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AMD sells hand-held division

Published on 21st January 2009 by Gareth Halfacree

Qualcomm has bought AMD's Imageon hand-held graphics technology - and the staff behind it - for $65 million.

With AMD following Intel's lead in cutting prices for mainstream quad-core processors, the company has to find a way to make up the shortfall – and it's the hand-held graphics division which is going to have to pay.

According to Ars Technica's Jon Stokes, chip maker AMD is looking to boost its bottom line by ridding itself of some of the leftovers from its acquisition of ATI – specifically, the hand-held graphics division.

The Imageon-branded OpenGL ES 2.0 hardware the division created – designed for hand-held devices including portable games consoles, PDAs, and smartphones – was based around the Unified Shader Architecture that the company used in the Xbox 360's graphics hardware. While the Imageon technology brought some interesting innovations to the market, it's never been a money spinner for AMD with licensees proving few and far between.

In order to boost its bottom line ahead of a pricing war with rival Intel, the company has agreed to sell Imageon to telecommunications chip specialists Qualcomm for $65 million. An early licensee of the technology, Qualcomm will also be taking AMD's hand-held division employees to help it get the most from the platform.

AMD's chief operations, administrative, and financial officer – busy guy – Robert J. Rivet hopes that the move will allow AMD to “focus on our core business and leverage our unique position as a leader in both x86 computing and high-end graphics,” and believes that “the talented AMD Handheld employees will be a great asset to Qualcomm.”

Do you believe that AMD might be making a mistake handing the hand-held crown jewels over to Qualcomm for a song, or are you hoping that the cash will help the company boost its offerings in the CPU and desktop graphics sectors? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

4 Comments

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Goty 21st January 2009, 18:40

I think this was a good move on AMD's part. They don't need to be diverse now, they need to concentrate on the markets that make them the most money and divert the engineering manpower from the peripheral projects towards getting their next-gen products (be it GPU or CPU) out the door in as timely a manner as possible and in the best shape they can be.

1ad7 21st January 2009, 22:20

agreed, although selling parts of a company is never an ideal situation qualcomm is a good company and amd needs the cash.

Adnoctum 22nd January 2009, 05:18

I can't see the cause and effect here. A sale like this couldn't be arranged in a few days, so I don't see it as a consequence of the current CPU price drops or in anticipation of a price war.

Rather it is because; AMD has no money to fritter on non-core competencies -> hand-held division makes AMD no/little money -> the asset (the division) requires constant investment in resources to maintain value or it suffers depreciation -> AMD isn't interested in or is unable to maintain a presence in the market -> AMD sells asset while it has value.

xprodancer 25th July 2009, 02:06

After reading about the fine qualcomm has on its houlders i think AMD should keep this to themselfs for now! when it comes to the fact there not making, as poeple say little to no money, then they should start to push this into the markets and get it out there!!!! how else they gona make there money! if they see that it does not sell in the market, then the time is to sell as is, but to some other company! that has no fines on there shoulders for dodgy patenting deals to other companys that are paying way to much for it!!!