AMD cuts 5% of global employees

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in hardware on (#Q32M)
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.
Reply 3 comments

Come on, AMD (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-10-11 00:02 (#Q3P8)

Get your act together.

Re: Come on, AMD (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-10-12 17:23 (#Q8K8)

For many years, AMD kept Intel honest and largely pushed the performance to what it is today. With AMD, you would typically get faster clocks, more cores, larger dies, and a cheaper cost. Intel was forced to compete.

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...

Re: Come on, AMD (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-10-13 22:43 (#QD0T)

At the highest levels, AMD appear to have stopped trying to compete and started looking for "efficiencies" within their business. Looking back to the 1980s, they're going to make themselves so efficient they can't actually build anything.

My last AMD CPU was an AMD166, unfortunately. Every time I upgrade they've made another cock-up. I'd love to buy an 8-core AMD CPU with a few gigs of RAM - top performance isn't my goal, it's basically efficient use of my money. They used to be the place to go.