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  • bug77 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    For a little perspective: AMD has paid $5.4bn for ATI and today the whole company us worth $1.43bn (https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD+Key+Statistic...

    They're probably preparing to get rid of the CPU business altogether.
  • Friendly0Fire - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    I still think that the best thing that could happen to AMD would be for the whole company to be acquired by a strong mobile manufacturer like Qualcomm or Samsung. They'd get a lot more weight with the foundries (or even their own foundries) instead of being stuck at the end of the queue, they'd have a huge backing in terms of money and brain power and they wouldn't have to worry about diversifying in the mobile sphere since the parent company would already be handling that (though there'd probably be some very nice technology transfer on both sides).
  • michael2k - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    For that price I imagine Apple would be an interested buyer too, seeing as how much graphics underlie all their products too (Retina iPad Pro!).
  • Mr Perfect - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    The x86 license is non-transferable though. If anyone buys AMD, they're only going to get the GPU, ARM and miscellaneous other bits.
  • Zoomer - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Easy, it'll just be a reverse buy out where amd buys the acquirer, changes it's name to the accquirer and the shares are distributed to the acquirers original shareholders.
  • ChefJeff789 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    ^This is the killer. I would love to see Samsung pick up the graphics division, but I would want them to breath new life into the CPU division as well. Can't do that without the license.
  • izmanq - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    no way, samsung known for selling overpriced shit, it's best if google buy AMD :D
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Then you`ll get ads right in BIOS.
  • Mathos - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Except for the part where the license is transferable. Which has been the case since the beginning. Don't comment on such things unless you've actually read the agreement and know for sure. They're required to transfer the license to the new company before leaving the x86 market.
  • Mr Perfect - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    That's great if it's true, the last time AMD was looking to split up(GF spinoff IIRC) it was reported that the license was non transferable. This is the first time I've heard otherwise. Do you have a link?
  • Kvaern2 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    VIA has a license which they got from buying Cyrix.
  • purre - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    What license are you talking about? Licensed from who?

    There is no such thing as a "license" for the x86 ISA. Perhaps you are confusing this with the fact that Intel and AMD has a cross-patent-licensing agreement. This covers ALL of their patents, meaning that both companies are secure of being sued for patent infringement by the other one.
  • bug77 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Well, they did have both a foundry (spun off as Global Foundries) and a solution for mobile graphics (Imageon - sold to Qualcomm, went on to become the Adreno line we know today).
  • iamkyle - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    It would make more sense for a company like Intel to buy them. Intel has the R&D muscle to drive the graphics division forward and even for it to enhance their onboard portfolio.

    They also have the cash to push the graphics division forward to deal with the titan that is nVidia.
  • Mondozai - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    "I still think that the best thing that could happen to AMD would be for the whole company to be acquired by a strong mobile manufacturer like Qualcomm or Samsung. "

    And watch their GPU prowess get lost chasing pixels on 5" screens?

    No thanks. Intel could be a possible buyer. They have enough of a desktop focus to understand that dGPUs matter. Then again maybe they are pushing the iGPU route until the bitter end.

    Whatever the case, AMD's GPU business will be bought. The Chinese will be interested in it for supercomputing purposes and since these are now issues of national security, the USG isn't going to sit idly by and watch that happen. A buyer will be found sooner or later.
  • Gigaplex - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Qualcomm already bought GPU tech from ATI - it's no coincidence that Adreno is an anagram of Radeon. It's not likely that they'd kill the desktop prowess. Besides, the 5" screens tend to have more pixels than desktop screens on average these days, so the physical size of the screen is irrelevant.
  • Samus - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    I suspect they will go the way of 3Dfx, unfortunately.
  • Impulses - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    3dfx faded out pretty darn quick... Yeah, guess I could see that. Would be driver hell for a lot of enthusiasts.
  • UltraWide - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    nVidia bought what remained of 3Dfx.
  • gruffi - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    No way. AMD is much more than 3Dfx ever was.
  • nandnandnand - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    "They're probably preparing to get rid of the CPU business altogether."

    Instead of quitting after Bulldozer, they created Zen. And they moved Zen from 2017 to 2016 instead of creating K12 ARM chips.
  • gruffi - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Yeah, that's why they develop Zen and K12. LOL. Brain™.
  • eanazag - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Dismissing the whole CPU division to sell the GPU division would destroy Play Station and Xbox One in the short term. Plus, any other contracts they have. It was stupid of AMD to displace Nvidia from the chipset business. They're not Intel. I think it wsas stupid for Intel too, but it didn't effect Intel's cash flow and competitiveness.

