AMD Restructures to Combine Graphics and Chip Units
Struggling chipmakerAMD has been trying all sorts of new business tactics to keep itself afloat after two solid years of losses in its competition with Intel—includingspinning off its fabs into GlobalFoundries so, technically, AMD has no manufacturing capability of its own anymore.n Now, the company has announced a major restructuring thatcombines its chip unit with the remnants of graphics developer ATI in a move to spur development of integrated graphics and computing processors. And as part of the reorganization, the senior VP of AMD’s microprocessor group, Randy Allen, will be leaving the company.
“We are tightening our focus on delivering the winning products and platforms our customers want based on AMD’s industry-leading microprocessor and graphics technologies,” said AMD president and CEO Dirk Meyer, in a statement. “The next generation of innovation in the computing industry will be grounded in the fusion of microprocessor and graphics technologies. With these changes, we are putting the right organization in place to help enable the future of computing.”
As part of the reorg, AMD is creating three other operating groups in addition to the combined chip group: one will focus on technology research, one on sales, and one one marketing.
AMD acquired graphic developer ATI Technologiesback in 2006; it has since had torepeatedly write down the value of the transaction as the business has failed to live up to AMD’s expectation—AMD alsosold off ATI’s mobile graphics technology to Qualcomm early this year.
AMD offered no reason for Randy Allen’s departure.
Editors’ Recommendations
Is it a laptop? Is it a tablet? Is it a gaming handheld? No, it's just the new GPD Pocket 4, and it's a bit of all three -- although without much of an emphasis on "gaming." Unlike the Steam Deck, GPD's new mini-PC packs some of the latest hardware and could blow away its competitors.
Obviously, the form factor of this thing is fascinating, but the AMD Zen 5 chip under the hood is equally interesting. GPD's Pocket 4 will be the first handheld to use one of AMD's best processors, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (12 cores/24 threads) and the Radeon 890M iGPU. This should give it a leg up in performance over systems like the ROG Ally X, especially when it comes to gaming.
Hundreds of millions of AMD CPUs are facing a new vulnerability called Sinkhole. The exploit, which was first reported by Wired, impacts processors dating back to 2006, and it spans nearly all of AMD's products. That list includes Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc CPUs across desktop and mobile, as well as AMD's data center GPUs. Despite Sinkhole hitting some of AMD's best processors, only the most recent batch of chips will receive a patch that fixes the vulnerability.
AMD isn't patching Ryzen 1000, 2000, or 3000 processors, nor is it patching Threadripper 1000 and 2000 CPUs, reports Tom's Hardware. The company claims that these older CPUs fall outside of its support window, despite the fact that millions are still in use. Still, even the most recent Ryzen 3000 chips were released over five years ago, and it makes sense that AMD would want to focus its support on new chips like the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X.
If you own one of AMD's latest processors, you're in luck. With the release of Ryzen 9000, AMD added a feature called Optimized Performance Profile (OPP), which lets you easily overclock your RAM.
There's more, though. If you have both a Ryzen 9000 CPU, such as the Ryzen 7 9700X, and an MSI motherboard, a new BIOS update can help you improve the gaming performance of your CPU by up to 21%. This is due to MSI's own stack of features, which now includes MSI Memory Try It and High-Efficiency Mode.
