People may also want to check out the official response from AMD over at the Register. Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/amd_closes_german_os...

Part of the response: " We will continue to support the Linux kernel, and the software development work happening at the OSRC is being consolidated and will be performed at other AMD locations."

This still seems incredibly vague, though.

The radeon driver is part of the kernel, as well... And how exactly they will "consolidate and perform" the cpu-related work in other locations without the people who have been working on it is a bit of a mystery to me.

I don't understand how this is supposed to work. ARM or x86, if they want servers, they will need good Linux support. Who's going to provide that is everyone's guess...

As somebody who recently sent back a notebook because Linux driver support for Radeon is abysmal and now is a happy Intel graphics user, this doesn't surprise me at all. More power to Intel.

The same is true for me, I will continue to buy Intel CPUs and motherboards, for both desktop and mobile, until someone else takes open source graphics drivers as seriously as they do.

or even drivers in generals - I'd still prefer closed but working NVIDIA drivers over the crap that ATI puts out

This has been a major pain point for the Linux community since the Radeon days. It's such a shame, because ATI had a huge opportunity to steal that market from nVidia back then. Instead, maximizing value away from users and toward shareholders left us with a video-diminished Linux community.

Given how many thousands of dollars we steered to Intel because of it, I'm not sure this maximized shareholder value either. Few things businesses do are actually big-picture decisions.

The dismissals have nothing to do with the quality of the radeon graphics drivers, as described by the last paragraph in the article.

Unfortunately it seems recovery of AMD now depends on very smart people that are not there anymore

Looks like they gave up after settling with Intel (and some years of bad management)

To be fair Intel also abandoned their idiotic race for MHz which fixed things for them.

Maybe their investment in ARM servers may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people.

> Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people.

The request for smaller, fancier appliances that consume less power will always be there.

Also, the world outside your PC is moving: JIT VMs in the browsers, computationally hard to decode movies, older analogue technologies moving to computers.

There will always be a request for better computers (for various meaning of "better").

The only problem with AMD going ARM is that everyone and their brother are doing ARM parts, too.

"Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people."

Nope. Shitty laptops with 5400 rpm old hdds, 2 GB of ram and old turion/core CPUs will NEVER be "fast enough".

It is a good machine for typing school papers and checking Facebook and Youtube

You're overestimating what most people do with their computers

I actually have exactly that setup (shitty Gateway with Turion and 5400 rpm hdd, dirt cheap).

It works well enough for what I need it to do - surf the web, Office, Facebook, Youtube, Plants vs Zombies, movies, - heck it has an HDMI port. And I've been able to do some light programming on it without trouble.

Only thing it really doesn't do is non-casual games.

You say that as though Turions and the Core series were bad. I'm currently running a Phenom 2 x6 3.3GHz.. and guess what? For the majority of tasks, it is no better than my previous Core 2 Quad 2.5GHz. And the Turion processor is no slouch; I know this from experience.

Can these chips power a supercomputer? No. Do 99% of people need them to? Not at all.

And, as Bill Gates is famously quoted, "640K ought to be enough memory for anybody."

"OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server processor"

It's almost like they want to fail. Do they expect their hardware to run Windows Server or something? Thankfully, the linux developers they're letting go won't have trouble finding jobs.

AMD stocks are unsurprisingly going down (as they have been doing for a while now). See https://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE:AMD