AMD Returns to Full-Year Profitability, Forecasts Strong 2018

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/263110-amd-triumphantly-returns-full-year-profitability-forecasts-strong-2018

by artsandsci • 8 years ago

497 237 8 years ago

zwieback• 8 years ago

1/3 of the sales increase from crypto, probably not sustainable.

I don't think it has to be sustainable. They just need more time for EPYC to really take off and for Ryzen to continue gaining market share. I think their strongest areas are going to be CPUs and APUs, and things like Kaby Lake G. They shouldn't give up on graphics but it's going to take longer for them to be super competitive there.

wastedhours• 8 years ago

If anything, (having assumed they also know the crypto position might not be sustainable) it's better that it's not. Hopefully that means enforced innovation from them for future products, bank the cash now and invest in newer tech for the future.

aoeusnth14• 8 years ago

If it gives them the capital to start seriously competing in deep learning, then it doesn't matter.

djsumdog• 8 years ago

I realize they've always been an underdog compared to Intel, but they still dominated the console market. When every xbox and PS4 sold as your CPU in it, how were they not profitable?

Where they dumping all that money into the Zen code R&D? With the Meltdown craziness, will this be the year we start to see AMD return to the data centre?

shmerl6• 8 years ago

I think console market is an unhealthy case, because consoles are sold at loss by big incumbents (Sony and MS), who try to reap the profits through lock-in rather than hardware competition. So AMD can barely profit on hardware there. It's starting to improve lately since it's becoming a bit more competitive and less stagnated, you can notice that the rate of console hardware upgrades is increasing. Their prices will also become more real in result.

AlphaSite• 8 years ago

AMD probably used consoles to keep the wafer supply agreement above the minimum threshold.

Grazester• 8 years ago

The PS4 was never sold at a loss(Sony learnt from their past with the PS2 and PS3). The Xbox One however was https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/report-399-playstatio...

zitterbewegung2• 8 years ago

Console market is where usually the chip maker in second or third place tries to make a play for their business because console makers are basically assured sales but they will have strange requirements.

PS3 XBOX360 and Nintendo Wii were all IBM chips . They tried a bunch of new architectures but for the most part developer ergonomics was horrible.

So for the PS4 and XBOX One they decided they needed regular computer parts. I'm sure AMD and Intel may have put bids on it but AMD would be the one that would have been extremely motivated to make sales to Microsoft and Sony. As time goes on you can make higher and higher margins since the chips don't change (but on the other hand we are seeing console revisions within the traditional generation). But, I think that the margins will keep on increasing.

vvanders6• 8 years ago

Those margins are usually baked into the contract and decrease over the lifetime of the console. At least that's how I've heard it told with people who were in the know.

dralley• 8 years ago

Well, there's motivation on AMD's part, but they also have a value proposition that nobody else could have matched. They can provide both the CPU and GPU on one chip, which simplifies the console designs pretty dramatically. More compact, easier to cool, etc.

Intel graphics solutions were (and remain) sub-par, and Nvidia has no x86 solutions (and their ARM chips would have been underpowered).

icegreentea2• 8 years ago

They previously (I saw previously cause they're doing a mild re-org right now), organized their console business under their "Enterprise, Embedded & Semi Custom" business unit which is broken out by itself in the article (https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/AMD-Q...).

You can see that in 2016, their console (+ other stuff) was making an operating income (basically revenue - cost of business not including R&D) roughly the same size as their losses in their main CPU&GPU business. This is before their ~400 operating losses in other categories. I think R&D gets rolled into that? I'm not sure

chillydawg• 8 years ago

Opterons were the only server chip worth using for years, until Xeons got good.

Florin_Andrei• 8 years ago

When every xbox and PS4 sold as your CPU in it, how were they not profitable?

I'm guessing razor-thin margins to get the contracts.

shmerl6• 8 years ago

I wish though they'd produce power efficient Vega for gaming sooner. Looks like it's being pushed off to 2019.

Sapphire Nitro version requires 3 (yes, 3!) 8-pin power connectors. That's why I'm staying with RX 480 for the time being. It works very well with Mesa on Linux.

floatboth2• 8 years ago

Whatever they make will be bought up by miners. Wait for the crash of cryptocurrency markets D:

vetinari• 8 years ago

That's up to Sapphire, why they did it (probably for overclocking).

The reference design (including the LC version) and some other designs, like Asus Strix, require only 2 8-pin power connectors.

shmerl6• 8 years ago

But they still are quite power hungry at least according to the TDP specs. So it gives an impression that Vega isn't really where it's supposed to be efficiency wise.

