AMD To Lay Off 4% of Workforce, or About 1,000 Employees 50
AMD has announced plans to cut 4% of its global workforce as it repositions to compete in the AI chip market dominated by Nvidia. The layoffs will affect approximately 1,040 employees of its 26,000-strong workforce reported at the end of 2023. CNBC adds: AMD produces powerful AI accelerators for data centers, including the MI300X, which companies such as Meta and Microsoft purchase as an alternative to Nvidia-based systems. But Nvidia dominates the market for powerful AI chips, with over 80% market share, partially because it developed the core software that AI engineers use to develop programs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Fewer employees will help! (Score:2, Funny)
If there's one thing I've been thinking, it's that AMD make it too easy to use their hardware and I'm 100% sure that having fewer employees working on things like not making every card just work out of the box with the major tools will help them a great deal.
FFS AMD you need to do the boring leg work of making your cards an EASY choice.
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Same number, just different (Score:2, Interesting)
This was less of an issue when the economy had more competition. There'd be lots of job opportunities. But with so few businesses owning entire markets that's not really an option.
And it's tough to reskill while also trying to survive. You can't just go back to school. It costs too much and you have responsibilities you can't meet.
Long long ago companies would retrain on their own dime. Those days are long gone. If the market shifts you're jus
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Companies have always discarded employees, just like employees have always discarded companies. Just like wives discard husbands, just like husbands discard wives.
This is not new or interesting. Human association outside slavery and serfdom is voluntary. This freedom is in fact a basic human right.
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Nobody here is arguing against the concept of at-will employment. The issues are (1) why layoffs are happening and (2) what you do to ensure people can find new jobs.
I have changed jobs (even fields) several times in my career, after starting out in physics research. I was lucky enough to have the training (or the ability to self-train) in order to effect these changes. Others may not be so fortunate, but they still need to be able to find new jobs when they get separated from their employer. You can't just
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Not sure if I'm reading you right - but no, companies aren't required to help fired or laid-off employees find new jobs and the societal consequences of layoffs aren't any single company's burden.
Thanks for qualifying your understanding. You may have misheard a bit.
As I said, most employer-employee relationships are at-will, meaning either party can terminate the relationship at any time for any reason.
I also said there are consequences to being separated. Generally an employee suffers more than an employer from such a separation, because the employee has fewer resources.
And you're right that companies generally aren't obliged to provide assistance to a separated employee. But many do, in the forms
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My post was modded down so quickly that I don't think the moderator even read it. Here, aim your thunderbolts at this one.
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Of course you can. People have been doing this since time immemorial. Other than a small amount of extreme loners, every human being has discarded other human beings. For example, how many childhood friends are still your friends, and how many have you discarded and left behind because you grew apart and got different interests?
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I'm beginning to think you're one of the "loners."
The societal consequences of changing your friends are not comparable to those that happen when you lose a job. Yes, you can find another job, and let's hope you do. But while you're looking, there are bills to pay. These consequences are addressed through unemployment insurance, and -- for some of the better companies -- severance packages, outplacement services, and maybe even retirement benefits. When a company offers such things to employees, it increase
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>The societal consequences of changing your friends are not comparable to those that happen when you lose a job.
How so? For many people, losing good friends is an exceptionally painful process, whereas they have a dosen recruiters going for them at any given time. For others, it's the exact opposite.
Are you aware how badly small businesses tend to suffer, down to total collapse when a key worker leaves? By your logic, should we force such people to remain at companies dependent on them? Because we appare
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>The societal consequences of changing your friends are not comparable to those that happen when you lose a job.
How so? For many people, losing good friends is an exceptionally painful process, whereas they have a dosen recruiters going for them at any given time. For others, it's the exact opposite.
I didn't say that losing friends can't be devastating. I said it is not comparable to losing a job. (*) You don't generally lose the ability to pay bills when you lose a friend.
(*) Of course, if you have friends at a job and then lose the job, you may or may not lose the friends too, so it could be a double-whammy.
Are you aware how badly small businesses tend to suffer, down to total collapse when a key worker leaves? By your logic, should we force such people to remain at companies dependent on them? Because we apparently can't ignore consequences we routinely ignore every minute, as such events are constant, ongoing since time immemorial.
If such a business, small or large, needed someone that crucially, then the business should sign a contract with the employee, to ensure that the employee would stay for a specified amount of time
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Ok, so I hit the nail on the head above.
