AMD begins cutting jobs, but without a viable roadmap it won't survive
The job cuts that AMD CEO Rory Read promised a few weeks back have now begun. AMD has closed its Operating System Research Centre (OSRC) in Dresden, Germany. The programmers at the OSRC were responsible for a number of code improvements to Linux, as well as for supporting features like PowerNow and Turbo Core. AMD was 17th on the Top 20 list of Linux kernel contributors through version 3.2, with 2,510 accepted changes or roughly 1 per cent of the total. The OSRC was also apparently working on virtualisation support in Linux 3.6.
From 2008 to 2010 the group was quite active, with a number of presentations and papers on multi-core and many-core processing, thread synchronisation, transaction locks, and various improvements to AMD’s hardware virtualisation support. Public disclosure on these initiatives appears to have ended in 2010; it’s unclear if the company was still pursuing these lines of research under the radar.
