News AMD takes a $403 million loss for 2014

It's never good when AMD lurch from crisis to crisis when Intel and Nvidia seem to be fine during the same time period. To me that implies they're doing something wrong that simply isn't getting them the market share. AMD are needed in the market to provide competition.

I think they're making good headway in the APU market, with a solid product that does the job really well. Outside of that, they seem to lose their way, releasing products that either lack the pure performance needed to compete, or have that performance at the expense of running hot, loud and drawing more power than the competition. They really need to go back to the drawing board and start again - painful I know, but maybe necessary? Just look at the signatures on an enthusiast board like this, and it's mainly Intel CPUs and a majority Nvidia GPUs (although not as clear cut as the CPU divide). Steam's hardware survey paints the same picture.

As for their future outlook, haven't the PS4/XBone APU sales been a part of this year's entire finances? Why are they expecting an increase in that area? Surely sales of the consoles will tick along at roughly the same rate, if not slower?

 

If the PS4/Xbox one sales stay constant but the rest of your company shrinks then they become a larger percentage of your total income. I think AMD are also in the running for a nintendo Wii U replacement, but doubt that will happen in 2015.

 

There was rumours before that this would be a bad quarter for them but never thought they would lose this level of cash. 400mil a year loses is unsustainable for most businesses.

 

I'm sorry but I think we might se AMD go down in the near future, A shame really because it leaves Nvidia and Intel without any decent competition in the GPU and CPU markets.

I for one haven't bought and AMD product for many years because of the heat problems they seem to have and the lack of driver support they had, although this latter part has been rectified. I think there's still a mountain of problems with this company and they need a radical overhaul to sort themselves out. Otherwise prices will go up without competition.

 

Fair point, but you know a company is in dire straits when they're spinning that as a positive...

As for Nintendo? Who knows what they're up to, they seem to release hardware updates willy nilly and market them as the NEW NEW 3DSXLi. Or something.

 

I still think/hope that if they can capitalise on their head start in the APU market and dominant position in the console market the future could be reasonably rosy for AMD.

They may or may not continue to struggle to be competitive in the standalone GPU market, but that might not matter too much if they can create and market an APU that can play modern console ports/equivalent games comfortably at 1080.

 

Rumour mill is grinding out that Samsung might be looking to buy AMD, can't see it myself...

 

I can see them swooping in for scraps, patents and certain divisions. Not the whole company though.

 

Samsung are rumoured to be after blackberry and AMD but the rumours do not disclose which parts of it. Id imagine the GPU side of AMD along with the messanger side of blackberry they are the only 2 bits of each company worth buying.

APU market is not big enough for AMD to sustain a business. Performance is still not there at 1080p which is the bear min on the desktop pc gaming sector. If your not gaming on a pc Intel is still the chip you want in your pc. Some people at work who know nothing about pcs know Intel is good and theres nothing else worth buying. Even though its just for facebook.

AMDs rep with none computer literate people is really at a none existant stage now.

 

Dunno, Samsung are heavily in to the mobile/SoC sector, so I can see interest in what AMD are doing with APUs. Full fat GPUs is unlikely though. I'd reckon that if true they'd probably want AMD portioned off and only take a little bit.

Interestingly though, if AMD went down wouldn't NVIDIA then be stuck in an anti-trust monopoly position and told to fund AMD's GPU business or something else odd?

 

I can see Samsung wanting *bits* of AMD [AMD's turn at the various fabs, their SoC/APU stuff, patents], I just can't see them wanting to buy AMD, lock stock and barrel like a lot of the rumours were suggesting...

 

Excuse my ignorance, but whenever topics like this come up I always see posts along the lines of "AMD needs to succeed so Intel won't stagnate/price gouge/monopolize the market." Well... Intel is already in a position to do that and they aren't. AMD probably doesn't even exist on the "Things we care about" spreadsheet at Intel HQ. Intel has completely dominated AMD in practically every facet of the market where they both compete.

Honestly I'd love to see AMD come out swinging with some great products but wouldn't be too sad to see their CPU division go away completely. They need to hit a grand slam in multiple markets to pull themselves out of this hole.

I think in the coming years it's more likely that AMD will become a much smaller company. The samsung thing doesn't sound too far fetched, as AMD could look to sell off as many extraneous aspects of their business to stay afloat and fund whatever smaller niche role they look to fill in the future.

 

I think it's a case of AMD [and to a a lesser extent VIA] provide enough on-paper competition that Intel isn't seen as a monopoly, even if they are effectively a monopoly and have [iirc] been found abusing their dominant position a few times...

AMD going south would see them going from 'Dominant' to an outright [from a regulatory viewpoint] Monopoly and thus could be force to split up.

 

And NVIDIA. They'd be in serious trouble as it's a two-horse race in desktop/laptop GPU land as well.

 

Can't really split nvidia into anything as they could argue that there gpu patents are required for all business levels. Intel would struggle a bit though enough wihh the success of ARM not even Intel are close to a monopoly when that is included.