AMD to exit the dense server market in shocking news..

Ah...AMD the perennial underachiever strikes again. Last week after announcing horrendous results for the first Quarter of 2015 with $180 million dollars, yes that's 180 with an M, AMD announced more worryingly that they will exit the Dense Server market by closing their Sea Micro server business. Why is this important? Well in 2012 they purchased Sea Micro $334 million dollars in hopes of catching up to intel in the server market by offering servers that strung together low powered x86 processors like AMD's Kyoto APUs to offer the performance of intel based servers at less power consumption. This was supposed to be one of their MAJOR strategies to diversify their business and return the company back to profitability.

I have been a defender of AMD and criticized their competitors like with nVidia with their deliberate misleading of customers with the GTX 970 memory fiasco but AMD is starting to turn into a JOKE...or more like a Shakespearean tragedy. Let me get this straight spend $334 to buy said company for said technology--->3 years later say ooops we made a big boo boo. The question then becomes: WTF were you doing buying said company in the FIRST PLACE??? Can you imagines how many engineers AMD could have hired to speed up their development of their GPUs/CPUs/APUs and bring them to market with $334 million dollars?! They should have released their R9 3XX series what like 3 - 4 months ago and we are in April and still no sign of the 3XX series GPUs! That's unacceptable! Granted the Sea Micro case was mostly former CEO Rory Reads doing and maybe part of the reason he was pushed out last fall but their current CEO Lisa Su doesn't look like she didn't say anything despite being part of management at the time of the purchase of said company. And oh yeah their stock just hit $2.28 (their worst performance since the 2008/2009) financial crisis.

The only way I see AMD out of this is to have some sort of major tragedy like going broke in order to seriously shake the company up. All they are doing right now is keeping their head above the water instead of drowning. Maybe they need to drown before they get their a$$es together or else PC Gamers are going to get screwed by intel and nvidia.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9170/amd-exits-dense-microserver-business-ends-seamicro-brand

Misleading title, and no source.

Added.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9170/amd-exits-dense-microserver-business-ends-seamicro-brand

That's kind of strange wording for the title. They're leaving their microservers behind, not the entire server market.

@JigglyWiggly_: Care to explain the difference? What is meant by microservers? Servers for small business?

From what I read after the disastrous Q1 financial status, AMD shutted down the ARM server project.

Unless I misunderstood it...

From Guru3D aswell:

Other Corporate Events

• • • As a part of the strategy to simplify and sharpen the company's investment focus, AMD is exiting the dense server systems business, formerly SeaMicro, effective immediately. AMD recorded $75 million of special charges in Q1 2015 primarily related to impairment of previously acquired intangible assets.

@horgen: No, typically for very large enterprise customers like Verizon. Entire point of the these servers was that it will use low power x86 chips (several of them) instead of the more power hungry intel chips thus drawing less power and provide similar performance. Cool and innovative idea but looks like AMD is not getting enough customers ( I think Verizon might be the only few) so I guess it was AMD best choice to cut it's losses and move on.

Incorrect. AMD is still working on ARM based chips (like Opteron) it's just they won't be making the servers themselves.

I think what is actually happening is that they stopped working on their Seamicro subdivision which made servers with a lot of low power cpus.

I think that AMD is working on x86 based Zen 32core MCM in the new Opteron.

The next generation Opteron has 32 Zen x86 cores

AMD is a sinking ship....i dont know why anyone has any faith in them anymore.

I wonder who's going to buy them out. At that absurdly low share price I'm surprised no one has thought of an aggressive buyout? Unless they are waiting to get cheaper. Or, probably that other big players think that AMD doesn't have anything worth buying (except maybe it's patents)

Shame though, I haven't used their CPU since 2001ish and an ATI card since... probably around that time.

@Xtasy26:

Intel Atom Bay Trail based solution is smashing AMD.

There are Intel Xeons that are low power which are similar to Intel ULVs/LVs.

For ASUS's Zenfone 2 http://pocketnow.com/2015/04/23/asus-zenfone-2-sales-2

Intel powered ASUS ZenFone 2 sales expected to reach 30 million units

PC OEMs doesn't want their suppliers to compete against them.

openpower ftw

Yes. And from what I read the CEO is now focusing full force on making strong chips as one of the reasons why they are closing down Sea Micro. Kind of like clearing the deck of certain products and using those resources to focus on what AMD used to be good at which was making great server processors.

There was talk of Samsung buying them. I don't see what's in it for them other than their GPU business which is competitive with nVidia. The R9 290X is beating the GTX 970 in quite a few games and even the 980 in some cases and that is AMD's "last generation" GPUs. But I don't see them buying it. They already make their own ARM processors for their Galaxy phones dropping Qualcomm (which affected greatly Qualcomm's revenues).

The only reason I see them buying it is in hopes that Zen and their future processors like their APUs will get significant traction against intel.

Besides x86 license in non-transferable. They could get sued by intel (which would be another headache that they may not want to deal with).

I mean Samsung is doing really well from their phones to their sales of HDTVs, they have more to lose than gain.

Yes they are smashing AMD with their SoC's which gets me wondering what the hell happened with AMD's Temash which is supposed to have great power for tablets. But then again you have to remember intel is practically giving away their SoC's for tablets for "free" as they are trying to smash their way into the phone and tablet market as they are significantly behind ARM. They are losing billions of dollars going after the tablet and phone market and mostly having success with cheap Asian phone and tablet makers.

Not sure what that has to do with with the server market as they are not putting their SoC's for tablets and phones into their servers and AMD's low power APUs would still beat intel Xeon using Sea Micros custom ASICs for dense servers.

But I don't think you hit then nail as PC OEM's would NOT want to have their suppliers compete against them. That something even crossed my mind when they purchased Sea Micro. I mean would HP buy server chips from AMD if their Sea Micro servers were competing with their Moonshot servers. Of course not!

Which goes back to the main point I made about AMD being downright idiotic in buying Sea Micro to begin with. It seems like they were short sighted (maybe hoping that it would help them in the short term, I don't know maybe get a bounce in the stock who knows) but in the long term they would have to bang heads with the big boys in the server arena like Dell and HP.

But they lost $334 million in the process that is just plain STUPID.

I think it's a good thing what they did. They made a mistake but cut it off in order to not lose more money in the long run.
In my opinion AMD also needs to sell of it's cpu department or just look for another party to buy them up entirely. There licenses are pretty much a gold mine.

AMD should just focus on GPU's and spend all there time on that department.