back to article AMD agrees to drop $29.5m to make Llano go away once and for all

AMD has agreed to pay out $29.5m to settle a class action lawsuit its shareholders filed after the disastrous Llano chip rollout. The chip designer told a US district court in Oakland, California, that it had struck a deal this week with shareholders who had accused it of misleading investors in the run-up to the 2011 …

  1. Oh Homer
    Paris Hilton

    Is it just me...

    Or is AMD being sued because, essentially, the PC market is in the toilet?

    Strange.

    1. Sgt_Oddball

      Re: Is it just me...

      No, more like because they over promised and overwhelmingly under delivered. Lesions learned and all that jazz by the look of things with Ryzen, threadripper and Epyc since they acctually work and are quite competitive with Intel (not something we've seen for over a decade)

      1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

        Re: Is it just me...

        since they acctually work

        So do A series.

        The original E series low power APUs where a bit of a dud, but also work. Looking around me I have 10 APU based systems in the house - 3 laptops, one media center using a laptop version of the A series, one "proper" media center, 4 desktops and a mini-server. Every single one of them trounces the "equivalent" (quotes desperately needed) Intel from the same period. Every single one of them can be (and is) loaded with memory to the gills - up to 32G for laptops and up to 64G for desktops. Every one of them is still fit for purpose to be used today 5-6 years after the original purchase date. This was at a time when Intel deliberately crippled all consumer chipsets so that they are limited to 8G or even 4G of RAM.

        The issue which investors were suing for is actually not described correctly in the article. In addition to being late, the original F1 socket for A series (and the mobile counterpart) was found to have some issues and had to be replaced by F2 leaving a huge stock of motherboards floating out there without matching APUs. What was the reason for the replacement we actually do not know, but the result was a lot of people pissed off in the supply chain. I have one F1 system and while a bit temperamental, it has been working 24x7x365 for 6 years now so no idea what the problem was in the first place. So in addition to being late AMD also did not deliver to spec.

        In any case, I will still get an APU system if I need a computer on which to do real work on what I do for a living - Linux, virtualization, java and occasional document. In fact a brand new A12 is traveling in the post - should be here next next week raising the count of APU based systems in the house to 11.

        1. AfternoonTea

          Re: Is it just me...

          I have to agree with you. I have an FX7500 APU in my laptop, it's a couple of years old but runs my day to day stuff great. Loaded with memory it's experience is as good as any intel offering for the price, also runs Crysis.

        2. Mage Silver badge
          Alert

          Re: Intel deliberately crippled all consumer chipsets

          4G or 8G of RAM?

          Actually many Atom chips (even the 64bit ones) can only address 2G of physical RAM. Presumably so these could be sold cheap to compete with AMD or ARM in Netbooks / tablets / setboxes / TVs / NAS etc without cannibalizing existing sales.

          1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

            Re: Intel deliberately crippled all consumer chipsets

            4G or 8G of RAM?

            Intel Core circa 2012. Limit hardwired at chipset level - 8G. Some consumer models were limited to even lower.

            As a comparison, my earliest APU system - a Vaio with an E series APU I have from the same period (early 2012 model) has 16G, and its maximum theoretical limit is 64G. While most manufacturers had posted stupid fake spec limits like 2 or 4G for E series APU to make them look inferior to the Intel counterpart, in reality the limit was 32G for one DIMM systems and 64G for 2 or more DIMM systems. The real limiting factor ended up the lack of availability for non-ECC unbuffered memory DIMMs. Memory manufacturers did not ship > 8G at the time.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It would be interesting to get a breakdown on the number of people involved that also have very close links to Intel.

  3. Mage Silver badge
    Coat

    Wasn't as good as promised.

    Shareholders felt they had been misled.

    Um, isn't this the case of MOST products, especially bleeding edge tech, hyped and over sold?

    Magneto Optic Disks (Worked but too expensive and storage didn't increase enough).

    Z8000

    Apple Lisa and Pippin. Apple Newton handwriting recognition.

    So called 3D TV (actually stereoscopic)

    Sega Dreamcast?

    Intel Xpoint memory

    HP Memistors

    IBM Watson

    All Voice Assistants

    Itanium

  4. James 51

    Waiting for the Zen based APUs, hoping nothing like this rears its head again.

    1. AfternoonTea

      Four 3.5GHz Zen cores with SMT and a 1024 core vega in a 95w TDP and I'll wet my pants, memory permitting.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shareholders are not necessarily behaving rationally

    Innovation comes at a cost and not without risk - and will sometimes fail to pay off.

    If companies get sued every time an innovation fails then there cannot be innovation, logically.

    I am not at all clear if there was genuinely misleading information published, but it seems to me to be more like vultures fighting over their "share" by biting the hand that feeds them.

    Being a shareholder is not SUPPOSED to be risk free. You may as well expect all kick-starter ventures to be perfect, profitable and on time.

    1. Hans 1
      Unhappy

      Re: Shareholders are not necessarily behaving rationally

      The shareholders are vultures, they want their dividends.

      When times are great, they are happy, coz they get what they want, when they don't, shit hits the fan ... so, you try to keep board and shareholders happy, regardless ... if that means cutting work force in half, so be it.

      Dell finally got it and went "private" ... no more hitmen at the doorstep ...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    share holding is gambling

    Unless they have some sort of guaranty from AMD or AMD have provably committed fraud then why the payout?

    To me this sounds like the usual "nice little earner" for those in the know.

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