AMD lays off 1400 employees, including some senior execs

Things aren’t going so well at AMD, which just laid off 1400 employees, or around 12 percent of its 40,000 strong workforce. The cuts hit every part of the company from top to bottom; VP of strategy Patrick Moorhead and Product Director Carrell Killebrew are among those leaving the company. A leaked memo from CEO Rory Read says the layoffs were necessary to “rebalance our skillsets” and “drive to a more competitive cost structure” — we’re taking that to mean the company will put more focus on its profitable GPU divisions while figuring out what to do with its underperforming CPUs in a market that remains dominated by Intel on the high end while being rapidly cannibalized by ARM-based mobile devices on the low end. The chip industry, it’s shaking up.