They said last year they wanted to get more into "consumer electronics" like mobile phones etc & quit the gpu/cpu side of the business & this looks like the beginning of it

This is worrisome, however at the same time, a smaller, more nimble company has the capability of operating more efficiently (not all the time obviously). IMO, if the graphics division gets split there is an increasingly high chance that it'll get bought out by another firm that may want that technology (Apple? Samsung?). The X86 side of AMD will probably forever stay/die AMD due to the license agreement with Intel.

This really would be a good thing. Give it to someone who has the money to make it shine.

This really would be a good thing. Give it to someone who has the money to make it shine.

It's not even money, AMD is just plain incompetent. They've had piss-poor management since around the period that they bought ATI; which is definitely what helped their downfall. Like someone mentioned, the AMD/ATI merger happened at the worst possible time, right as the Intel Core 2 and the Nvidia G80 were coming out. They were preoccupied with a merger at a time when their competitors were putting out two of the most revolutionary computing products in a long time, and they never recovered since.

Wonder what would have happened to ATI if they had not been bought? Think they would have gone under?

Wonder what would have happened to ATI if they had not been bought? Think they would have gone under?

Just the opposite, they might have done OK if they held on to their mobile GPU line Imageon (now Adreno) and licensed out the tech, instead AMD sold it off for freaking peanuts ($65 million) to Qualcomm. Look at it this way. On July 21 2006, the day AMD acquired ATI, Nvidia Market Cap was $6.2 Billion, and ATI was $4.2 Billion; AMD's was $8.84 billion. Compare that to today, where the entire AMD (combined) Market Cap is $2.01 billion, and Nvidia's is $11.77 billion. There's only so much you can blame Intel and Nvidia before you realize AMD were just plain incompetent and had bad plans that never matured in the market place. The APU vision very much killed AMD.

I think this would be a good move for AMD, as of right now money wise they are spread too thin across two segments of the industry to remain competitive. If AMD were to only concentrate on CPU's and APU's then I could see them becoming a decent competitor against Intel again, which would be awesome. AMD made some bad mistakes back in 2006, and they've been paying for it ever since in the CPU segment.

Thanks for the thoughts Chillin.

I'm curious as to how that would affect their APU's, since that seems like what they are focusing on (and they don't do a bad job with it either), if you split off the CPU and GPU business to different companies, how does AMD make APU's? Maybe they'll market their own graphics, similar to Intel?

Once again something Reuters has gotten wrong. [Quote]... “While we normally would not comment on such a matter, we can confirm that we have no such project in the works at this time. We remain committed to the long-term strategy we laid out for the company in May at our Financial Analyst Day.”...[/Quote] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/208659-reuters-claims-amd-mulling-breakup-or-spinoff-company-denies-rumors

Full answer is: APU

Once again something Reuters has gotten wrong. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/208659-reuters-claims-amd-mulling-breakup-or-spinoff-company-denies-rumors

That article pretty much states exactly what my question was lol

The beauty of the simplicity of that article is that it gives your question as to why the rumor is not based in reality. Another question it raises, again as to why the rumor is not logical, is how does the revenue get split between the two resulting entities. Like Fox stated, the reason the Reuter's article is click bait, is the APU. Which is also why I agree with the article in that even though AMD paid a premium, amount over and above the stated book value, for ATi; it was a smart move. Made the APU a reality.

I believe that the AMD ATI merger was done at the wrong time, BUT, if AMD managed to sell their APUs, their numbers would be great, and I've used a lot of APUs in my laptops, and they are very good performers for the price, even better than other intel offerings, but thats just my opinion ( I paid $270 for a laptop with a A10-7350pro apu and its great) You don't need an i7 to play lol and do office stuff EDIT: AMD just needs a good PR team, since intel managed to sell their netburst crap and Nvidia their FX series.. thats pure marketing

AMD is at a critical stage. It can ill afford to keep leaking money like it is. I really hope they sort something out sooner rather than later.

