@Xtasy26: Well since I am not at AMD's board, I can't tell you about all the decisions she made.
But a lot of decisions made for the GPU summer launches were awful (this includes the first decisions Lisa Su needed to take before too).
Fiji was a chip with great potential.
They should allow Sapphire, ASUS etc etc to make air coolers of Fury X aswell. This could lower the cost of FuryX which also means more sales.
R9 Nano in my opinion wasn't worth the RnD. They could allow companies to create Fury or FuryX with lower clocks in SFF PCBs.
R9 390 and R9 390X. This is obvious. 8GB VRAM? Really? 99% of people that will not CF, they would love 4GB and $50 in their pockets. They could simply allow AIB partners again to add 8GB in some models if they want.
And she could also lower the price of Fury to make it even more attractive.
All of these decisions were made or were able to change in 8 months of Lisa Su's authority (8th october till summer launch).
I believe these decisions would save money (millions of $ actually) and they would add some percent in the global market share giving AMD more cash.
And I see them as obvious changes that even me or you would made them. So after what I saw the decisions from Steven Elop at Nokia, I found her moves suspicious.
Its even more suspicious if you look at AMD market cap and share price. In October when Lisa Su became CEO of AMD, an AMD share price had a value of 3,28.
Today has a value of 1,85.
Dejavu with Nokia?
ps: This is the reason I said that AMD is not a charity organisation. People didn't hire Lisa Su to make AMD almost twice smaller. AMD is not a school to tell her "its okie, you tried". Trying or not, doesn't matter when you are the CEO of a big company like AMD. She might (a lot of mights here :P) tried but it didn't work. That makes her a failure.
ps2: I believe that creating the Radeon Group was the only great thing she did. But if we believe that these fail decisions she made weren't on purpose, then she realise that she should let more capable people than her to make decisions for the GPU department. Thats a start...
ps3: New architecture designs take 3 years, not choosing a cooler or the amount of VRAM or price...
So, let's give some context. They guy who ran AMD's Graphics Business before Rory Read came into AMD was Rick Bergman. After Rory Read became CEO on August of 2011, Rick Bergman left, I guess he didn't like the direction the company was heading or was passed over for the CEO job of AMD or thought that he might be canned and become the CEO of Synaptics. Matt Skynner took over his position and started managing AMD’s graphics division and he was to report to then CEO Rory. On a side note since Rick Bergman became the CEO of Synaptics he doubled the value of the company and in the same period Rory Read ran AMD he halved the value of the company. In other words they both went in opposite directions! You bring in a new CEO to INCREASE the value of the company and not reduce it in half like Rory Read did. And now Synaptics is valued MORE than AMD. Yes, that's right the maker of touchpads for laptops and other devices is worth more than a well known chip maker. That's how bad it is. In hindsight, I think they should have made Rick Bergman the CEO of AMD, I think he wanted the job. He manged ATI's graphics development team and even worked at S3 prior to that and had significant experience in the semiconductor industry. I was open to bringing in an outsider to "shake things up" but clearly Rory Read did a poor job. I think if they had made Rick the CEO of AMD I don't think AMD would be in the position it is now. Certainly, their graphics division wouldn't have lost that much market share as he knows the graphics business very well. That's the first point. Second point is since Matt ran the graphics division and had experience working at ATI going back to 1998 I think Lisa Su trusted him to run the division well and clearly he mis-managed it over the past and a half, hence him getting fired/forced out with the creation of the new Radeon Group. So, my hypothesis is that she trusted him and he didn't deliver and hence him getting fired.
With respect to 8GB versions of the R9 390X/R9 390 instead of being a regular 4GB. I would argue that it had more to do with marketing. By having 2X the memory of the GTX 970/980 buyers could choose these parts over their respective competitors in the price range since it has more memory. So, I don't think it was a bad move.
I totally agree that they should have made a air-cooled version of the Fury X. I think they should have had an "option" for the liquid cooled version but they should have launched an air-cooled version with the Fury X and thus would have lowered the price. I don't know why they went that route. It could be that they have low yields on Fiji or they wanted to do something different, I heard that they can only have 30,000 world wide availability this year and that HBM is expensive to make. I mean the Fury X is pretty much sold out on newegg. But still I would have love to see a non-liquid cooled version of the Fury X, it would have garnered more positive reviews because it would have cost less.
With respect to the the R9 Nano, I sort of agree. But having read up on what they wanted to do with the Nano they wanted to make it the World's Most Powerful SFF GPU. Sort of like the iPod Nano that came out 10 years ago. They wanted to make the "Nano" version of the ipod of the GPU World. Remember the guy who now runs the Radeon Group they brought him back from Apple. I read somewhere that he played a role in the development of the Nano as a SFF idea. So, maybe they were trying to copy Apple. I don't have necessarily have a problem with trying something new and different. Now, the question with respect to the Nano and the Fury series in general with the prices that they are selling, are they selling well? Are they making a ton of money? If the answer is yes then I don’t have a problem and AMD needs the money for the R&D they put in and to generate positive cash flow.
On the other hand, if the answer is No then that would be a huge mistake in my book as I would have love to see the prices down so we can have another HD 4850/HD 4870 repeat where AMD did so well that they captured over 40% of the Discrete GPU market share in a single quarter.
My hunch is that they are trying to protect their margins because remember the Fury is a large GPU, the largest GPU that ATI/AMD have ever produced, while the HD 4850/HD 4870 was one of the smallest GPU that ATI/AMD produced. The larger the GPU the more cost and add on top of that HBM memory which from what I hear is expensive. I personally would love to see the prices come down so we can have another HD 4850/HD 4870 because having high demand is much better the having okay demand. They would probably would have to adjust the price of the R9 390/390X because if they lowered the price of the say the R9 Fury it would have eat away at the sale of the R9 390X as it would have been too close to the price of the R9 Fury. The question is would AMD have been able to meet the demand and still make a profit, if they had lowered the price of the R9 Fury, Fury X, Nano?
On a side note, one weird coincidence is that before 3DFX died it was run by another “Dr.” named Dr. Alex Leupp who became the CEO of 3DFX in the fall off 99 and a year later the company went kaput. Just like AMD had a new CEO named Dr. Lisa Su appointed in the fall of 2014 and by December of 2015…well, we will have to see if AMD goes kaput or have some drastic changes.
Frankly, the similarities between 3DFX and AMD is downright creepy.
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