AMD CEO Denies Sale of Company and Assets

AMD's CEO Rory Read has issued a memo to company staff clarifying and calming those who read the Reuters report earlier claiming that AMD was exploring sale options. The AMD leader says clearly that there is no sale and reiterates his confidence in the new direction. The memo below comes from the Verge.

Team,Within the past couple of hours, a major media outlet wrote a piece speculating about the sale of AMD. As you know, articles such as this periodically surface in the media. I want you to know exactly how we are responding to this speculative piece, as we expect some additional media outlets to inquire. Our official response is below, along with the original news article.But let me personally reinforce to you: we are not actively pursuing the sale of AMD or any of our significant assets. It's full steam ahead with our strategy … we absolutely are on the right path.Rory

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Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.

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52 Comments Comment from the forums

shqtth

Sure hope so, because the second you try to sell things off, even more market share will be lost as well as stock prices.

ATI can survive without AMD. AMD has already been gutted (1 billion from Intel is all gone and GF sold off). But do not gut ATI, make it a canadian company again. (make ATI a separate company, then AMD can go bankrupt). But no need to take down ATi with the ship.
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omnimodis78

The key phrase to keep a close eye on in that statement, and the official statement, is that AMD is "not actively pursuing" the sale of the company. When wording like that starts to be thrown around, it's clear as day to anyone familiar with the end-life of a business what that means.
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AMD is obviously going to ditch x86 completely and move to ARM, where they can get a fair deal, instead of having to deal with Monopoly-zilla. That is the real reason Steamroller and Kaveri are delayed, and they're going to do Piledriver+GCN for the next APU instead of Steamroller+GCN because they're considering not doing them at all with x86...

Of course, the minute they announced that, Intel had their minions in the tech media run hit-piece after hit-piece on AMD... Read any of the news sites for the past few weeks, every article has a disgustingly negative connotation towards AMD, and Larrafail is being praised to no end with the usual lack of hard evidence that it's going to be worthwhile... They all say "AMD isn't remotely competitive...", which is a lie, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference in a blind test. VIA x86 chips actually, really aren't competitive, but you would think that AMD had VIA levels of performance just reading tech sites...

Intel doesn't want AMD to make an ARM chip because without the constraints of having to be x86(aka: Intel) compatible, AMD would have every chance in the world of out-performing Intel, they have the know-how to make a 4.0ghz+ ARM chip with greater IPC than current ARM chips. Intel wants to run AMD out of business before they can put out their first ARM product.

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matt_b

The insinuation or even hint of mentioning a possible sale, having JPMChase hired to "explore options", and then denying any possible sale usually results in what most people's gut reaction is. It wouldn't surprise me, with the "lengthy" tenure Read has with AMD, this smells of golden parachutes and early retirements..........
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mikenygmail

I'm glad someone else realizes what's going on here. Indeed, Intel and Nvidia's paid bashers are all over the place in one form or another. They're on the yahoo finance message boards, posting anti-AMD messages on AMD's message boards. They've repeatedly posted outright lies claiming that AMD is in the process of declaring bankruptsy, or will go bankrupt since 2008.

AMD's Piledriver CPU's are great. AMD desktop and laptop APU's have no competition and can actually run games reasonably well, unlike any Intel product. AMD is even making tablet APU's now, and ARM chips are on the way.

The last time AMD's stock was at $2, it went up to $10 in less than a year - all when AMD was in a much worse position than now. This took place from February to December in 2009. Don't expect the stock to stay this cheap for long!

Bottom line, don't believe the BS and support AMD. This actually helps lower prices for us all.
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ram1009

I work down the street from a major Intel facility. One of their engineers told me recently that it's common knowledge among employees that Intel has been "carrying" AMD for years to avoid being branded a monopoly.
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ekho

Hope you're right Rory.
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Camikazi

ram1009I work down the street from a major Intel facility. One of their engineers told me recently that it's common knowledge among employees that Intel has been "carrying" AMD for years to avoid being branded a monopoly.That is more than likely true since Intel was more or less forced to license out x86 to AMD just to avoid being considered a monopoly years ago. That is the reason why AMD won't be sold, Intel cannot afford to let that happen since in order for Intel to make CPUs they need AMDs x86-64 and if AMD gets sold they could lose access to that license.
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AMD is not going to ditch x86, at least not until Apple does, AMD is using the services of JPM chase to find a private equity qroup to buyout AMD's stockholders and take AMD private! Private equity groups are made up of very wealthy investors, who can afford to loose money for a few quarters, and then run AMD at the break even point for for even longer, while taking any profits that AMD may produce and reinvesting these profits back into AMD to build up AMD's markets! This should give AMD time to develop some competitive x86 APUs (to compete in the low end market) and ARM based CPUs for the Tablet, and maybe PC maket!
AMD's will continue to be sold as will AMD SeaMicro server products, AMD can and does use Intel CPUs in SeaMicro products as well as AMD's CPUs and others!
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This is like the inner-office memo you receive the day before everyone is laid off.

Trust me, This CEO "Roy" is pure freaking evil, do not trust him. The company will be sold and he will run away with the money.
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