AMD never had a full company sale as a priority, and this continues to be the case, but a certain development suggests that that there might eventually not be a choice in the matter.
According to an exclusive report received by
Reuters, Advanced Micro Devices has hired JPMorgan Chase & Co to explore options that will help it find a new, strong role in today’s industry.
The focus on mobile devices, and migration away from regular personal computers, has been putting pressure on the company, pressure that the
Z-60 APU and the
tablets based on it might not manage to offset on their own.
According to the “sources” that spoke to Reuters, AMD is considering a full company sale, but only as a last resort.
Before it considers such a move, it wants to see if it can sell some of its patents and, in so doing, reverse this year's drop in share value of over 60%.
Seeing as how the other method AMD is employing to achieve business stability is
a large reduction in workforce (it is even laying off engineers), “leveraging highly-differentiated technology assets” is one of the few things left to try at this point.
For those interested, AMD's market value is of around $1.4 billion / 1.1 billion Euro, but its long-term debt and capital lease obligations are of $2 billion / 1.57 billion Euro.
What it needs now is to score laptop and tablet design wins, at least enough to keep it afloat until its longer-term strategies start paying off.
Powering the strongest supercomputer, the
Titan, which was acknowledged the other day by the Top 500 list, is just a partial victory, since much of the computing prowess is actually owed to NVIDIA Tesla GPU compute accelerators.
In order to break away from its position as foil to Intel, AMD even decided to
license ARM CPU technology. Nothing will come of that decision until 2014 though, and AMD doesn't exactly have the luxury of taking it easy until then.
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