SAN FRANCISCO — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is cutting some 1,400 workers as a weak computer market and manufacturing delays have hurt the world's second-biggest maker of microprocessors for PCs.
The layoffs announced Thursday amount to about 12 percent of the company's 12,000 workers and are the first big move by AMD's new CEO, Rory Read, who was hired from Lenovo Group in August. The cuts will unfold over the next five months.
AMD is struggling with an industrywide problem: PC sales growth, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, has been anemic because of the down economy and competition from smartphones and tablets.
Although PC shipments continue to grow, the pace is slowing sharply — and more than market research firms IDC and Gartner Inc. expected. That has raised concerns about the strength of the market going in to the holiday shopping season.
Most of AMD's business is in chips for PCs; it doesn't have a meaningful presence in smartphones and tablets.
Read's job in large part is to help devise a strategy for AMD to penetrate computing markets where it and rival Intel Corp . have been largely absent. The battle has taken on a new dimension as AMD's and Intel's market share in PCs has reached a steady balance for years — Intel's chips are in about 80 percent of the world's PCs, and AMD's are in essentially the rest.
Not having much presence in mobile devices has hurt AMD more than Intel because of its smaller size and it was a key reason AMD ousted Read's predecessor, Dirk Meyer, in January.
Meyer in some ways had an excuse: He was orchestrating triage as he tried to manage the company's spinoff of its manufacturing operations while fending off Intel and overseeing the launch of an important new type of chip for AMD. That chip can process sophisticated graphics and general data on the same piece of silicon, a technical achievement.
The rise of mobile devices, meanwhile, is benefiting chip makers such as Qualcomm Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc., whose processors were designed to consume less power.
A variety of financial struggles has led to several rounds of layoffs at AMD in recent years. It let about 3,300 workers go in 2008 and 2009.
Contributing to Thursday's announcement were manufacturing problems that have postponed the shipment of AMD's newest chips, which it calls "accelerated processing units."
The layoffs and other unspecified operational changes are expected to save $200 million in 2012. A company spokesman said is severance benefits will vary based on location and local laws.
AMD shares increased 5 cents, or nearly 1 percent, to $5.78 in extended trading Thursday after the cuts were announced.
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382 reviews
Great PC. I would recommend it if you need an inexepensive PC for either your TV or for everyday use
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a perfect little computer hookup to a TV to watch netflix/hulu/youtube. It has built in wireless and HDMI output. This gets rid of lot of wires that would need otherwise to hook up a computer to a TV. It comes with minimum bloatware. Its pretty quiet and requires very less space. Its a no brainer for people who needs a cheap media center PC.
The rest of the review is specially for those who are interested in the details of how this computer is best for media center.
I needed a PC to do following things.
1). Watch videos off of my network drive – WD world book.
2). Stream HD channels from my HDHomeRun box.
3). Record shows in HD to my network drive.
4). Download movies/videos off of internet in the background to my network drive.
5). Stream my Video library on the home network so that I can watch it on Xbox in other room.
I wanted a computer to do all of the above and my budget was $300. I also didnt want to wire my whole house in order to achieve this.
Not all of the above worked out of the box. I had to fine tune this bad boy to get the full juice out of it. Remember this computer has a single core and 2GB RAM to work with. However, NVIDIA 9200 comes in handy to do lot of video handling especially HD.
Tweaks in the order I did.
1). Get rid of bloatware including office works and other software trials.
2). Removed Norton Internet Security and installed the Norton Antivirus that Comcast gives away for free.
3). Disabled – Norton back up service, Identity protection service. These services eat lot of RAM and I can live without these protections. Also I wasn’t gonna do anything related to money on this computer. So, do not care about these stuff.
4). Disabled Win 7 Aero Graphics by changing the theme to Windows classic. I dont need fancy animations for this computer to open a window.
5). Disabled lot of windows components such as Tablet services, assistance services – You can disable these things by going to ->Add Remove programs -> add remove windows components.
6). Install CopSSH, so that I can dial into this computer while I am away.
7). I had to upgrade all the drivers – sound, chipset, display from the emachines website because I had issues streaming HD content through Media Center. After that everything worked fine. I found that NVIDIA has a newer display driver on its website. Hence, I upgraded that too. After upgrading the display driver, the choppiness of video on went away.
8). With above tweaks, the PC uses little over 700MB after boot up. So I have about 1GB of Ram for actual media center activities. Around 256MB is unusable because its shared by NVIDIA.
After all these tweaks, I setup my Windows media center with my network drive and HDHomeRun. So now, I have a fully functional media center which allows me to watch movies/videos off of my Network drive and also watch/record local HD channels. I use bit torrent to download videos. I can also manage these downloads remotely by dialing into this computer through copssh. Everything for under $300. Couldn’t ask for anything more.
Rating: 4 / 5
I got my ER1402-05 yesterday. I had waited on ordering it because I couldn’t find enough information about a feature I was concerned about.
I discovered I had no need to worry. My concern was about remotely starting it. In order for me to do this – the BIOS needs to be the type BIOS that is in desktop computers, which allows you to specify how the PC responds to restoring power input. Once this is set to power up when the power is applied, you can use a remote controlled power strip to remote start.
Well enough of that. This is a very good PC for using with a TV. HDMI connector, VERY QUIET, streams HULU with no problem (with Flash 10.1) and I measured the actual power input to be about 14 Watts at idle and 25 Watts when streaming video. The PC gets slightly warm – the power supply (similar to a laptop charger/power supply) does not seem to get even warm.
The Keyboard and Mouse work well. The Mouse has an on/off switch and the keyboard does not.
EMachine web site says, “can snap to the back of your monitor” but so far I have not found where to get the bracket
I am very happy that I finally bought one!
Rating: 5 / 5
Due to the price, I didn’t expect much from this machine. But it’s actually pretty great. It’s connected to two displays, an Acer 19″ LCD monitor via VGA and a LG 42″ HDTV via HDMI. Both work very well. HDMI is kind of sluggish especially when I unplug the speaker jack. I believe it’s due to switching the sound driver. But it’s only about 10~20 secs. After that, it just runs perfectly.
It’s very quiet and cool. Also, YouTube runs find on my machine, but Hulu hasn’t been tested yet. I don’t play PC games, so no idea. The wireless keyboard and mouse are very handy.
Rating: 5 / 5
Bought this little thing to replace a Core 2 quad that was making too much noise. Since the desktop is just used for word processing and web surfing, speed is not important. MS Office, itunes, even 1080p video played back just fine. Absolutely no noise. Storage is not an issue since I save to a home file server. Very happy. Hardly notice the difference compared to the Core 2 Quad.
Rating: 4 / 5