Media reports indicate that AMD is poised to layoff an additional 10 per cent of its current 15,000 employee workforce.

According to the DigiTimes, the redundancies will primarily be limited to AMD's manufacturing business, although certain administrative positions may also be eliminated. The company originally planned to axe 10 per cent of its 16,500 employees but confirmed yet another 3 per cent cut in November.

AMD is still reeling from a recent corporate downgrade by Moody's and weak fourth quarter projections. In addition, the company's stake in the New York State Foundry has dropped to 34.2 per cent from 44.4 per cent, while ATIC's ownership increased from 55.6 per cent to 65.8 per cent. Mubadala is expected to purchase an additional 58 million shares of AMD's common stock, which is currently valued at $182 million less than when the agreement was finalised on 7 October.

Unsurprisingly, AMD's troubled NY State Foundry scheme was roundly criticised by Morris Chang, who formed the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 1987. According to Chang, the planned NY facility is located too far away from both suppliers and customers. Nevertheless, CEO Dirk Meyer has continued to insist that the Foundry Company will help eliminate the high price tag associated with constantly building new fabs.

Meanwhile, AMD has rolled out two new dual-core Athlon processors designed for mainstream desktops. The X2 7750 "Black Edition" unlocked processor boasts a listed clock speed of 2.7GHz and is priced at $79. The second processor, also dubbed the X2 7750, has a clock speed of 2.5GHz and is currently reserved for the company's OEM partners. The two processors feature 512KB of Level 2 cache with each processing core and 2MB of L3 cache shared by both cores.

The chip manufacturing giant is slated to launch a new line of 45-nm processors in 2009, including the Phenom II, Kodiak and Tigris. X

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