Official: AMD layoffs 10%; misses Q1 guidance.

Tuesday 08th April 2008, 12:25:00 PM, written by Arun

AMD has just confirmed that they will layoff 10% of their workforce amid lower than expected Q1 sales in all categories; they now expect revenue of $1.5B while analysts were forecasting $1.62B. Lower sales will also reduce fab utilization and thus gross margins, further compounding losses.

Credit where credit is due: The Inquirer broke the story first, while Fudzilla gave it much more comprehensive coverage afterwards; first by being the first to claim it would likely be a 10% cut rather than a 5% one, then by 'confirming' the layoffs, and finally by claiming AMD's Austin offices would be by far the most affected. Fudo's track record for management-level AMD rumours has been truly excellent for quite some time, so we'd tend to believe that last claim even though it hasn't been confirmed by AMD yet.

AMD's Austin team was responsible for Barcelona/Phenom, while also having worked with the California team on the original K8/Opteron. On the other hand, AMD's next-generation architecture, Bulldozer, is being worked on solely in California. It is unclear where AMD's Silverthorne competitor, Bobcat, is being worked on.

Our guess is that AMD has decided to terminate all long-term projects in Austin, while also aggressively laying off employees with subpar performance reviews. It seems likely that both Shanghai, the 45nm shrink of Barcelona, and Montreal, the 2009 refresh, were designed in Austin. It isn't clear where the 2009 incarnation of Fusion is being engineered, but we suspect it might not be there, just like Puma which was made at a smaller design center.

We look forward to getting more detailed financial information regarding AMD's Q1 results, especially in terms of breaking down CPU vs GPU weakness. We also wish the best of luck to those who are or will be affected by AMD's layoffs.

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amd ± layoffs, earnings, bulldozer

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