AMD's Project Win: A Misunderstanding
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 9, 2011 5:49 PM ESTLast week AMD announced layoffs that impacted 10% of its workforce. A disproportionate number of those AMDers were apparently from the marketing and PR groups, but even engineering was affected. In CEO Rory Read's internal memo announcing the layoffs, he made reference to a mysterious "Project Win" that would be discussed in a webcast on November 9th. That's today, but where's the webcast and what's Project Win?
There was an internal AMD webcast but there's no announcement of a change in corporate direction. AMD's next analyst day in early February 2012 is when we'll officially hear about what AMD plans to do under Read's leadership.
As for Project Win, that's simply an internal codename referring to an effort to streamline AMD's business practices. The project didn't have a name previously but it refers to something AMD has been talking about in its earnings calls for the past couple of quarters. An excerpt from last quarter's earnings call where Project Win was referenced (not by name) is below:
"Last quarter, I described a set of initiatives to streamline business and decision-making processes across our operations, R&D and go-to-market functions. We are in full executional deployment across each of the key work streams. These efforts are aimed at accelerating our transformation to a world-class design company...growing revenue, lowering costs and reducing time-to-market. We expect to see material benefits from this project in 2012."
In short, Project Win is just about making AMD leaner and more efficient. Layered on top of this leaner AMD will be a (new?) product strategy, which we'll hear about in February. Until then, there's still AMD's 28nm GPU launch that we're waiting for...
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nofumble62 - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
At Lenovo, the engineering work is basically to take a reference design, added a little spin to make the product. At AMD, it won't work anymore.Taft12 - Friday, November 11, 2011 - link
Uh, Lenovo and AMD have completely different core businessesmino - Sunday, November 13, 2011 - link
That is the point ....(RR was at Lenovo just before ...)
pcfxer - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
BS, if you want to improve a business you will rarely remove your engineering capacity. Your engineers are trained and have learned key knowledge specific to AMD in the industry; with such specialization you don't remove ANY of this capacity.It is also important that one does not reduce engineering capacity but also not to reduce engineering support capacity.
I agree with frozentundra, Anand should run AMD. None of this political/PR crap. No wonder our old friend left AMD a couple of months ago.
Belard - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
WentIntel
Now
Yeah, I'm for positive spin for the AMD company... I'm not waiting for AMD to get their act together, again.
Casper42 - Friday, November 11, 2011 - link
Why does the picture of the roadmap slide say Next Gen Bulldozer in 2012.Doesnt everyone pretty much already know that will be Piledriver?
danwat12345 - Sunday, November 13, 2011 - link
Agrred should be Piledriver in the chart.