    This is a good idea to reorg the graphics division. We need to get rid of holding on to 5 year old hardware to fill in the bottom of the graphics market offerings. This is where they have failed.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Microcenter is still selling the 8400 GS.
  • Michael Bay - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    Do you seriously believe that Microsoft and Sony did not provision for that in contracts? AMD got chosen because it was desperate for cash and could work for less in the first place, there is no way chip design in both consoles belongs to them.
  • Toss3 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    "after 9 years the feel is necessary" - the feel is strong in this one
  • mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    So have any laptops with Carrizo launched? I am desperate for Carrizo reviews.
  • Communism - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Looks like the first publicly shown step of ATi cutting off the rotting corpse of AMD from itself.
  • toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    I think you are underestimating how long ago this was planned. I have a feeling this was why he came back to AMD. The bulldozer core was influenced by gpu designers and it didn't work well.

    They should consider hbm for the apu chips to compete with Iris.
  • plonk420 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    yes, this excites me much :o
  • phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    First paragraph, last sentence, there's some words missing, me thinks, after ATI:

    "In AMD’s eyes the future would be fusion, and it would be ATI who would the missing pieces that would in time make AMD’s future whole."
  • phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Second paragraph:

    "reaching a level of quickly AMD"

    Should be "quality", maybe?
  • phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Paragraph 7, missing the word "means" after AMD?

    "just what graphics being an integral part of AMD at a high level"
  • phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Same paragraph, too many "is":

    "graphics is truly is everywhere"
  • phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    And I stopped caring about the article after that. There's several more typos, misprints, missing commas, and other errors in the text, making it very hard to take it seriously and to bother reading the rest. Several bits read more as stream-of-consciousness than professional writing.

    Please hire some proof-readers (or fire the current ones; they're not worth whatever you're paying them). The number of issues with the writing on this site has been increasing over the past few weeks/months, and it's starting to affect the image of this site.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Thank you for the feedback. As you may know, today is a very busy day and this had to be written up quickly.
  • thetuna - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    It's a 3 page article... how long does it take to proof-read once or twice?
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Honestly, I really wouldn't worry much about the grammar/spelling/typo trolls. Some of us prefer more content with typos over less content without them.
  • HighTech4US - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    This is the start of AMD spinning off the graphics division.

    The "Private equity to buy 20 per cent of AMD" rumor makes more sense in light of this announcement.
  • pogostick - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    "Spinning off the graphics division"... Do you really think this makes sense? Are they also going to throw away HSA? Which company would design the console chips? How would the custom compute designs work without the graphics parallelism component? Are they ditching that too? What would be left? Just Zen with HBM? I don't think so. That would be the last straw for AMD.

    Graphics has been evolving over many years into compute in its own right. HBM allows seamless mixing between CPU & GPU programming, and AMD is the only company on the planet positioned to implement it effectively.

    I think this move will end up being for the purpose of creating discrete GPUs without any of the unnecessary compute baggage. Meaning, they will be extremely narrowly focused on the pc gaming market, the way Nvidia is. Meanwhile, anything gleaned from one side of this coin can be shared with the other side.

    Personally, I would be extremely interested in a workstation grade APU product that combines Zen, GCN, and HBM. I think that is where AMD could create its own new market.
  • pogostick - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    *HSA allows seamless mixing... but HBM kinda works here as well. It's what I was thinking as far as sharing memory structures.
  • HighTech4US - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    Graphics is the only part of AMD that has value.

    Why do you think that AMD can't contract with the spun-off company for their graphics needs.

    Remember they did spin off the fabs that became Global Foundries and then used Global Foundries for fabbing parts.
  • pogostick - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    "Why do you think that AMD can't contract with the spun-off company for their graphics needs"

