Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  is name that some of you may be familiar with, while others of you are probably not very familiar with, unless you spend a lot of time looking at the parts inside your computer. So before we talk about the job cuts that are being made by the company lets begin by talking about what the company does by looking at how they have chosen to describe themselves, “About AMD: AMD (NYSE: AMD) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its groundbreaking AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD’s server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD’s superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers.”

Sadly the company has chosen to make some truly massive job cuts in the near future. After some seriously disappointing results in its third quarter the company is getting ready to cut back on about 15 percent of its staff.

For the time being the company has not outlined detailed plans about the job cuts, but if the job cuts impact workers in the USA then the company is likely to trigger a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” The only good news about a mass layoff action is the fact that the workers must be given several weeks of notice before they are cut from the payrolls.

Interestingly enough the company, in its latest release, did not say much about the job cuts, and their latest release was about its newest world record, instead of the big restructuring that is coming to the workers in the near future, “AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced an update to the Guinness World Record-setting¹ AMD FX family of central processing units (CPUs) that continues the brand’s history of delivering a fully unlocked and customizable experience for performance desktop PC users. At the heart of the latest AMD FX processor is the new “Piledriver” multi-core architecture that offers up to a 15 percent increase in performance at a lower price than the previous generation² – with the highest-performing AMD FX processors starting at less than $200. The increased performance from the latest architecture is designed for multi-threaded applications like content creation, video and audio encoding, and games, allowing users extreme responsiveness and mega-tasking performance… The AMD FX opens the door to a world of possibilities when combined with other AMD technologies, like an AMD 9-Series chipset motherboard and AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series graphics cards with AMD Eyefinity technology multi-monitor support.  AMD also provides downloadable software upgrades that free the creative user to push performance with the AMD OverDrive™ utility, manage their gaming with AMD Catalyst™ Control Center, or harness the power of multiple graphic cards working in parallel with AMD CrossFire™ technology³.”