Quote:The initial complaint in this action was filed January 15, 2014. After Arkansas Teacher Retirement System and KBC Asset Management NV were appointed as Lead Plaintiffs by the Court, they filed their Corrected Amended Class Action Complaint (the "Complaint") on June 11, 2014. Lead Plaintiffs allege that Defendants made materially false and misleading statements to investors about the manufacturing and subsequent launch of, as well as the demand for, its Llano microprocessor between April 4, 2011 and October 18, 2012, allegedly in violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Lead Plaintiffs further allege that the false and misleading statements inflated the price of AMD's common stock and that, when Defendants later disclosed the truth of the ongoing problems with Llano, AMD's stock price dropped. The Complaint, which contains all of the Lead Plaintiffs' allegations, is available here.

Defendants moved to dismiss the Complaint on July 7, 2014. On March 31, 2015, the Court issued an order denying Defendants' motion to dismiss.

On September 4, 2015, Lead Plaintiffs filed their motion for class certification. On March 16, 2016, the Court issued an order granting Lead Plaintiffs' motion, certifying the Class, appointing Lead Plaintiffs as "Class Representatives," and appointing Class Counsel.

The parties are currently engaged in discovery, and the deadline for completing discovery is March 3, 2017. The parties must file motions for summary judgment by April 7, 2017. No date for the trial has been scheduled.

Quote:Did AMD defraud investors? That’s a lot harder to prove. The PC market began to decline in 2012 and the decline became precipitous in 2013:

Granted, AMD was seeing the impact of this strategic misalignment on its own sales before CY 2013 had begun, but manufacturers tend to place orders for new hardware based on how the old equipment is selling. Regardless of whether AMD’s public statements rose to the level of being legally actionable, the company was clearly tired of the case following it around. And it’s definitely true that Llano’s introduction was delayed by poor yields. The problem was almost certainly on the GPU side of the equation — GlobalFoundries had plenty of experience building CPUs, but AMD had never before attempted to put a GPU and CPU on the same piece of silicon. When Intel rolled out its first CPUs with GPUs on-package, it kept the chips separate for a generation before integrating them into the same die with Sandy Bridge. AMD skipped this step, hoping to save time, but it cost them in the long run.

Llano ultimately faded out of the market, replaced by other APUs, and the entire ‘Fusion’ concept and the HSA capabilities AMD once trumpeted have largely vanished as well. It’s not clear how tightly AMD will tie Zen to this previous exercise. One of the paradoxes of the HSA/Fusion situation was that accelerating workloads by using the onboard GPU was critical to improving the performance of AMD’s older hardware — but now that Zen finally offers a solid CPU core to match with AMD’s on-board GPU, the need for that acceleration is significantly reduced.