10-19-2015, 05:30 PM
Most billion-dollar companies (like Monsanto, Intel, etc..) seem to have it real, real easy when it comes to the overall bottom line. AMD certainly had it hard - the road wasn't smooth for AMD.
The management tried to act like they were Intel during the 65nm fab roll-out.
1) Realizing that all fabbed 90nm Athlon64's and Opteron X2's couldn't meet demand quickly enough, while gaining so much reputation over Intel's Pentium4, AMD with their greatest intelligence decided to cut the L2 cache for all 65nm Athlon's by HALF, while implementing basically close to ZERO IPC improvements, just so that more of these chips could be fabbed for cheaper. At the same time, they had the audacity to completely ditch the Socket939 platform which was what AMD's immense growth was based on (forcing people to upgrade motherboards as well if they wanted to upgrade). Guess what, Intel went back to the Core architecture, so AMD was fucked (as if AMD couldn't have seen the hints from Intel's mobile Core processors that were emerging for quite a while). Even if AMD didn't spend all of their $$ on ATI, there was no way AMD could've ever recovered from this.
2),
3),
4), etc... all stems from 1) above, perhaps the dumbest move of any multi-billion dollar company in the decade of 2000.
The management tried to act like they were Intel during the 65nm fab roll-out.
1) Realizing that all fabbed 90nm Athlon64's and Opteron X2's couldn't meet demand quickly enough, while gaining so much reputation over Intel's Pentium4, AMD with their greatest intelligence decided to cut the L2 cache for all 65nm Athlon's by HALF, while implementing basically close to ZERO IPC improvements, just so that more of these chips could be fabbed for cheaper. At the same time, they had the audacity to completely ditch the Socket939 platform which was what AMD's immense growth was based on (forcing people to upgrade motherboards as well if they wanted to upgrade). Guess what, Intel went back to the Core architecture, so AMD was fucked (as if AMD couldn't have seen the hints from Intel's mobile Core processors that were emerging for quite a while). Even if AMD didn't spend all of their $$ on ATI, there was no way AMD could've ever recovered from this.
2),
3),
4), etc... all stems from 1) above, perhaps the dumbest move of any multi-billion dollar company in the decade of 2000.