This was expected, AMD did some serious fundamental changes, especially downsizing. AMD as a company is but a vehicle nowadays, it is not the main enterprise entity. AMD is supposed to make losses and not pay taxes, and is supposed to be asset stripped completely. Most important AMD assets have been migrated to GF.
When it comes to market share, I'm pretty sure both AMD and nVidia wish they would have Intel's GPU market share, which is much much greater than the GPU market share of AMD and nVidia combined. When it comes to console market share, both Intel and nVidia probably wish they would have AMD's market share, which is 100% in terms of x86 based consoles. When it comes to ASIC and custom silicon, also both AMD and Intel probably wish they would have AMD's market share, and when it comes to x86, nVidia probably wishes they would have an x86 license, and AMD probably wishes they would have Intel's market share also.
AMD as a company is hollowed out. This has everything to do with the attitude of the US government, nothing more, nothing less. The owner of AMD is ATIC, a company that's majority owned and controlled by the state of Dubai, in conjunction with some European investment groups. The mother company is not nearly in any kind of trouble, but it's been in the process of reorganization and securization for the last years, and part of the plan is to asset strip AMD because it's full of liabilities, the biggest liability being that AMD is a US company. The main development body for AMD silicon has been in Dresden in Germany for a long time. The name "AMD" was completely taken off the building, and everyone there got a new contract with GF instead of AMD. The reason is that the new developments that are done, should not be part of the company AMD, but rather of GF or other companies in the ATIC portfolio, where these technologies are safe from the influence of the US government, which is probably a wise decision in the long run.
AMD has also announced that it is closing it's division that sells Intel hardware. AMD had acquired SeaMicro a couple of years ago, and was selling Intel microserver solution there. ATIC has now decided to take that part away from the AMD vehicle. Guess AMD must not be needing to sell Intel solutions anymore or something. In the microserver market, ARM is also on the uprise, and there is a risk involved in investing in x86 microserver development and marketing going forward. AMD makes a lot of custom ARM based silicon, maybe the technology has advanced enough to not have to sell x86 microservers to customers any longer.
We'll have to see what the future brings, but if AMD, well, GF/ATIC, is sitting on a really revolutionary technology and some concrete plans for the next generation of computing hardware, ATIC may well decide to dump the AMD vehicle completely, and go forward with another vehicle or brand. It would also allow them to defer some development and marketing costs to the US tax payers if they would choose to strip AMD blind and then let it go bankrupt for instance, which would be a good plan insofar it has been a very popular thing with various global companies in the last couple of years.
Anyway, who cares, the manipulations of the filthy rich on a global enterprise level are not that fascinating if you ask me. The filthy rich will pay no taxes, and will not care about the less filthy rich lolz, so I don't really care about them either. Back in the day, these large global companies were always good for a good profit when doing assignments or projects for them, but after 2008, that changed, and they became very bad customers, always thinking that they can have everything for free basically, and the world doesn't work like that. That's true for ATIC, nVidia, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Samsung, any of those. In my experience, it's much better to be second line providers, doing the same job for the customer that made a deal with such companies as first line providers, it's the same work, but better paid and less crap. I wish all of the global companies the very best, and I wish them plenty of innovation and marketing efforts, because as long as they do well, there is stability in the market as a whole, regardless of what countries they are active in or what organization they have chosen. If one of the big players would drop from the mass market competition, e.g. if nVidia or AMD would throw the towel in the ring, that would not be good for the situation of the market. The x86 market is bad enough as it is, with hardly anyone interested in going forward with it any more in long term technological architecture planning. There is a bit of a technology vacuum, that is being filled really quickly by a huge amount of smaller players that offer cheap modular solutions, and that shift the gravity point of computer technology to a place that's very likely to shift out of reach of AMD, Intel and nVidia if they're not careful. The problem with a lot of big technology concerns is that they're just not as clever as Coca Cola, and they don't see that they have to stay fair to a certain degree to stay on top of the heap. Coca Cola/Masterfoods rides that critical line between business and fine grain market analysis really well, and can keep its customers satisfied. Coca Cola spends one billion dollars per day on marketing, and does product development and extreme quality assurance continuously. They don't pressure their suppliers too much, they're pretty fair all things considered, so that if they need twenty million bottles tomorrow for a shipment, they can get it overnight from their combined suppliers. That means that they don't always please the shareholders because profit margins may vary, but they keep pleasing their customers. Technology companies still have a lot to learn about how to treat suppliers and customers. In the end, karma cannot be escaped, even for a company the size of Intel. If there is any tech company that has learned from Coca Cola, it's Apple maybe.
