AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns

[notty22]

This post sheds some light on where Tegra 2 stands, its a success imo.
http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4011

 

[shangshang]

I heard the exact same thing 1 year ago. I remain skeptical.

you're joking right? NV stock is going through the roof because of Tegra design win. sorry bud but if you fall asleep in the tech world in 1 year, you wake up in another timezone

 

[brybir]

you're joking right? NV stock is going through the roof because of Tegra design win. sorry bud but if you fall asleep in the tech world in 1 year, you wake up in another timezone

Well "going through the roof" is certainly relative. If you bought this stock in the latter half of 2006 through the early part of 2008, you are still out significantly. The stock has a few more bucks to add before it is significantly improved over what it was, and it has a lot more bucks to go before it is "going through the roof".

Best I can tell, the market is reacting to the settlements as well as upcoming earnings hype based on forcast. To say that the stock price change is solely or even mostly due to design wins is just your speculation.



As far as tegra 2, it is not the only player in the field and in fact it is going to face some fierce competition from some very large companies spending tons of money in this sector including TI, Samsung, Qualcomm, Intel, Broadcom, Marvell, Apple and Freescale. And those are only the ones I can think off of the top of my head. It should be a good fight, but it is far far far to early to start declaring "winners' in this field.

 

[Wreckage]

Well "going through the roof" is certainly relative. If you bought this stock in the latter half of 2006 through the early part of 2008, you are still out significantly.

Not really as they had a stock split during that time.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1186700969989.html

 

[Wreckage]

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx

One of our sources, a former executive within the company was less than kind in his texts: "Dirk touched everything into Gold at DEC. In AMD, everything after K7 turned into Sh*t." When asked to elaborate, we were told that "Dirk and Hector run the company to the ground by selling the family jewlery. Dirk did not believe in Cellphone business and gave everything to BroadCom and Qualcomm. We lost Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and look who is now taking all the deals. Graphzilla." [Graphzilla was the nickname for nVidia on my previous publication, The INQ].

Wow

 

[at80eighty]

when i read the news - my first honest-to-goodness thought was "i bet Wreckage posted a thread about this with his concern already".

 

[jrodson69]

If Bulldozer turn out to be less than a massive leap over Phenom we can pretty much kiss goodbye competition in x86 CPUs.

I disagree. There will always be a market for $99 quad-core chips. Intel won't go that low. I'm shocked the new SB chips are so cheap (relatively) for Intel. $225 buys a lot of punch for an Intel CPU these days. Without AMD it would be $1000 just like the "Extreme Edition" chips and we'd get much slower innovation.

Despite all the grumblings around these forums I see the high-end Phenom chips doing pretty darn well against Intel's high-end offerings. I don't think Bulldozer needs to be a Pentium 4 -> Core Duo type transition performance-wise to be successful. Just my two cents.

 

[badb0y]

It's tough to be a CEO of a company that barely breaks even or even loses money. :-/

 

[blastingcap]

I am concerned about the long-term viability of AMD as a competitor in the gaming market. Sure, AMD can survive as a bottom feeder, but that is irrelevant to me as a gamer. At the gaming-grade CPU level and above, INTC is obviously not going to let up the pressure and has stormed back in the server market, not just in desktops and laptops. NVDA meanwhile had Fermi problems but muddled through and has a deathgrip on the non-gaming portion of the high-end graphics market. Even in the gaming market where NVDA trails in DX11, NVDA has great mindshare and is highly competitive and a big architectural advantage right now, particularly in geometry, though that last part is not going to be decisive unless console games start exploiting it. Lastly, AMD stupidly sold off its mobile division, whereas NVDA is poised to (finally) enter it in a big way.

Bottom line: I hope AMD gets its act together and keeps competition healthy in the marketplace, else we will all end up paying higher prices.

 

[Idontcare]

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx



Wow

If you think about it though, AMD cannot resign itself to merely "evolving" into something that is competitive with Intel in both performance and profits.

They are holding their own in the GPU marketspace but the margins do not make for a sustainable business policy there either.

