AMD cuts 5 percent of its workforce

Sunnyvale (CA) – Business news from AMD has rarely been good lately. We remember bad news beginning to come in just about when Intel pushed its Core 2 Duo into the market in Q3 of 2006 and there is no end in sight yet : With the first quarter winding down, TG Daily learned that AMD is reducing its workforce by another 5%.

Since AMD has not officially announced the layoffs yet, there is no official explanation why these layoffs are coming now. However, our sources indicate that AMD may be preparing the analyst community for another not-so-great quarter, in which especially CPU sales have tanked. The TLB bug (and the following PR disaster) hurt Opteron sales anyway and this week Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger was telling journalists that the Tigerton Xeon MP processor is gaining market share and will bring “the biggest market share swing in years”.

Sources are now telling us that AMD decided to silently wipe 5% from its workforce of almost 16,719 people. As a result, about 800 to 850 people are laid off, while some people at AMD believe that the total number of employees should come down even further and end up closer to 15,000. Official financial details are coming with the release of the Q1 result.