Personal computing discussed
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BoBzeBuilder wrote:Am I the only one who really hates it when people end their statements with "discuss"?
ronch wrote:Hey guys.. Hector Ruiz has been getting quite a bit of attention lately because of his book 'Slingshot', where he talks about his story at AMD. And it got me thinking a little bit. Not many people remember Hector's tenure at AMD fondly but is he really as bad as he seems? Why would he write a book about Intel's misconducts? Is it just because he's bored and has nothing else to do? Or is it because he feels like his tenure at AMD has some loose ends and he wants to wrap them up? Perhaps Hector truly cared about AMD and is going back to take a stab at Intel? Did the ATIC deal force him to join GF and leave AMD so that AMD can sell its fabs and live another day, which means he sacrificed his AMD CEO position for AMD itself? Discuss.
it was handled by the legal department, no engineers were pulled from engineering duties to begin practicing law
uni-mitation wrote:Great figures are often haunted by their former shadows. Discuss.
Intel during "the dark time" made a huge number of mistakes that were discussed because they were in 2nd, choosing Rambus, the 810 chipset disaster, the P3 1133 recall, the original P4 and all that followed, disappointments all to varying degree's.
AMD's habit of being late with every cpu update got ignored, when AMD botched The XP launch it was ok because history views the victor and the loser differently.... to say "they shouldn't have made mistakes" is easy, the hard part is not making them as proven by Intel & AMD.
regarding the ATI acquisition, AMD at the time was a cpu maker, no server business, dependent on 3rd party motherboard support, no gfx, not even audio.
Hector got AMD into server just in time, got AMD a complete platform just in time and had he not bought ATI when he did AMD would never had the opportunity, so where would AMD be now if they were still dependent on VIA for their motherboards and had no server revenue that only recently stopped coming in..... with no platform to offer they wouldn't be in all of the next generation consoles
the lawsuit was a job for the legal department, Hector gave the lawyers something to chew on and then asked for an occasional update, he did not believe it would fix all of AMD's woes, it's just something else that went on while Intel regained the lead.
"AMD should have looked outside of X86".... sure, maybe in the abstract they should have but to explore those options would have drained from existing operations, something you have already said was a bad idea, so what options was an X86 centric company supposed to explore? additionally you are asking AMD to see what was on the horizon that Intel didn't see, you are asking that AMD, a company that was earning 95% of it's revenue from X86 to invest in other avenues..... and this while competing with a corporation that has 10X's the resources AMD has?
was Hector Ruiz the best man for the job? no, was he terrible? no, did he do a decent job, I'm inclined to believe he did a decent job of leading AMD, Gerry Sanders left the mess, he crippled AMD just before he left, spend some time looking into it.
ronch wrote:"AMD should have looked outside of X86".... sure, maybe in the abstract they should have but to explore those options would have drained from existing operations, something you have already said was a bad idea, so what options was an X86 centric company supposed to explore? additionally you are asking AMD to see what was on the horizon that Intel didn't see, you are asking that AMD, a company that was earning 95% of it's revenue from X86 to invest in other avenues..... and this while competing with a corporation that has 10X's the resources AMD has?
Intel didn't see it. But TI, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, etc. saw it. Even Taiwanese MediaTek saw it and is now inside smartphones when AMD isn't. So to say that it was impossible for AMD to see it back then is being too lenient on AMD and its past management. This is what I was talking about when I said Hector's main role os charting AMD's direction. By the looks of the book Hector wrote, it seems like his main agenda was forcing Intel to play fair in the x86 industry through lawsuits. You know, to 'free an industry from the grips of Intel.' All this happened while the industry started to shift away without Intel and AMD.
riviera74 wrote:OK. Enough about Hector and what he did or did not do. What should AMD do right now to be viable and competitive for the next decade?