They need/needed a revolution to spark what is needed to truly get out of the rut they are in.

ATI purchase was 5yrs ago. Core2 was 5 yrs ago. At some point people are going to get serious about asking "is it reasonable, and not mere hope, to expect a recovery from AMD?".

 

[SirPauly]

That's what fusion was created for in my mind-set. But, had trouble with them selling off that tech to Qualcomm, especially when the boon was in target range. Really think Intel and AMD never expected ARM to be the serious player they are.

 

[bryanW1995]

Things are not looking good for AMD if BD is a flop. Look for a restructuring or buyout by a major player.

from reading anand's short article on it today I wonder if they aren't planning to sell the company to ATIC?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4123/what-a-day-amds-ceo-dirk-meyer-resigns

 

[bryanW1995]

If Bulldozer turn out to be less than a massive leap over Phenom we can pretty much kiss goodbye competition in x86 CPUs.

it's tough to read the tea leaves, but from what I've seen from jfamd I'd expect bd to clock to around 4.5 or so and be ~ phenom2 clock/clock. SB looks to clock about the same and is 30-40% faster clock/clock. so SB will stomp BD in 4 core apps but in highly multi-threaded apps (like in servers or DC) BD will probably be much stronger, at least until skt 2011 comes out later this year.

 

[kyniskos]

According to this http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601108&sid=afBXC0DzsLXM there was disagreement between him and the Board, with the Board wanting to be more aggressive about growing the company. He and his team had just delivered a plan to the Board for the future of the company. He's delivered well in the 2 years he's been at the wheel. I can't help but wondering if the Board think his goal has been to much at lowering the debts, and to little at expanding gross product. It could also be that he simply preferred to pay back debt rather then issue dividends.

 

[Idontcare]

from reading anand's short article on it today I wonder if they aren't planning to sell the company to ATIC?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4123/what-a-day-amds-ceo-dirk-meyer-resigns

I don't know about ATIC...hard to see the opportunity for synergy to come from an acquisition like that (versus ATIC just become a majority shareholder through standard market actions)...but I could definitely see this being a case where AMD has been tendered an offer from some existing big-name IDM but Dirk steadfastly and in no uncertain terms said no (internally) but the BoD wants the offer to be considered/pursued/negotiated so they told Dirk "step-up or get out of the way" and Dirk elected to get out of the way post-haste.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/10/07/amd-denies-oracle-buyout-rumour/1

I bet Oracle wanted to buy AMD nearly coincident to their acquisition of SUN...and possibly they still want to but Dirk was blocking the negotiations.

Funny how AMD has a big push to blogosphere everything...exactly what Ellison lamented about in regards to SUN.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtrader...on-sun-execs-were-astonishingly-bad-managers/

Ellison says Sun’s management “made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price.”

He had harsh words for the way former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and former Chairman Scott McNealy ran their company. “The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” Ellison said. “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

I see parallels to AMD, and I firmly believe Oracle is/was trying to buy AMD. That Dirk has suddenly resigned suggests to me that he was blocking it, or the deal fell through and the BoD is super pissed at Dirk's role in the situations outcome.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I disagree. There will always be a market for $99 quad-core chips. Intel won't go that low.....Despite all the grumblings around these forums I see the high-end Phenom chips doing pretty darn well against Intel's high-end offerings.

I just upped about 12 systems from 965P/65nm C2Ds to 785G/PII 940s for very little money and am impressed by the amount of performance for the $.
Going EP45/45nm C2Q would have cost a LOT more.

 

[Wreckage]

I see parallels to AMD, and I firmly believe Oracle is/was trying to buy AMD. That Dirk has suddenly resigned suggests to me that he was blocking it, or the deal fell through and the BoD is super pissed at Dirk's role in the situations outcome.

That seems to be the current rumor circulating. That he was in the way of a buyout. If that's true, I wonder how long until we find out who and when.

I don't think ATIC would help them much, other than giving them cash. I think they need a company that can help them expand into new markets and capitalize on their current technology.

