14 DAY TRIAL // According to sources at DigiTimes, one of the world's largest HDD controller manufacturers in the world, ASMedia, may feel the impact of AMD's recent poor performance in the PC industry.
Apparently, the source claims that "To save costs, AMD decided to cooperate with ASMedia in 2014 to license ASMedia's SATA Express patents and outsources its chip R&D and manufacturing to the chip designer."
ASMedia managed to get NT$228 million (US$7.38 million) net profits in 2014 and expects that the new USB 3.1 demand of 2015 will grow its revenues.
The source continues, "However, for the first quarter, ASMedia only achieved EPS of NT$0.64 and combined consolidated revenues for the first five months of 2015 were down 11.2% on year to reach only NT$585 million and had a monthly EPS of NT$0.12 in May."
The insider also blames Intel for its aggressive push of integrating USB 3.1 into its chipsets, posing a great risk fto AMD and indirectly to ASMedia too.
Anonymous leaks keep hinting at AMD's weakness
Things aren't looking good indeed at AMD. Rumors are ravaging the company's reputation, and sources from different parts of the world talk of an inherent weakness that might lead to AMD splitting its CPU and graphics processing departments. Microsoft is also said to plan to buy the company.
Until now, most of these rumors have proved to be unfounded and have gotten more and more outlandish. The latest comes from KitGuru, claiming that a source spoke of Microsoft having unfinished plans to acquire AMD. They received no official confirmation and were normal to do so as it would rock the very foundations of the IT industry. However, rumors coming from Reuters and now from DigiTime multiply the cracks in AMD's cupola, and it will have either to answer them or to bring along a worthy show of force.
As it became more and more obvious that the new Zen x86 CPU from AMD remains in a faraway future, NVIDIA launched this spring its quite successful GTX 980Ti and Titan X, and Intel closes the year with Skylake. All this is quite clear that AMD fights two giants all by itself with little to no hope of actually succeeding.