    Because their "graphics needs" are integral to future custom work and APUs. It's not a plug-n-play component. How many console wins would AMD have without a CPU core? How many imbedded solutions contracts would AMD have without a GPU core? Splitting these apart puts both halves at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. It's stupid. Keeping them together is the only thing that makes AMD potentially viable.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    AMD needs to focus on making their own product. Something like a steam box. Call it a radeon box. They are years too late with this. They jsut finally released an SoC that contains a southbridge. But it still has no SSD controller. They need to be able to connect directly to flash chips so they can cut half the cost of a SSD of their BOM. Given the size of the Fury chip, it would only take an additional 10% die space to add two carrizo modules to such a huge die. With 12GB of unified HBM2 they can build a perfect fairly high end radeon box. And keep all the profits of the entire system, instead of just the SoC. But what they really need is a 400 square mm SoC with 2 modules and 8 GB of unified RAM and 128GB of flash. That would make a great entry level radeon box, and the cost wouldnt be much higher than the PS4's BOM. They need to start churning these out, generation after generation. Eventually they will take off. No other company can put out such potentially powerful low cost gaming machines.
  • at80eighty - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    I think that's what the Project Quantum POC was about. And the Nano is a good step in that direction
  • lefty2 - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    HSA was a complete waste of time from a financial point of view. Look at the amount of time and money that was invested in it. Then look at the payback - there are zero commercial applications that make use of HSA (sorry, tech demos don't count). I mean who's going to target software for Kavari/Carrizo - that's represents about less than 1% of the PC market?
  • pogostick - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    HSA gives AMD the ability to very easily put together custom designs that mix x86 ARM and GCN components as they please. All of which can use the same HBM simultaneously. They spent the time and money up front instead of reinventing the wheel for each design. It also makes for some really interesting potential in super-computing.
  • lefty2 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    HSA is a software programming model related to OpenCL. It has nothing to do with ARM, or HBM
  • pogostick - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    "It has nothing to do with ARM, or HBM"
    not directly, but yes it does.
  • Mondozai - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    This is good news - but it is long overdue.

    The reality is that AMD's focus would benefit greatly from being a GPU only company. If they went that route, they would start releasing GPUs that are not only good but great. Zen is too little too late. Intel's iGPU performance grows by 40% per year or so. Their latest iris pro on Skylake is at GTX 750 levels and imagine how good it will be on Kaby lake, to say nothing of Cannonlake.

    I expect this is a first step to either branching the GPU unit out or selling it completely.
    Whatever happens, AMD's current strategy has reached the end of the line a long, long time ago.
  • Nagorak - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    I don't think Intel's iGPU performance is going to continue increasing at that rate. They're approaching the point where they're just going to be hamstrung by memory performance. Also, how many people even use the integrated GPU to actually game? I understand the drivers are not even very good.

    To be completely honest, iGPUs are still extremely unimpressive at this point, whether from Intel or AMD. Their performance is still way too low end to be capable of much of anything.
  • ET - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Drivers are pretty good at this point, and if people get GTX 750 level of performance on a low end CPU they'd probably use it. The market for mid-range graphics is larger than for high-end ones. A lot of laptops come with discrete NVIDIA chips which are less powerful than this.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    iGPUs only make sense for tiny form factors like laptops and even then it would be beneficial in a laptop, especially one with a metal case, to have the heat spread out more by having a separate GPU.
  • Asomething - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Yes but that is only at the top end of intel's cpu's. they would make an absolute killing if they scaled cpu and igpu in opposite directions, say an i3/i5 with iris pro then the i7 gets a lesser igpu and a dedicated card. hell they would rip a lot of of the low end straight from amd's nvidia in no time like that, they would also be able to up the price of lower end hardware a bit and profit more.
  • BurntMyBacon - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    They could take it a step further and offer a single price point per level (Core-M, i3, i5, i7). The models within a level would differ simply on how much of the chip is allocated to CPU vs GPU.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    "Zen is too little too late."

    Are you kidding? Skylake was a colossal disappointment compared with the hype, at least so far on the desktop.

    Intel has been dribbling out tiny improvements for long enough that AMD should be able to catch up.
  • medi03 - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    I've just checked that AMD still hasn't made anything that beats my old i5 750. And that is a bloody 45nm chip.

