It is no secret that AMD's board of directors and new executive ranks have plans to change the company into something very different that what the company once was. However, the pace at which former key staff is departing is rather surprising.
Bob Feldstein, vice president of business development and in charge of AMD's Boston Design Center, has left the company and is joining Nvidia as vice president of technology licensing at Nvidia. During his time at AMD, he was responsible for deals that included the integration of ATI graphics into the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360. Feldstein is the next in line of several other high profile departures, including John Bruno, Godfrey Cheng, as well as higher level executives that included Rick Bergman and Nigel Dessau.
While Bergman and Dessau are rumored to have been layoffs, and Bruno was accepted as a casualty during the layoff round late last year, key staff such as Cheng and Feldstein went to rivals or moved deeper into the field AMD is trying to reach. Bruno is now at Apple, Bergman is CEO of Synaptics, a developer of human interface solutions. Cheng, formerly a director in AMD's gaming division, is vice president of marketing at Synaptics.
Great tech with no marketing team to match is doomed to failure.
Just remember the Commodore Amiga.5 years ahead of anything in graphics , a whole decade in video and still did not sell fast to keep the company afloat.
in the words of p'diddy
They need to think that stream, they need to thinkin it the f' up
their attention is making affordable chips in a non normal environment outside of gaming, like powering up screens on things like casinos and such rather than push for the fastest everything.
Interesting that this guy went from the director of the gaming division at AMD to the VP of tech licensing.
for the WiiU, its most likely going to be an amd card(whether if its based of a 4870 or 6770 rumor i still dont know), for the other 2, they are still under the hood about how its actually going to turn out and nothing is totally official as they still have years before their release as nintendo has to prep for a holiday season during November release.
Those same engineers that have let intel beat AMD down so far they are irreverent in the CPU market? They should've been the first one to get canned.
And for those who missed the memo, AMD CEO called it quits months ago. Said they were going to "redirect" their focus on low-end market and stop trying to compete with intel in the enthusiast / high end market.
You must be a random hater because the entire 4000, 5000, 6000 & 7000 series of graphics cards must have completely gone over your head. You could argue Nvidia would eventually top them or be a bit better from the getgo, but they are fantastic cards for their day. A 4870 was a value steal, 5870 held the crown for a solid amount of time and the following 6-7 series were always competitive in most all price ranges.
I can't speak for the bigger markets, but here I South Africa where I am the ATI cards win hands down on value for money. Their cards outpace Nvidia cards by a full step at each price point.
Actually that has more to do with management and board decisions. The beginning of the decline can be attributed to the leadership of Hector Ruiz when AMD put off 65nm production. That action alone gave Intel time to push out the Core 2 Duo while AMD had to rush to put out their 65nm Athlons that were actually slower than their predecessors.
The good people AMD has let go of or has had jump ship include ol ATI team members including the guy that brought us Eyefinity, and Dirk Meyer the one that brought us the original K7 architecture. Dirk was setting the place on the right path before they gave him the boot because he didn't want to focus on tablets till they got all their other shit in order.
Great tech with no marketing team to match is doomed to failure.
Just remember the Commodore Amiga.5 years ahead of anything in graphics , a whole decade in video and still did not sell fast to keep the company afloat.
A good company also needs good management. See Enron as an example.
You do not get it, the Buldozer architecture is brilliant! It is truly amazing and mindbogglingly great! What they did was re-make HT tech, but in a way where threads can run on the HT style cores without a specific command. If Intel could do this it would be a huge gamechanger for anyone who owns an i3 or i7. I cannot tell you how many programs I get so frustrated with because they simply cannot touch the resources available, meanwhile future AMD systems will not have this problem. The problem they do have is that when push came to shove the engineers were cuffed by the board who wanted a cheaper chip. They stuck with the same general idea that they wanted, but they paired it down to the point of useless by the time it made budget. If the board were to listen to their engineers then they would be better off.
No, not really. Nvidia has low-end video cards too, but their prices are far above the prices of similarly performing AMD video cards.