The question about reducing the AMD personnel has been in the air since the merger of AMD and ATI: some duplicate positions in the joint company had to be eliminated. From the beginning of this year AMD reduced the number of its personnel by 2%, some financial and accounting specialists have been laid off.

In the meanwhile, the troubling financial results of Q1 2007 forced AMD to think about reducing their expenses even more. Besides other measures, they were also forced to lay off some of their employees. According to Mercury News site referring to AMD officials, they laid off another 430 people last Wednesday. According to the data from the end of April 2007, they had the total of 16,823 people on stuff, which means they lost 2.6% of their personnel.

About 40 people were laid off from the California, USA office (Sunnyvale and Santa Clara). 80 positions will be eliminated in Austin, Texas. Another 50 people will lose their jobs in the Canadian graphics division of AMD in Markham, Ontario. The German offices, including Dresden fabs remained safe this time.

According to AMD officials, most of the laid off employees were working in sales, marketing and management departments. They have also eliminated a few engineering positions, although this will not affect any of the projects in progress. We sincerely hope that it will be exactly like that, because in this hard situation even the AMD CEO bets on technical innovations that cannot be implemented without experienced engineers. Hector Ruiz claims that Barcelona processors should let AMD regain the technical leadership lost to Intel. The innovations brought by AMD solutions (Barcelona CPUs in the first place) make Mr. Ruiz very optimistic about the year 2007 as well as even farther future.

Note that several percent lay-offs for a company like that is no cause for concern. For example, Intel last year announced that they will gradually reduce their personnel by 10,500 people (10%) and 3,000 of them will be laid off this year. As you can see the microprocessor giant didn’t suffer from this event in any way. Hopefully it will have the same healthy effect on AMD, too.