Rumor: AMD Considering Breakup

By Nathan Kirsch

Thomson Reuters is reporting that AMD is in the initial stage of reviewing if it would be a good idea to split itself up or spin off a business to remain competitive in the current market. The news was sourced from three people that are said to be familiar with the situation.

AMD has asked a consulting firm to help it review its options and draw up scenarios on how a break-up or spin-off would work, the people said this week, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. One option under consideration is separating AMD’s graphics and licensing business from its server business, which sells processors that power data centers, one of the people said.

AMD’s current CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, took over the top spot at the company in October 2014 after joining AMD in 2012 and quickly announced that the company was cutting seven percent of its workforce. Ever since then she has been trying to re-establish the company’s growth and profitability while shaping the future of computing all while battling chip giant Intel Corp. for market share.

PC Gamer Show - AMD Fiji

This news comes just days after AMD announced nine new graphics cards during the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. AMD announced that the new video cards will utilize the company’s brand new Fiji GPU, which features High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for the very first time. In fact, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card that was announced this week has the highest GPU memory bandwidth ever thanks to HBM memory. The new memory architecture announced this week delivers up to 60% more memory bandwidth over GDDR5. AMD saw its shares rise over 11% this past week.

amd-shares

It will be interesting to see if AMD will separate its graphics and licensing business from it’s server business, but we’ve heard rumors about AMD splitting up and being acquired in the past and nothing ever came of it.

Update: AMD Spokeswoman Sarah Youngbauer issued a statement over the weekend denying the rumor. She wrote, “AMD provided official confirmation that we have not hired an outside agency to explore spinning-off/splitting the company… We remain committed to the long-term strategy we laid out for the company in May at our Financial Analyst Day, which encompasses all parts of the business.”