AMD: One of nine Great American Companies that will never recover

[Fire$torm]

24/7 Wall St. - Article (Link (http://xfinity.comcast.net/slideshow/finance-companiesneverrecover/9/))

[litehouse43]

It's a real shame they are struggling. Competition in the CPU/GPU market is so essential. Getting a runaway lead company like Intel and Nividia can just stifle the market and is awful for progress. Hopefully they will be able to turn it around, although I don't see their R&D budget ever being able to compete with Intel.

Has anyone checked out parallella? They are a semiconductor start up who recently got funded on kickstarter to develop 40+GHz board computers for around $100. It's basically a "BOINC Board". Cheap unit price, high throughput, they are pretty amazing. They work on the parallel computing framework so they have reduced the number of cores per chip to the optimal 1 and reduced the frequency down to it's optimal (700MHz or so) and strung 16 chips together on one board. It works on the arm processor and the best part.....5V power and very minimal heat production. Could be the future? I hope so..

[Slicker]

No great surprise. Every time they come out with a new driver, it breaks apps built for the old ones. Then they stop supporting older GPUs whereas nVidia supports every GPU -- even the ones that are 6 times slower than the ones AMD stopped supporting. AMD dropped Brook+. Then CAL. Their OpenCL implementation sucks in comparison when you look at speed. nVidia produces all of its own GPUs. AMD farms out the chips to other manufactures losing a good portion of the profit. In other words, lots and lots of bad decisions. Reminds me of a company for whom I used to work and they declared bankruptcy last summer.