AMD Radeon Technologies Group formed to re-define the industry

[OilSheikh]

For a minute I thought ...
AMD has announced that it is splitting off its graphics technologies operations into a new unit called
ATi !

This decade seems to belong to the Indians, seeing how so many are CEO's and MD's.

[nobodyspecial]

Hmm, those two statements seem to contradict each other

Check the wording - the second statement is talking about discrete desktop graphics, a very minor part of the market. Laptop/tablet/embedded graphics etc. are much larger.

But the DISCRETE part is highly profitable (see NV's quarterly reports for years), where AMD's entire gpu division as a whole...Not so much. This is largely due to the destruction of their market share in the discrete portion of the gpu market. If you show me a smaller market that is highly profitable (and always desired by gamers), vs. a larger market that isn't making squat, I'll take the smaller one every day. Dr. Su is rightly pointing out where the profits are. Console margins barely make enough (and not even considering R&D to get them out the door) to cover interest on AMD's debt if they're lucky (they're not lucky), and margins on APU's are squeezed to death from Intel racing down, ARM racing up. The only place AMD can look to for profit is DISCRETE, and hopefully ZEN soon. It's comic they let Dirk Meyer go instead of listening to him, when they now go back to his strategy. Meaning, making a king gpu and cpu, while the rest (putting them together with apu, expanding to other markets etc) could come once you had WINNERS in your CORE tech. With losers all around (and no profits due to losers), you can't expand into new markets. You need PROFITS, and that comes from king products that have pricing power (see Intel cpus/NV gpus). Both Intel/NV are moving on new markets with...PROFITS from king products. Doing the opposite just increases debt and lowers R&D on core stuff, kills engineer jobs (layoffs) etc. AMD has lost 6B in the last 12yrs. The last time they made any real money was when they had a king CPU.

[kalniel]

But the DISCRETE part is highly profitable (see NV's quarterly reports for years)

I just had a look through the quarterly report and nVidia don't say about their desktops. They lump them together with the notebook sales. There's no comment about the size of the desktop market in isolation as far as I can see, but maybe I was reading the wrong report.

[PuremasterZ]

Well this is AMD's last resort to last longer

[DanceswithUnix]

Well this is AMD's last resort to last longer

They just got a new investor, so probably not.

[shaithis]

They just got a new investor, so probably not.

They are ready to sell 20% stake in the company to a private equity firm but no deal has been done yet AFAIK....

If it does go through it will be interesting to see if they can turn everything around with the $300m!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thats the thing - the firm owns shares in some pretty large tech companies,so do they know something we don't??

[GuidoLS]

Thats the thing - the firm owns shares in some pretty large tech companies,so do they know something we don't??

AMD bought ATI, and they've been losing overall company value hand over fist. Almost 80% at this point since the purchase. I hope, for their sake, that someone knows something we don't. And no, that's not commentary on product quality, but reality.