AMD cuts 5% of global employees
Advanced Micro Devices is handing out pink slips to 5% of the company's global workforce, as part of a restructuring plan to help improve poor fiscal results after declining sales and six consecutive quarterly losses. AMD has 9,469 employees as of June 2015 and will cut approximately 470 positions. The restructuring plan will target "all sites, all levels, all functions," an AMD spokesman said, adding that engineers will represent a smaller portion of layoffs. Cuts will mostly come from sales, marketing, and operations segments.
The restructuring plan will cost AMD approximately $41 million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2015 -- $31 million of which will be related to severance and benefit costs, and $1 million to facilities related consolidation charges. The company expects to save approximately $9 million in 2015 and $58 million in 2016 following job cuts and restructuring.
The restructuring plan will cost AMD approximately $41 million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2015 -- $31 million of which will be related to severance and benefit costs, and $1 million to facilities related consolidation charges. The company expects to save approximately $9 million in 2015 and $58 million in 2016 following job cuts and restructuring.
Remember Intel Itanium? AMD responded with a more sane alternative that even Intel eventually adopted a few years later. SATA 6GB? USB3? AMD's chipsets had them almost immediately, while Intel dragged their feet for years afterwards.
Although Moore's Law is still technically alive, they've essentially been "cheating" for the past 5+ years. All those new transistors are being added to the graphics and memory caches; performance of the cores have been relatively stagnant for some time now. For example, compare a 5 year old sandy bridge (i5-2500K) with a brand new skylake (i5-6600K) CPU. See how 5 years has added hardly any additional performance? Granted, the new chips are far more efficient energy wise, and you can now play some low end games on the integrated graphics, but still...