[Raqia]

Painful delays in execution rumored:

VR-Zone

[Zaphod]

Or a bullish and aggressive rescheduling of the roadmap, leading to the inevitable cancellation of some interim/transitional products.

Whichever way you want to spin it.

[Raqia]

I agree. The rumored gains are nice, but AMD's main problem has always been execution. Keller being back in charge is a very hopeful change though.

[3dilettante]

Keller's the greatest CPU architect of all time?
Well, I guess that means there's no pressure then.

That piece looks like it has at best a muddled understanding of some of the things we already know or strongly suspect, so I don't know how much to lend credence to anything new this text brings to the discussion.

[Raqia]

Originally Posted by 3dilettante

Keller's the greatest CPU architect of all time?
Well, I guess that means there's no pressure then.

That piece looks like it has at best a muddled understanding of some of the things we already know or strongly suspect, so I don't know how much to lend credence to anything new this text brings to the discussion.

It's filled w/ sensation and written w/o citations, but for what it's worth, Keller is still very very good.

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by 3dilettante

Keller's the greatest CPU architect of all time?
Well, I guess that means there's no pressure then.

That piece looks like it has at best a muddled understanding of some of the things we already know or strongly suspect, so I don't know how much to lend credence to anything new this text brings to the discussion.

Out of curiosity I looked at the author's name, and I saw Theo Valich.

[AlexV]

Originally Posted by 3dilettante

Keller's the greatest CPU architect of all time?

I'd expect this to have been a tongue in cheek reference to Kanye...then again, given the author, probably not. Sadly, this gunk seems to have proliferated, and everybody is waiting for the savior Jim Keller to bestow his magical light upon the ignorant AMD engineers and lead them to victory. Kindof like how it was Bergman, Skinner and some other marketing guy that saved ATI by designing and implementing rather impressive GPUs. Yep yep.

[Davros]

Amd has invested in these dudes
http://www.ciinow.com/

[egoless]

Sudden CFO resignation causes stock price tumble http://arstechnica.com/business/2012...o-resignation/. Not looking good.

[Alexko]

Nah, Ars is blowing this out of proportion. The stock dropped from $4.0 to $3.5, but then bounced back up to $3.7. No big deal.

[AlphaWolf]

And now the stock is at the highest point since august...

[Alexko]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

And now the stock is at the highest point since august...

No, still at $3.7, you have to look at after-hours trading, that's when the drop and subsequent bounce happened.

[Lightman]

Originally Posted by Alexko

No, still at $3.7, you have to look at after-hours trading, that's when the drop and subsequent bounce happened.

Apparently a lot of curren/ex AMD folks say it is good news he's going.
I know not the most reputable source but still:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...n-siemens.aspx

[tunafish]

When the new boss fires the CFO, it often means that some kind of "creative" accounting had been going on. This alone is worth the price drop.

As to the BSN article, CFO is typically sort of like the XO in the military. If the rank and file hate the Commander/CEO, it often leads to subpar performance. So, all the shitty decisions that the commander has to do get passed through the XO so that they all hate him and not the commander. AMD went through some pretty hard financial times, they absolutely had to fire people, cut benefits, and generally do mean things. If the rank and file didn't hate the CFO I'd be very surprised.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the CFO is innocent or competent. Just that no matter how good engineers the interviewees were, you couldn't reasonably expect them to say anything else.

[Pete]

Couldn't it be simply that the CFO wants to be a CEO, and he won't get to be that at AMD anytime soon? Not that I'd take corporate PR at face value, but that was mentioned as his reason for leaving.

[imaxx]

I highly doubt that.
Unless he is a crying kid that says 'i dont command so i dont play with you'...

at higher levels, you change work to get a better position, why would you bother to change for an equivalent -or lower- position?

We'll see if he immediately has a new position as a big CEO. Else, he just got kicked out by AMD and PR thrown the classic 'smoking cloud'.

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by Pete

Couldn't it be simply that the CFO wants to be a CEO, and he won't get to be that at AMD anytime soon? Not that I'd take corporate PR at face value, but that was mentioned as his reason for leaving.

That wasn't actually corporate PR that said that, that was press stories i.e. "sources close to..."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-an...201227683.html

[Davros]

Dave's been sent in to the thread for damage control

I see Amd still has no ceo of gaming goodness....

[cal_guy]

Originally Posted by tunafish

When the new boss fires the CFO, it often means that some kind of "creative" accounting had been going on. This alone is worth the price drop.

As to the BSN article, CFO is typically sort of like the XO in the military. If the rank and file hate the Commander/CEO, it often leads to subpar performance. So, all the shitty decisions that the commander has to do get passed through the XO so that they all hate him and not the commander. AMD went through some pretty hard financial times, they absolutely had to fire people, cut benefits, and generally do mean things. If the rank and file didn't hate the CFO I'd be very surprised.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the CFO is innocent or competent. Just that no matter how good engineers the interviewees were, you couldn't reasonably expect them to say anything else.

Well according to the press release "Seifert's departure is not based on any disagreement over the company's accounting principles or practices, or financial statement disclosures."

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Davros

Dave's been sent in to the thread for damage control

I see Amd still has no ceo of gaming goodness....

Yeah what is Rory's gamerscore anyway? Does he know why Colonel Christopher Blair was so named? Somebody needs to ask the hard questions there methinks.

[Pete]

Originally Posted by Dave Baumann

That wasn't actually corporate PR that said that, that was press stories i.e. "sources close to..."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-an...201227683.html

Mea culpa. I intended to cynically stretch the meaning of corp PR to include quotes from "sources," but I can't find the news piece that said Seifert was looking for CEO openings. It's not Ars or TR.

[I.S.T.]

Apparently it comes from the Wall Street Journal, but the tech report back link only gives a partial story. I dunno why, maybe WSJ walls off portions of their older articles now?

http://techreport.com/news/23594/amd...s-also-leaving TR link

[eastmen]

Its sad watching AMD fall apart

[Davros]

thankfully amd have a cunning plan
they allow reviewers to do a review about only the good parts of a product, then at a later date reviewers can publish the whole review

http://techreport.com/blog/23638/amd...elease-of-info

[Alexko]

Originally Posted by Davros

thankfully amd have a cunning plan
they allow reviewers to do a review about only the good parts of a product, then at a later date reviewers can publish the whole review

http://techreport.com/blog/23638/amd...elease-of-info

AMD must have hired Baldrick.

Seriously, though, I'm not sure this is such a bad idea. The CPU market is not what it used to be. Fifteen years ago, you could feel every upgrade, as it made MS Word smoother, every part of the OS, every application faster.

Now, if I gave you a Trinity-based computer, let you use it for a few days, and then suddenly swapped it for an Ivy Bridge one, would you even notice? If you frequently encode video, compile code or compress data, or conversely play games with the integrated GPU, sure, but otherwise you'd probably never know.

Yet reviewers have not fully adapted to this new state of things, so AMD is trying to nudge them in that direction. Somewhat awkwardly, perhaps, but from their perspective it makes a lot of sense to try.