Something needs to happen. I said in the beginning that buyout was going to cost them in the end. If they don't do something soon, I'm afraid that whole company is going to end up on the auction block.

The beauty of the simplicity of that article is that it gives your question as to why the rumor is not based in reality. Another question it raises, again as to why the rumor is not logical, is how does the revenue get split between the two resulting entities. Like Fox stated, the reason the Reuter's article is click bait, is the APU. Which is also why I agree with the article in that even though AMD paid a premium, amount over and above the stated book value, for ATi; it was a smart move. Made the APU a reality.

I'm just going to requote this since I don't want to waste time writing something similar in my own words: What happened was that AMD had some of the best integrated graphics available. They had DX11 functionality integrated on CPUs long before Intel. And these weren't ****ty Intel HD3000 POS's; these were really good GPUs (for the size), which could actually handle some modest gaming as well as genuine compute tasks. Their problem was that this great IGP was attached... to a (relatively) ****ty CPU. And when people buy CPUs, they buy them to be CPUs first and foremost. AMD knew this, but they also bet on GPU-threading technologies like OpenCL and C++AMP, which would really showcase their APUs. They bet that applications in 3-4 years would use this tech to make substantial performance gains. So, the crappy CPU wouldn't matter so much. That didn't work out. Which meant that these great GPUs went mostly unused. Coupled with this is the fact that gaming performance has been increasingly limited by the CPU rather than the GPU. Even at the medium end, the single-threaded nature of APIs like D3D11 and OpenGL meant that a slow CPU could hurt graphics performance. Remember when AMD was complaining about how something needed to be done about driver overhead in games? This is why; because their CPUs couldn't cut it. This is also why they created Mantle and kicked the entire graphics API industry in the balls, leading to Metal/Vulkan/D3D12. But as with many things with AMD, it's too late; the damage was already done. If this had happened 2-4 years ago, then APUs could have really been something. But now, Intel has figured out how to make a decent CPU-integrated GPU. And a half-decent driver for it. So even that advantage is lost.

Chillin, AMD is usually late. Because they know long time before they bring some tech to life it is needed, but have limited resources to make it fast. But do not forget what APU's were about from start. That's HSA, and HUMA in carrizo is step which (if used) brings huge leap in performance and efficiency as tasks are run on proper type of workhorse without access overhead. Intel may now have strong GPU, but those are not true APUs, intel never targeted that. iGPU in APU has to have decent and efficient compute power. With APUs based on Zen there will still be HSA 1.0 or better functionality.

Chillin, AMD is usually late. Because they know long time before they bring some tech to life it is needed, but have limited resources to make it fast. But do not forget what APU's were about from start. That's HSA, and HUMA in carrizo is step which (if used) brings huge leap in performance and efficiency as tasks are run on proper type of workhorse without access overhead. Intel may now have strong GPU, but those are not true APUs, intel never targeted that. iGPU in APU has to have decent and efficient compute power. With APUs based on Zen there will still be HSA 1.0 or better functionality.

The iGPU is what makes the CPU an APU (AMD's term). 🙂

Chillin, AMD is usually late. Because they know long time before they bring some tech to life it is needed, but have limited resources to make it fast. But do not forget what APU's were about from start. That's HSA, and HUMA in carrizo is step which (if used) brings huge leap in performance and efficiency as tasks are run on proper type of workhorse without access overhead. Intel may now have strong GPU, but those are not true APUs, intel never targeted that. iGPU in APU has to have decent and efficient compute power. With APUs based on Zen there will still be HSA 1.0 or better functionality.

Really, the Intel iGPU's don't have good compute power? http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-7.html [spoiler] http://media.bestofmicro.com/S/J/497395/original/12-IGP-Maya-OpenGL.png http://media.bestofmicro.com/S/I/497394/original/13-IGP-Showcase-DirectX.png http://media.bestofmicro.com/S/O/497400/original/16-IGP-Cinebench-OpenGL.png [/spoiler] Where's your HSA god now?