Reuters Claims AMD is Pursuing a Sale, AMD Denies it

From DailyTech: Reuters on Tuesday created a stir in the semiconductor side of the New York Stock Exchange when it published a report citing three sources as saying that Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), the world's second largest graphics processing unit and x86 chipmaker, hired JPMorgan Chase & Comp. (JPM) to "explore options" including "a sale".

The publication cited AMD's struggles to achieve mobile market share as a key driver of the probe. An unwillingness to pursue mobile options is viewed as a key factor behind AMD's decision to force Dirk Meyer out of the company's chief executive spot in Jan. 2011.

But Reuters did clarify that its sources suggested AMD may merely look to sell a significant part of its patent portfolio and that a sale of the entire company was unlikely.

JPMorgan refused to comment on the rumor. But an AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie directly denied it, stating, "[AMD is] not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets at this time. AMD's board and management believe that the strategy the company is currently pursuing to drive long-term growth by leveraging AMD's highly-differentiated technology assets is the right approach to enhance shareholder value."

News of a potential sale of some of AMD's assets is not the only surprising news to emerge regarding AMD in recent weeks. The chipmaker announced two weeks ago that in 2014 it would be releasing 64-bit Opteron server chips, and potentially consumer chips based on ARM Holdings plc's (LON:ARM) proprietary reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, a rival to x86.

The switch to ARM's Cortex-A5x series intellectual property (IP) cores could save AMD on engineering overhead. Versus the company's current monolithic complex instruction set computer (CISC) x86 cores, which are designed entirely in house, AMD's will only have to tweak, improve, and otherwise performance tune the IP-cores from ARM.

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