Selling their mobile business to Qualcomm was obviously a huge mistake. I don't know what they will have to do to get back into that market. But they really need a presence there. I think they also dropped the ball on their "all-in-wonder" line. They could have been in every set-top box and "enhanced" TV out there.

Strange days indeed.

 

[SirPauly]

http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/...rap-amd-intel-myspace/?boxes=Homepagechannels

It seems that the board had problems with growth and when seeing the growth potential in the smart phones and tablets has to drive them in a frenzy, imho.

 

[Wreckage]

http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/...rap-amd-intel-myspace/?boxes=Homepagechannels

It seems that the board had problems with growth and when seeing the growth potential in the smart phones and tablets has to drive them in a frenzy, imho.

"board chairman Bruce Claflin said that Meyer wasn’t the right person to lead AMD through its next phase of “significant growth… market leadership and… superior financial returns.”

Wow that Bruce guy sure can shovel it.

 

[busydude]

Wow that Bruce guy sure can shovel it.

May be he was right or wrong.. there is no point in judging. For all we know, his decisions are purely in the interest of his company.

 

[Keysplayr]

IMHO, it was an Ginormous mistake for AMD to sell off it's mobile chip biz. I mean, how do you sell off something, when that something is the direction the entire tech world is heading toward? Why would you do that? I'm sure there was a good reason, but I can't fathom what it was.

 

[Genx87]

IMHO, it was an Ginormous mistake for AMD to sell off it's mobile chip biz. I mean, how do you sell off something, when that something is the direction the entire tech world is heading toward? Why would you do that? I'm sure there was a good reason, but I can't fathom what it was.

The dumbest part is they sold it for so little. Even for AMD 65 million is a drop in the bucket.

 

[SirPauly]

Imho,

I was surprised by that move but their future play was Fusion and may of decided to place their resources there and were in such debt and confusion. I thought he did a very respectable job and the company was moving forward -- not backwards. This may be a knee-jerk move by the board.

 

[Idontcare]

IMHO, it was an Ginormous mistake for AMD to sell off it's mobile chip biz. I mean, how do you sell off something, when that something is the direction the entire tech world is heading toward? Why would you do that? I'm sure there was a good reason, but I can't fathom what it was.

Let's revisit history.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/AMD-Sells-Handset-Division-to-Qualcomm-for-65-Million/

Jan 20, 2009: Advanced Micro Devices has agreed to sell its struggling handset division to Qualcomm for $65 million, according to the chip makers.

AMD inherited the ATI’s handset division in 2006 and the division had underperformed since then and the losses have had a significant impact on AMD’s bottom line.

AMD originally inherited the handset business when it bought graphics maker ATI in 2006 for $5.6 billion. The handset division was original part of ATI’s consumer electronics business and that division has underperformed for the last two years.

Last week, when AMD announced that it would eliminate 1,100 jobs, the company also announced that it plans to take a $622 million impairment charge related to the 2006 acquisition of ATI.

It's early 2009. You are bleeding cash. You have an asset that has depreciated like crazy because it simply hasn't been profitable or viable, for years, up until then. You just laid off 1,000 (!) employees. And it is the middle of a "great recession".

What do you do? Keep shoveling money at a program with a proven track record of losing money? Or do you try and do some triage, stifle the cash loss, and heck if you find some dope with some cash who will actually buy your money-pit from you then you sell it and raise some cash?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It is easy to say with hindsight now that Dirk/AMD should have kept shoveling money into the money-pit...but if Dirk/AMD had proposed that to their investors at an analyst meeting in Q1 2009 I think Dirk would have been forced out even sooner.

He had to do something different, and he did. That the BoD is coming back now and using this as an argument against retaining Dirk going forward seems ludicrous, its pure smokescreen.

We have yet to hear what the real reasoning is. Kinda like when Pat Gelsinger left Intel but Intel had not yet declared Larrabee dead as a discreet GPU...those dots weren't connected until later.

 

[Wreckage]

Looks like he's just a fall guy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20028285-92.html

Report: AMD's Meyer fired over failure to target mobile devices