>You don't generally lose the ability to pay bills when you lose a friend.
So hardline materialist world view...
>If such a business, small or large, needed someone that crucially, then the business should sign a contract with the employee, to ensure that the employee would stay for a specified amount of time.
Who understands reality only in one direction, but doesn't understand that it also works in opposite direction.
Looks like my assessment hit the bullseye.
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Ok, so I hit the nail on the head above.
>You don't generally lose the ability to pay bills when you lose a friend.
So hardline materialist world view...
Oh, puh-leeze. You snipped out the context, where I was showing that losing a friend is not comparable to losing a job, but both can be harmful. You seem to do it a lot.
>If such a business, small or large, needed someone that crucially, then the business should sign a contract with the employee, to ensure that the employee would stay for a specified amount of time.
Who understands reality only in one direction, but doesn't understand that it also works in opposite direction.
You don't understand contracts then. Contracts do work in both directions. They specify an exchange between two parties: party X will do something for party Y, and conversely party Y will do something for party X. If that doesn't happen, then it is not an enforceable contract.
Looks like my assessment hit the bullseye.
You are delusional and highly presumptuous. But I'm done with you.
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>Contracts do work in both directions.
Motte and bailey argument. We were talking about general human relations, just contracts. Your retreat into the motte of "just contracts" once caught indicates that you understand the issue. You're merely arguing in bad faith. Another common problem for people with aforementioned world view.
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>Contracts do work in both directions.
Motte and bailey argument. We were talking about general human relations, just contracts. Your retreat into the motte of "just contracts" once caught indicates that you understand the issue. You're merely arguing in bad faith. Another common problem for people with aforementioned world view.
Kindly elaborate on how you see "reality" as going in only one direction here.
You appear to introduce vague positions and then clarify them later, to your advantage. You tell me who is acting in bad faith.
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Considering this is clearly cognitive blindness at work, let's see if I got any better at dispelling it.
For example, this was the original statement of yours:
>I have changed jobs (even fields) several times in my career, after starting out in physics research. I was lucky enough to have the training (or the ability to self-train) in order to effect these changes. Others may not be so fortunate, but they still need to be able to find new jobs when they get separated from their employer. You can't just "di
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After this exchange with Luckyo, I have leaned what to do: ignore him. I think he hates that.
Luckyo is Dunning-Kruger personified, with a self-styled PhD in Trolling Badly.
No they haven't (Score:2)
The H1-B programs combined with widespread automation devouring jobs [businessinsider.com] means those days are long, long gone.
But we just pretend none of that ever happened so it's OK...
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You're now taking a general principle that has applied to all humans in all cultures since time immemorial, and narrowing it down to a single example that sometimes may have exceptions to this rule.
Let me afford you the same courtesy.
Small business employing several people requires a key employee to function. If that employee leaves, all other employees will lose their jobs. Should this one key employee have a right to resign without compensating all others employees and the owner?
Because to me you seem to
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Companies drop employees now because they know they can "hire new" or hire back the same people at a vastly reduced rate a few months down the line if they actually need them. It's a good way to keep those wages from rising as employees gain experience. Experience reset is a legitimate thing that management and HR love to bandy about in meetings about employment. Seniority is frowned upon below the C-suites. That's how you end up with high-value employees, and high-value employees are a liability in most bu
Draw poker with employees (Score:2)
Nothing new here. Just like playing draw poker. You can discard low order cards/low performing employees for higher order cards/higher performing (i.e. hungrier) employees. I saw this in many companies I worked for,
This was one of the reasons I ended up retiring early. I had the means to do so, and in my early 60's I had had enough of employers.
My dad warned me when I was a young boy in the 1960's that things would deteriorate (i.e. a race to the bottom) and he was right.
History of the "Race to the bottom":
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Well it's a good thing we've now put the most humane and understanding individuals in our country, billionaires, in charge of everything. .. .. possibly both. And if you're poor, broke, or in debt .. well then you're just some kind of parasite. They'll never tell you ..
What in God's name were people thinking "yeah let's hire the people who fired us"?? Every billionaire thinks they're 100% self-made and that anyone intelligent should be a billionaire. If you're not a billionaire it means you're dumb or lazy
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Reducing excess workers in large teams often makes projects more efficient. This it's pretty common knowledge. You want total efficiency, not maximum head count where team as a whole becomes more efficient.
Only so many cooks in the kitchen, and so many programmers on the same software before hiring more starts to have negative returns.
