AMD to lay off 470 employees worldwide

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will hand out pink slips to five per cent of its global workforce after adopting a restructuring plan to help improve poor fiscal results.

AMD has 9,469 employees as of June 2015 and will cut approximately 470 positions. The restructuring plan will target "all sites, all levels, all functions," an AMD spokesperson said, adding that engineers will represent a smaller portion of layoffs. Cuts will mostly come from sales, marketing and operations segments.

In the first half of this year, AMD slipped from IHS' top 20 semiconductor vendors list after six consecutive quarterly losses. The company expects to save approximately $9 million in 2015 and $58 million in 2016 following job cuts and restructuring.

Among the new teams created at AMD is an enterprise solutions group within the existing Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment. AMD previously had separate server and embedded teams with sales support for both; the reorganisation will merge the groups to create a single team focused on server and embedded businesses.

"Server remains a high priority for us. When we introduce our new CPU core Zen, that will help return us into higher performance in both the client and server space," the spokesperson told EE Times.

The restructuring plan will cost AMD approximately $41 million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2015—$31 million of which will be related to severance and benefit costs, and $1 million to facilities related consolidation charges.

- Jessica Lipsky
??EE Times U.S.