Rory's backround at IBM and Lenovo especially tends to indicate that AMD are leaning towards a less diversified cookie-cutter type range of products- high volume, average to low selling price.
A couple of things spring to mind:
Firstly, how much faith does AMD have in Llano, Bobcat, Piledriver and the HD7xxx/GCN series if they are already bulwarking the next few financial quarters by laying off 12+% of their workforce ?
Secondly, It would seem reasonable that the competant people being sacked would find work at AMD's competitors. Sacking an employee usually means they aren't bound by the non-competition conditions that usually are in effect in a headhunted situation. It would seem that AMD are basically giving away a fair amount of IP....unless of course, that IP is no longer a factor in the companys long term strategy.
I'm actually hoping that Rory is presiding over the ritual disembowelment of AMD. If the BoD are looking at some short term dividends and a nice stock buyout/continued BoD seat, then ATIC has some truly serious money to put into R&D...unless the x86 cross licence agreement with Intel is non-transferable, in which case I don't think this happens.
Worst case scenario is AMD contract their product lines and operate as a vastly slimmed down version concentrating on the mobile market (again,
day late dollar short ) and all-in-one type deskops/laptops with Trinity. Squeezed between Intel at the high end and ARM at the low end, I could see AMD cruising along at "barely relevent" status (unless they actually start innovating and pushing technology rather than just developing hardware and hoping others want to use it*) with a possibility (
warning sarcasm approaching) that Intel have to buy a few million AMD chips every year to keep AMD functioning and the various monopoly commissions of their back...AMD cash constrained to the extent that R&D barely has a pulse, while the Intel cream the high margin markets and progressively work toward the ultra portable sector.
At present the one shining light for AMD would be the fact that they seem to be frontrunners in providing the next-gen console hardware...unfortunately, I care as much about consoles as I care about smartphones, e-readers and tablets.
* By that I mean AMD waffling on about Fusion for 4+ years yet it was Intel was first to market with a CPU with integrated GPU, and being "all for" OpenCL yet relying entirely on third party software designers to implement it and thereby make FirePro etc. relevent.
EDIT: On a related note, Simon Solotko's post on XS (post #36) indicates that he will probably continue to be well worth following:
In the meantime I am going to enjoy being opinionated and uncensored.
