronics group, and Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager for the graphics products group. Also this week, AMD renewed its determination to continue its price war with Intel, announcing Monday that it wasÂ cutting prices on its range of desktop PC chips, from the top-end Athlon 64 FX through the Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron families. In the longer term, AMD hopes to regain profitability with itsÂ "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip. AMD plans to launch that processor in August to compete with Intel's dual-core "Woodcrest" and quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon processors launched last year, and quad-core "Harpertown" server chip due out in the fourth quarter of 2007. AMD may provide more details on Orton's departure and its new strategies when the vendor reports second-quarter fiscal 2007 earnings on July 19. Â
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Burned by a series of production missteps and canceled products, the company lets AMD get out in front on multicore product announcements.