http://www.anandtech.com/show/8625/amd-q3-fy-2014-quarterly-earnings-analysis
Revenue - Down on the same qtr last year.
Operating Income - Down on the same qtr last year.
Net Income - Down on the same qtr last year.
R&D Spending - Tracking down (this is the big problem)
http://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense
Indeed.
continuing downward spiral of income and revenue is what you said yet the link you provided says.
Q3 13, $48mil income, Q2 14 -$36mil income, Q3 14 $17mil income.... Q3 12 -$157mil , continuing downward spiral, really...or one quarter up, one down, one up... when it was anything from $157-300mil losses a quarter only a year before that.
Continuing downward spiral, over the past few years they've gone from an average $250mil losses per quarter through 2012 to profit in some and SMALL losses in some quarters.
I don't know if you know this but going from $250mil loss to a $48mil profit is an UPWARD trend, and -$36mil to $17mil is UPWARDS.
Claiming a continued downward spiral when the results are going up is nonsense. Under new management financial results have gone up, significantly and your own link agrees with that and shows absolutely no downward trend.
As for reduced R&D spending, no, the biggest part of R&D spending is wages of people involved. If you have 1000 engineers who suck fire then and bring in 100 great engineers then you can easily end up saving millions while also making better products.
The company was heavily bloated by the ATi/AMD merger, as most mergers end up, particularly in terms of senior guys with huge wages running departments and yes their huge wages end up being R&D costs when they are heads of R&D departments. The company was widely considered to have a huge amount of waste, restructuring to trim as much waste as possible has is done because it will save money and it does this by reducing on going costs which is reflected by the R&D 'budget'. The restructuring has saved them a huge amount of money. Some good guys will get cut out with the bad, it's pretty natural and unfortunate. But you need to cut back to the bare bones before you start hiring the right people which is what AMD(and many other companies before them) have done during restructuring.
The right guy controlling R&D can save you billions in R&D by going down less wrong avenues and simply making a better product in the end. If they got the right people in or not will probably show in 2 years when we see the results of the ARM/x86 architectures and see how competitive they are.
It sounds like they've switched from two x86 architectures to one x86 and one ARM architecture with a lot of shared ground(one uncore it seems) which again reduces the number of teams and engineers needed. They also don't forget had huge numbers of guys doing R&D into processes, a lot of there costs have gone from being called in house R&D costs to a business expense purchasing a service which doesn't count as R&D, the result should improve as a result. employ 1000 people who tape out 3 products a year or employ a firm who employ 5000 people who between them tape out 300 products a year... which will get you a better end product. It's not feasible to do everything in house any more, so again moving guys out though the cost isn't necessarily gone but moved around.