    It's quite said, frankly. let's hope Zen delivers....
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    draw call comparison between 4 GHz FX 8350 and Intel 4690K:

    Intel DX 11 multithread with GTX 970: 2.1m
    AMD DX 11 multithread with GTX 970: 2.1m

    Intel 4690K with DX 12 and GTX 970: 14.5m
    AMD FX with DX 12 and GTX 970: 16.0m

    i5 760 vs. FX 8350, Anandtech CPU bench:

    Cinebench multithread: i5 = 15060, FX = 22674
    x264 benchmark 2nd pass: i5 = 22.4 fps, FX = 41.5
    x264 encode 2nd pass: i5 = 21.8, FX = 44
    POV-Ray: i5 = 2847, FX = 5008
    Par2 Multi-Threaded: i5 = 28.8, FX = 16.1
    7-zip: i5 = 11641, FX = 23225
    Photoshop retouch (lower better): i5 = 17.9, FX = 13.3
    Blender (lower better): i5 = 57.1, FX = 44.6
    Excel (lower better): i5 = 18.4, FX = 12.6
    Sorensen Squeeze (lower better): i5 = 120.4, FX = 77.4
    WinRar (lower better): i5 = 96, FX = 74.9
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    note: Par2 is a lower is better benchmark
  • Dribble - Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - link

    If you keep cutting back staff you can't run all those different teams. Sounds like a lot of cutting back to focus on a lot fewer things which is what they must do. Like others say also makes the gpu, or cpu divisions easier to sell independently of each other.
  • cjb110 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    This does make sense, esp when considering the weird organisation situation you described they were in.
  • Morpheus1 - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Raja, sorry to break it to you buddy, but this changes nothing. According to insiders the professional graphics (Radeon) group has been operating standalone for all practical purposes for the past two years and yet has been losing share to NVidia. Your marketing is hype, your sales force is a sham, and your exclusive partnership with Sapphire is a failure so good luck!
  • BurntMyBacon - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    Hmm. Well, Marketing, Business Development (Sales Force?), and ISV Relations were not under his guidance for the past two years, so I don't really think we can say how those will be affected by this yet. Now for your other points ...
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    I guess they should focus more on fraud then. It has worked so well for Intel and Nvidia.
  • Wolfpup - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    DRIVERS. DRIVERS. <-- This is why they're behind Nvidia. Their hardware is always fine. I mean maybe Nvidia is ahead more of the time, but who cares. I don't buy AMD GPUs because EVERY SINGLE TIME I do I have driver problems and they only support their hardware for five minutes. It's sort of getting to the point where I almost trust Intel more on this than AMD.

    They've literally known they had this problem since the 90s, most people ignored it and pretended you were a "fanboy" if you pointed it out, and...they still have it, like almost 20 years later. I still find their hardware to be cutting edge and awesome, but...

    (And PLEASE someone kill off switchable graphics! Nvidia can't do it right, much less...)
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    I haven't had any trouble with my 7870 but I have had driver issues with my Fermi card. One of those drivers caused Fermi cards to brick, too. That is at least the second example of a card-bricking Nvidia driver.
  • webdoctors - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    Do you run Linux? My ATI cards are a paperweight when I boot into Linux. Main reason I stopped buying them.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    No, I don't use Linux. I tried five flavors and the low-grade UI in all of them turned me off. I do my real work in OS X and my entertainment (gaming and such) in Windows 7.
  • iwod - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link

    Some people say is a Skylake is a disappointment. Let's just assume it is and no compiler will help it. ( I am expecting the big change in Skylake's Uarch will require compiler support to gain 10+% performance per clock )

    If not, may be we have reached the high point of IPC and diminish return without bumping up Ghz and Multi Core?
    If that is the case Zen will be very close to Haswell, and the Zen+ coming after Zen will get very close to Skylake.

    This means AMD have lots of room to work on for Server CPU, where Intel are making big bucks.
  • CuriousHomeBody - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link

    I've read a lot of comments on how this is a setup to splitting or selling the company. I don't get it. The Fury X would have taken the performance crown from NVIDIA if they hadn't jumped first releasing the 980ti before it was expected. (not counting the Titan)

    If AMD can come that close to a win when it's graphics people are answering to 5 different heads than simplifying there control and directions to 1 head sounds like an excellent idea.
  • webdoctors - Sunday, September 13, 2015 - link

    But the Fury X was/is irrelevant. Due to the exotic materials (HBM), chip size and cost it couldn't have been expected (internally) to sell in high margin. The halo effect from having the front runner brand would've been marginal since the other chips in the lineup aren't using the same architecture.

    They'll need to narrow the gap in the mid-range that drives the large volume. That's gonna be tough.
  • johnpombrio - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link

    Sorry guys. No one buys a company that has a capital value of a billion dollars and is two billion dollars in debt. Plus the company has lost large amounts of money each quarter for over a year now. Not exactly the best way to spend money is to buy that sort of mess. No, AMD will most likely be bought out by some hedge fund or "investment firm" and sold off into little chunks to various companies.

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