AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years(marketwatch.com) |
AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years(marketwatch.com) |
From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?
There is not much software yet to take advantage of 24 or 32 cores and single core performance will always be a direct benefit.
The multithreaded workloads part is correct, but the argument falls apart when you remember that an average user has hundreds of different processes running in the background, or in other words a workload that can handily take advantage of those cores.
Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best-- if only I hadn't had my bitcoins stolen from an early mining pool... oh well.
Another big thing, i feel, these days is people are able to A. communicate this better, and B. call Intel on their bullshit. I've seen a LOT more hype, understanding, and word of mouth via forums etc. than around the 2000s when the stock was last high. Granted there is a bit of a hype at the moment around crypto currency, I genuinely can't see why anyone will be picking Intel over AMD in the future... and that's the crux of why I don't think the stocks going to crash.
Now, Intel's CEO got fired, they also poached one of the top AMD engineers. But these guys move slowly. So i guess we will see.
You probably would have sold the bitcoins before it went crazy up.
They couldn't compete in terms of high end performance for a long time. But nowadays they even lose the price-performance ratio of entry->mid level GPUs.
But one can be concerned about the utter failure of high end Vega.
As far as VR goes, I think they're in the early stages still -- they need to improve the lenses, resolution and refresh rate before I will be buying in so I don't yet need the VR frame rates. At the current level I'm sure the Vegas would handle VR fine though since it seems to outperform nvidia slightly.
And the integrated Vega graphics in their Ryzen mobile processors are nothing to sneeze at. Getting performance comparable to some of the low-end nVidia cards.
[0] https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977
Uh, do they mean vega GPUs or EPYC CPUs?
That aside, the experience I've have had with the EPYC cpus has been awesome. They are truly amazing for the price tag.
Perfect buy was on April 25th, up 75% since then.
Thank god someone spilled the beans; also incentives me read HN all the time -_-
Miners bought AMD because AMD cards are usually better at mining for the money. They started buying more Nvidia when AMD didn't make enough cards.
In any case though, the success of Ryzen is the interesting thing, not the mining sales.
Last I remember this thing was bouncing from 11 to 12 consistently.
Not super impressive, but we'll see what happens I guess.
AMD's primary focus is on Epyc building presence in data centers. They are aiming for 5-6% market share by end of 2018 and 15% by the end of 2019.
Frankly, if AMD can start putting this stuff together over the next 2-3 years it's usually not too bad to have deep learning frameworks leverage this stuff.
On the other hand, with the rise of their cheaper CPUs and APUs, I'd actually expect that to change. From a power perspective and eventually the ubiquity, it'll make sense to provide more support.
AMD was literally going bankrupt like 2 years ago. They fired 30% of their staff and then reverse-mortgaged their headquarters. They bet their entire company on "Zen" and... luckily, it paid off.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/12/3496006/amd-layoffs-10-p...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/amd-s...
AMD finally has money to actually invest into long-term projects. But AMD just didn't have the money to do so between 2012 and 2016.
Unfortunately, it will take until 2020 before AMD puts something together. It just takes a long time to build software and hardware. But ROCm shows how AMD is beginning to accelerate, finally, into the GPGPU compute sector.
AMD finally got Jim Keller back in 2012 to help develop Zen. This would prove to give them a fighting chance. He lead development of the Infinity Fabric, successor to his Hypertransport, which would allow the Zen to be so modular in adding more and more cores so easily. He was previously head of K8 architecture which lead to the successful Athlon 64 and Opterons. We also have to thank him for transitioning us to 64bit. He later departed and working on the A4/A5 CPUs at apple in the iphone 4/4s and ipad 1/2 respectively. These chips also helped Apple dominate for nearly a decade in CPU performance. Jim and Raja Koduri made a great team at Apple at that time. Jim would head to Tesla next, and Raja would head back to AMD to help create Vega. And now Intel has the duo. Will they be able to give us another decade of dominance from Intel? Exciting times coming!
default clocks: https://i.imgur.com/dU3aI35.png
normalized clocks: https://i.imgur.com/wg3SQUd.png (sadly they have not normalized memory clocks)
In single threaded games this can be even more apparent. But Intel is mainly faster because of a significant clock advantage. Clock for clock the advantage is small.
