AMD chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, was a speaker at Pacific Crest's Global Tech Leadership Forum in Colorado on Monday. Unfortunately for him AMD shares were taking a beating on the day – at one point on Monday AMD shares were 13 per cent down - with no AMD news or financial releases to blame, good or bad. Financial blog Barron's, part of the Wall Street Journal group, wonders if it was a delayed market reaction to Nvidia's upbeat financials from last Thursday eve.
AMD shares suffered a painful decline on Monday, and are over 1% down in pre-market trading today
With the share performance stats looming over his presence, Papermaster took to the stage to answer questions from Pacific Crest analyst Mike McConnell. One of the most interesting Q&A segments, which I chose to headline this story, concerns AMD's sharp reduction in R&D investment.
McConnell addressed the issue of investor anxiety over AMD's scaling back of R&D levels. "When I talk to investors about AMD, there's some concern — I mean, we've seen a decline by close to 40% versus levels we were at in the beginning of the decade," McConnell pointed out to AMD's Papermaster.
The AMD CTO didn't quibble about the reduction in R&D, and admitted that as the PC market has contracted AMD has put less R&D effort into this part of the business. Instead of supporting its role in the PC market AMD was looking to target R&D in carefully chosen operations, so-called "banking the future of the Company."
Papermaster sketched out the narrower targets of its reduced R&D spend; "So it is on that next generation of CPUs starting with Zen. It is on successive generations of our graphics core next." With particular reference to its APU and GCN designs Papermaster boasted that a lot of investments have paid off in getting its APUs adopted for its game console wins. Furthermore the AMD CTO asserted that "we have a very strong roadmap for that Graphics Core Next IP going forward".
There were some other interesting nuggets from Papermaster, quoted by Barron's. The CTO talked about the innovative design AMD had to drive forward to keep getting better processors from the 28nm production node, boasting that Carrizo "doubled the battery life," compared to earlier 28nm chips. Papermaster also said that AMD was "fixing" its data centre offerings to provide consistent total cost of ownership advantages to enterprise.
What do readers think? Can AMD continue to devote fewer resources to R&D but succeed against the likes of Intel and Nvidia?
