Do we know how many people AMD hired in recent years? Because often with news like that it is just companies cutting back a bit after having undergone an even larger expansion not too long ago
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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They had 8,200 employees at the end of 2016. By the end of 2023, they had 26,000 employees.
So yes, a massive expansion in the last ~8 years.
AMD's situation has massively shifted during that period, but it does add some perspective. In 2016 they'd have probably loved to have more employees, but couldn't afford them unlike now. And in recent times the Xilin aquisition added a bunch of employees, with some possibly redundant?
Overall i probably believe AMD's comment:
AMD argues its cutbacks aren't a sign it's struggling financially. Instead, it's more about refocusing its resources towards higher-margin products
I assume lesser profitable margine products are e.g. dedicated consumer GPUs?
Did not expect AMD to engage in layoffs with them doing so well.
9000 series was a total flop before the x3D, and their GPUs can’t compete at all. They are also missing out on a lot of the AI boom with many models being locked to NVIDIA hardware.
What ever you think of the 9000 series, you need to compare it with their primary competitor, Intel, which have poor reviews of their latest offerings to say the least.
The only thing AMD have to worry about with Intel's repeated calamities is getting complacent.
I dunno. If my company launched a new product, and then that product just sat on store shelves unsold, there’d probably be some people at my company who lost their jobs over it…. Regardless of how my competitors were doing.
Intel sold practically nothing, see reports of literally zero Intel sales in a month at Germany’s largest retailer for example.
That means AMD got the lions share which was also lower than expected.
This points more to market slowness than individual company performance. A 4% cut is quite modest with that sort of market.
I don’t think it’s market slowness… more that there’s nothing worth upgrading to.
Now that the x3D came out, and it’s actually better than last gen, it sold out everywhere. People just want good new products.
And yeah 4% is small, just providing insight into why AMD layoffs are a huge surprise.
Their are still gaining market share in the their core CPU business. They are doing particularly well in server where you have the highest margins. While they are nowhere near Nvidia in AI compute hardware, I believe they are still seeing massive YoY growth in this space.
Agreed regarding consumer GPUs, I don't think I've seen Radeon having such a weak position in dGPUs in the last ~25 years. But even there, there is lots of money in iGPUs where they have a solid position verses intel.
Sure Intel is doing poorly, but AMDs 9000 series was one of the worst selling launches in of new CPU in recent memory. They started slashing prices on them in record time.
There was also huge criticism from reviewers that the performance increase over 7000 series didn’t match what their marketing team had promised. Probably time to let some of those sales and marketing people go.