I'm looking forward to Zen 2 which could allow AMD to close the IPC gap or even get a bit ahead of Intel. Combined with the 7nm process which should allow better clocks it's looking good for AMD.
Question is if AMD uses the high performance process which is touted to allow up to 5 ghz [0] at the cost of increased power usage, or if they use the low power process (which is also more affordable). Since Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc use the same die probably the latter since power consumption is so important in the data center.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12438/the-future-of-silicon-a...
I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that Intel has employed previously.
Luckily it seems AMD can probably deliver both with Zen 2. For Epyc the roadmap suggest a 50% increase in core count [0] over Zen 1, and since Ryzen and Threadripper uses the same die as Epyc this will most likely trickle down to Ryzen 3xxx and Threadripper 3xxx.
Depends on your game and monitor I guess. Quite a few people seem to buy ugly 144hz gaming monitors and some games like Warhammer and Far Cry 5 can have ~20 fps difference at the same clocks at 1080p.
> I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that Intel has employed previously.
Most of the time the limiting factor is not the CPU but the GPU anyway. The good thing about AMD closing the gap or potentially even overtaking Intel in single threaded performance is that the fanboys, fangirls and corporate shills have one argument less for spreading FUD and suggesting Intel over AMD.
[0] there are even (unlikely) rumors floating around about a 64 core Epyc, but I don't see that happening before 7nm+ on EUV.
It does when you want "the best of the best" for gaming on an expensive 144Hz display, and also spend a ton of money on a GPU to handle that. You don't want your single-threaded CPU performance be the bottleneck in your games then - so for a top-of-the-line gaming PC, Intel is still the best choice.
A segment of their business was promising, and they could see a hugely emergent demand growing. Instead of getting in on the projects that matter, they just ignored it turning it into an entirely nvidia market. Yes, that is irrational and self-defeating. If they were so self-sabotaging in the GPU market they should have sold that business (and it makes one wonder why they ever bought it in the first place).
Of course CUDA is a moat. AMD sat doing nothing allowing it to get dug further and deeper, becoming completely synonymous with deep learning. A small scale, inexpensive software project to keep official, supported branches of major projects wholly functional on AMD hardware (e.g. Tensorflow) would have done great things. Instead they made some completely irrational solutions that tried to move the market somewhere completely different.
This has nothing to do with how they bet on "Zen". It isn't either or.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/10/16/amd-misses-earnings-targe...
https://venturebeat.com/2015/10/01/amd-to-lay-off-500-people...
2016 AMD began to stabilize, as they focused on Zen. They still were losing tons of money per quarter, but they refocused their efforts. And 2017 they finally delivered. AMD didn't actually turn a profit until late 2017.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/05/amd-turns-its-firs...
Between 2011 and mid-2017, AMD was losing money every quarter. There's a reason why the stock was below $2/share for a long time.
Small Cat (Puma cores) were cancelled and that entire department was laid off. This is the core that won AMD the Xbox One and PS4. Small Cat was also their low-power architecture designed for tablets (notice that AMD literally gave up on the growing Tablet market?)
AMD cut DEEP to stay out of bankruptcy. They were cutting known, successful projects and were still losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.
Lets be frank here: if AMD were today, in a position where they had better ROCm or OpenCL or Tensorflow support but say... no "Zen" or "EPYC" ?? They'd be worse off. The CEO made the right bet to focus on Zen as their comeback strategy.
Zen is successful because it demonstratively does something better than Intel. It also doesn't need much software support or tooling, and was designed to be relatively cheap to make. I don't think AMD would have done the same with the NVidia GPGPU compute world, especially since CUDA is a proprietary technology. Even if AMD were to make something better than NVidia, they wouldn't reap any rewards because CUDA is a big moat.
