AMD shutters German Linux lab, gives devs the axe Struggling chipmaker AMD has shut down its Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC), handing pink slips to most of its Linux kernel developers in the process. Rumors of the site's closure had been bouncing around the open source community for several days, owing in part to ominous posts to Linux kernel …
From a few conversations I have had with AMD personnel, they are clueless. No one seems to know when the next shoe will fall or what the real game plan is. Customer support is non-existent and chaos is rampant.
The horrendous worldwide economic depression is literally destroying many small businesses. It's unbelievable the damage that is occuring. AMD will probably survive and have to rebuild all over again - assuming Rory Read has a viable plan. With all the potential minefields in this economy, any one of them could end it all for AMD. I'm sure they aren't cutting personnel because they want to. They simply have no choice and it's never easy to dismiss good people who are difficult to replace if and when the economy improves.
This is quite an unfortunate situation as AMD currently has some excellent products and exceptional prices. By the time they recover however the market dynamics may have changed and they could be SOL.
And then they are getting hit by an Obama Tax Bill, closely followed by QE4.5 and the demand to raise wages across the board because purchasing power has degraded. Then comes an Apple Patent Lawsuit, an IRS audit because the the money paid for the democratic campaign was a tad low, increased energy costs because of a cakewalk with Iran, demands that they replace Silicium by Unobtanium because it's greener. Then union activists riot hard as they have discovered that work is being "exported" to faraway lands. Finally an accusatory film by a fat filmmaker with a baseball cap puts the company under for good.
Power management is a big one. Intel has a team that works with Microsoft and others on this, and you can see that there are two different HALs that can be installed on a new system based on the CPU brand. This is the deep down stuff the vast majority of coders never have to concern themselves about.
A few years ago there was a big problem for some owners of certain brand machines when a Windows Service Pack was installed and left the machine DOA. This was because the OEM thought they were clever and used an image for factory prep that had both HALs visible in the system directory, something that would never happen in a normal install. They thought it more efficient to have a single image for both AMD and Intel systems. The Service Pack installer assumed the first HAL it saw was a correct indicator of what kind of machine was being updated. Trying to use the wrong HAL meant the machine died during the OS boot.
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