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Reducing excess workers in large teams often makes projects more efficient.
Having small teams is usually more efficient, but in most organizations, going from a large, inefficient team to a small team doesn't give the same kind of efficiency improvements of just having a small team.
You want total efficiency, not maximum head count where team as a whole becomes more efficient.
Not necessarily: assuming equally skilled people, small teams are always more efficient, but they do less. AMD have a certain amount o
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Not small. Sufficient. Those are completely different things. Your assumption of dichotomy of "large and small" demonstrates that you do not understand the subject of sufficiency being the primary factor.
As for the rest, the problem with competing with Nvidia is that it worked for close to two decades on CUDA. That is the main reason why it's so far ahead in the AI race. AMD bet big on much smaller investment in openCL. That didn't work out.
And so it has well over a decade of catch up on software side. You'
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Several years ago RoCM wouldn't even build in a Redhat ecosystem (compiler errors, etc) and nobody was able to answer questions on the mailing list and the website was beyond baroque.
I heard they had ten guys for all platforms for all tasks. That was a key poor decision.
My client swapped out for nVidia cards. We were trying to avoid binary drivers for trade-secret protection reasons. Risk mamagement was satisfied that we ruled out the less risky potential option.
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Yeah makes sense.
I would like to support AMD, but in my day job shit needs to get done and I ain't being paid the medium sized bucks to root for the underdog. And at home, well I have these ml projects with my so and it just ain't that fun fucking with AMD cards.
So I have my Nvidia shit, feel vaguely guilty every so often then forget about it and get hacking. Life's short, painfully so, gotta pick carefully.
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They're just mopping out the DEI hires.
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Who says this has anything to do with software support or dGPUs? It could be layoffs in sales or their CPU division, or from embedded.
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If there's one thing I've been thinking, it's that AMD make it too easy to use their hardware and I'm 100% sure that having fewer employees working on things like not making every card just work out of the box with the major tools will help them a great deal......
Yes, because they'll sell you subscription for extended support and make you think you're getting a great deal!!!
Normal annual churn (Score:3)
Now if they're doing this every quarter ... that would be news.
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Except this isn't turnover or retirement, or childbirth, or death and illness. This is layoffs. Which means those other items will still come on top of that figure. But if you look at the figures there something else there which forms a very convenient reason why this is a non-story.
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Pretty much this. Unfortunately unemployed /. users are downvoting anyone who is against DEI. The whole karma system needs to go.
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Not sure that AMD had any DEI hires? Allegedly Intel does/did, but...
Speech to Text (Score:2)
Beyond idiotic (Score:2)
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So 2+ years late to this one and they're starting from near-scratch at a company that sells chips but doesn't make their own chips. They just sell other people's chips (TSMC).
That's like saying that TSMC doesn't make their own chips, they just fab other people's designs.
Intel having their own fabs has gone from helping them to hurting them because they cannot keep up with TSMC.
Intel now has their best chips (or at least the most important "tiles" on them) made by TSMC, because they lack the technology to do it themselves.
However, all insanely high pricing right now is actually introductory pricing to gain market share. Wait until they start charging what the electricity, R&D, and hardware really cost.
You think they're going to stop charging enough to make a profit? You fell off the turnip truck last night, right?
Wrong direction (Score:2)
Intel's stock is crashing and their reputation is through the floor. They're on the verge of being taken over, and their latest CPU is a dud.
This is when AMD needs to push hard on both R&D and QA, to capture the marketshare that no longer trusts Intel, but is still wary of AMD because of their failings.
The two major alternatives - ARM64 and RISCV - are also chewing the scenery. Anything AMD doesn't grab will go to these.
As for the AI market, AI needs SIMD. Basically, you want processors that can digest
Overdue and not a surprise in the slightest. (Score:2)
AMD is one of the few tech companies who hasn't had a course correction from the COVID bubble.
In 2001 they had 14000 employees
In 2011 they had 11000 employees
In 2019 they had 12600 employees
In 2021 they had 15500 employees.
In 2022 they had 25000 employees.
They now have 26000.
Does anyone else see an insane post COVID hiring spree that many other tech companies have corrected on?
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They constantly acquire companies 2022 was no different. The acquisition isn't at all what caused the employee number spikes and account only for a fraction of the increase. That said even if it were accounting for all of it it changes nothing, you don't just remove those stats since it is expected generally that as part of an acquisition many employees are let go.