I think most would look at the situation and conclude that even broken clocks are right twice a day.
Intel does have margins on their products but at the same time, the products are still expensive. I fault their production method for that. I bet that even if they sold their CPUs at a loss, AMD could undercut them in the important market segments at minimum.
AMD has struck gold with being able to, in Intel's words, glue together a bunch of desktop CPUs.
Intel's biggest CPU, a 28 core, is a monolithic die. All in one go. Which means the yields are bad. AMD produces basically 1 die and glues together as needed. The yields here are much better due to the smaller die and being able to use basically any die that has functioning 2 cores.
Intel doesn't have a response to that since if their 28 core die has 26 defect cores, they don't have a housing for it to sell in. Their segmentation also means that they don't have compatible sockets in size to even conceivable put the 28 core to use at all.
IMO Intel will have to come up with a similarly modular response or reduce their production cost.
Of course, Intel has a while, they can idle a few years on marketshare and mindshare before they run a risk of loosing the CPU business (and they sell other silicon too where AMD doesn't compete). So likely, they will be able to do it.
Question then is how much marketshare AMD will have eaten by then.
(Personally, I hope AMD will release server cpus for the lower market segment, building an Intel-based Server that doesn't have the suck is rather expensive and low-cost baremetal would be a delight for hobbyists and SMB)
The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die area then you get double as many defective chips.
Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would be even more expensive to produce.
Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that aren't black, ie defective silicon.
AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their performance (chips can have wildly different performance).
Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that) that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the die.
For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a 32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run fast.
The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is 98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those sockets.
Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that they'll canabalize future sales- if they sell you a 2 core 2GHz processor today, they can sell you a 4 core 2GHz processor in a year. Which is exactly what they've done with Apple, they're basically slowly releasing performance at a given price to ensure a certain refresh cycle. If they give you a 48 core 4GHz processor today they're not going to have anything else to sell you until 2050.
Thirdly, if they start competing on Price they have to work against their entire brand as being leaders in the market. You can't say "We produce the top performance chips" and also "Buy this because it's cheaper than the other options". Again, once you have the reputation as the low cost solution, it's very hard to regain the performance lead reputation.
Fourthly, a lot of the markets they're in aren't growing so they aren't going to increase total sales much by decreasing the margins, they're just going to make less money on what they do sell. So those lower margins don't really stimulate demand.
Finally, Intel has a very strong company brand, but a weak product line brand. Everyone knows Intel - so Intel has to define itself by it's name. It can't say "This is the performance product line", "This is the value product line" because all anyone sees is "This is the Intel product".
First, anti-competitive. They're a monopolist in microprocessors for desktop / laptop. They've been allowed to retain that monopoly so long as they behave a certain way. They could try to squeeze AMD out of the market with very aggressive price cutting, and that would definitely be viewed as anti-competitive behavior by the US Government (and plausibly the EU and China; China is just starting to see the fruits of a very potent deal with AMD that could revolutionize their ability to build domestic processors to compete with Intel, zero chance they want to see Intel bury AMD now).
Second, there are few things investors hate to see more than aggressive margin erosion in a core product. Intel will restrain themselves from using that as a competitive hammer until or unless there are no other options (and by then it may be too late). They have a very large amount of margin to give up, doing so would have very damaging consequences to their stock. Intel's stock was in a pit of hell for 15 years, since the dotcom implosion. They just finally climbed out of that in the last year. They're sporting 25-27% style net income margins, which are classic Intel solid figures. They could smoke AMD any day of the week by smashing their margins, making processors entirely unprofitable for AMD and driving them out of the business, and then raising prices back to where they were. It's likely they simply can't reasonably take the risk entailed in doing that (both regulatory and Wall Street).
Their mission statement [0] doesn't even mention shareholders anymore.
[0] https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/0...
There's no law obliging companies to place "maximising shareholder value" above all else.
