AMD To Cut 10 Pct of Its Workforce

By Geoff Duncan April 8, 2008

Citing a drop in sales, chipmaker AMD has announced it will lay off over 1,600 employees, or about 10 percent of its workforce, between now and September in a bid to cut costs and return to profitability. AMD will also incur a restructuring charge during the second quarter, but didn’t estimate its amount. AMD is scheduled to release it’s first quarter financials on April 17.

AMD says the drop in its revenues is larger than the seasonal decline it anticipated at the start of the year, but the company expects to return to profitability in the second half of 2008 when its first 45nm process CPUs hit the market.

AMD estimates its revenue for its first quarter of 2008, ended March 29, will be about $1.5 billion, which would represent more than a 20 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago, but a 15 percent decline from the last quarter of 2007.

Many industry watchers weren’t particular surprised by the news, citing delays in getting 45nm chips to market and the overhead of AMD’s perhaps overly-ambitious acquisition ot graphics developer ATI back in 2006. At the end of 2007, AMD admited it overpaid for ATI and wrote down $1.6 billion related to the acquisition. AMD revenues were also dogged by an embarrassing bug in AMD’s quad-core Barcelona CPU that no doubt limited its sales in the first two months of 2008.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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AMD has released a new graphics driver update that disables its newly introduced Anti-Lag+ technology in all supported games. The latest graphics driver (23.10.2) is a follow-up to 23.10.1, which launched almost a week ago and introduced Anti-Lag+ for Counter-Strike 2.

AMD has confirmed via the official release notes that the reason for disabling the anti-lag tech is due to recent reports about certain online games that were identifying Anti-Lag+ as a hacking tool, which then resulted in player bans. AMD also said that it is actively working with game developers and hopes to find a solution to reenable Anti-Lag+ and reinstate gamers who were impacted by the anti-cheat bans.

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Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is seeing big price cuts in response to AMD

It seems Nvidia is feeling some pressure from AMD. The popular RTX 4070 is now readily available for $50 below its list price of $600, likely in response to AMD's recently released RX 7800 XT.

You can find models in stock at various retailers like Newegg and Amazon, as first spotted by Wccftech. The shift comes just days after AMD released its $500 RX 7800 XT, which beats the RTX 4070 in a head-to-head matchup. Ahead of this launch, prices on Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti 16GB also dropped, bringing the card from $500 down to $450.

Computing

GPU sales figures show that AMD is its own greatest enemy

The AMD RX 6700 XT sitting on a table.

Despite the vast difference in market share, AMD's GPUs continue selling very well -- in some places, they're actually more sought-after than Nvidia's best graphics cards. However, we're not talking about AMD's flagship RX 7900 XTX here. In fact, the latest sales figures show that AMD might be its own fiercest competitor.

As is often the case, today's insight into the GPU market comes from TechEpiphany on Twitter, who reports on the sales numbers for Mindfactory, a German retailer. This week's report shows an interesting trend: while those who prefer Nvidia largely seem to have switched over to the RTX 40-series, AMD enthusiasts are still mostly sticking to last-gen cards. It's really no wonder that shopping for a GPU is such a headache despite the abundance.