What's really happening at AMD?

On the other hand...

All this said, it’s still far too early to dismiss AMD's horrendous 2007 as an aberration.

The company’s quad-core processor launch last September, considered by many to be the most important in its history, did not go well.

Both Barcelona, the enterprise product, and Phenom, its desktop equivalent, were considered by many to offer disappointing performance. Also, it's remarkable that the channel is only recently reporting good availability of Barcelona.

Let's not forget that the core of AMD's strategy over the past two-to-three years has been to gain enterprise market share. With that in mind, it was very important that it executed of the launch well, not least in terms of product sample availability to review sites such as HEXUS.net. Sadly this isn't what happened and AMD missed a chance to vindicate its 'enterprise first' strategy.

It's important to stress, nonetheless, that the fault for launch and others not going well lies very firmly with the product execution, rather than the PR people who are the public face of the company.

On many occasions, AMD's overstretched PR team have been asked to launch a product that wasn't ready and then ended up catching the inevitable flak that followed - and that's hardly fair.

Regarding the enterprise-instead-of-channel decision, AMD assures us that, in the desktop market at least, it now prioritises the channel over tier-one business. And we have to say that our meetings with channel marketing executives, including Stephen DiFranco and Richard Baker, have always revealed a mea culpa desire to admit to past mistakes and make things better.

Power vacuum

Maybe part of the problem is that it's still far from clear whether the Dell deal has delivered what AMD hoped it would. Increasingly, though, it again looks like it was the enterprise business that AMD really coveted. From an Intel point of view, as discussed earlier in this piece, if the Dell deal did distract AMD, it was well worth losing a bit of Dell business.

It’s also still far from certain that the ATI deal delivered what was hoped. Furthermore, one possible unintended consequence of the ATI acquisition could have been the flurry of senior departures in the summer of 2007.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Dave Orton and Rick Hegberg, who were ATI men, would leave, but Henri Richard’s departure seemed to surprise everyone and left a bit of a power vacuum on the sales and marketing side that has only recently been filled.

So is AMD axing 10 percent of its workforce? If AMD says it isn’t, we believe that it isn't. However, that doesn’t mean nobody’s losing their job. It may be that the post-ATI power struggle was concluded last summer. But if it wasn’t, then it's pretty clear what one of the new HR VP’s first jobs will be.

Update - 15:00 28th March: Reports are emerging that Vijay Sharma, the director of product marketing at AMD's Graphics Products Group has left the company.

Update 2 - 11:00 29th March: Business Week has revealed that Victor Peng, a vice president of engineering for its graphics division, has left to join another company after 11 years at AMD.