And I prefer to avoid reference design which is usually too noisy.

davedx• 8 years ago

Is it worth picking up some AMD stock?

mamon• 8 years ago

It was worth it before the Ryzen premiered. Now all the current and future profits are already incorporated in market price. Currently, you stand a better chance of earning money if you short the AMD stocks. The old "buy the rumor, sell the fact" rule.

S_A_P• 8 years ago

I bought AMD about a 9-12 months ago, and sold it for what I paid last week. I was just happy it got back to my purchase price. I was expecting a bump with their recent return to relevance. The market yawned apparently. I am also slowly getting out of all my positions of individual companies and into indexes.

TheAdamAndChe2• 8 years ago

That's a good thing if you're into value investing for long-term returns. If a strong or strengthening company is selling for less than it's worth, then it's basically on sale. Such irrationalities are bad for short-term trading though unless you find a way to exploit such tendencies consistently.

lettergram4• 8 years ago

Probably not today, but soon yes

https://i.imgur.com/bGtm6kt.png

They weren't as impacted by the recent vulnrabilities, Intel is likley going to lose quite a bit of marketshare (Intel currently has ~95%+ of the server market). If AMD can break into the server market with even a 10% showing, then their golden.

(Image and prediction(s) from: https://projectpiglet.com)

Edit: words

reiichiroh• 8 years ago

"Intel is likley going to use quite a bit of marketshare"

How would they use their marketshare?

BugsJustFindMe• 8 years ago

Can you explain that chart re: "no" vs "yes"?

aoeusnth14• 8 years ago

Do you realize that your chart indicates that it would have been a very bad idea to buy AMD stock in late December? How can you make recommendations off such bullshit charts with a straight face? Maybe cherry-pick a better example to sell people on your product next time.

ZenoArrow11• 8 years ago

"(Image and prediction(s) from: https://projectpiglet.com)"

From the site...

"Experts' Opinion Score, is a score representing how experts feel about a given stock, product, or topic."

With all due respect, I don't think that's a very sensible metric to base investment decisions on.

matthewmacleod2• 8 years ago

This is great. It's super important to have multiple market players producing CPUs; obviously AMD is not the same company as Intel, but we also really can't afford to have a monopoly in something as important as CPUs.

dnautics2• 8 years ago

don't forget though that intel owns a sizeable chunk of amd (iirc)

e1ven2• 8 years ago

I've heard that they have a patent cross license agreement, which is why AMD can use x86 and Intel can use AMD64, but I hadn't heard about the ownership.

I don't see Intel listed at http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amd/institutional-holdings

Where do you see they have an ownership stake? How much is it?

throwaway20482• 8 years ago

You do not recall correctly.

BeeOnRope• 8 years ago

I don't think so. They certainly don't show up on any of required disclosures of major AMD holders, so if they do hold AMD stock it is less than 1%.

oatmealsnap2• 8 years ago

What do you mean by "obviously AMD is not the same company as Intel"?

matthewmacleod2• 8 years ago

I mean that they’re not directly comparable as companies - since AMD is fabless, they’re not competing on process, which I imagine is a huge chunk of Intel’s budget. But I could be wrong!

epigramx• 8 years ago

Wait a second though, AMD and Intel are practically a duopoly on the PC space; they almost fully control the x86_64 patents and they keep patenting more instruction sets every year (in fact the original x86_64 design requires SSE2 and it's not expired yet). Something similar exists for PC GPUs with NVIDIA and AMD.

I'm pretty confident the situation wouldn't be that acceptable if all 3 weren't American corporations.

UK-Al05• 8 years ago

Not surprised. Ryzen was a hit and their GPUs are great for Linux and mining.

madengr2• 8 years ago

I think AMD GPUs are crap; at least their windows drivers. I recently built a gaming PC (MSI RX-580 GPU) for my son, and never had so many frustrating crashes, black screens, etc. Waited for a month for their 5.18 driver release, and no improvement.

What a piece of shit. Sold it on eBay in 30 seconds for $40 more than I paid for it, and bought an Nvidia 1060; works flawlessly. The guy I sold it to said the RX-580 is working fine for mining. He got a card for $300 and I got rid of a headache.

m-p-3• 8 years ago

5.18 driver release?

How many years ago was this? The latest AMD Adrenalin drivers are at 18.1.1. Oh and on Linux the open-source AMDGPU drivers (made by AMD themselves) are now part of the kernel since not too long ago, so any recent cards will work out of the box on a distro with a recent kernel.

Yizahi3• 8 years ago

I had good PSU, MB, mostly clean OS install and no overclock and my AMD card run like clockwork, with zero issues over 3 or 4 years. Literally zero crashes while running almost 24/7 and gaming regularly. Don't skimp on important PC parts and install crapware and you see that both manufacturers produce pretty decent software (putting shady marketing practices aside, like internet account requirement to update geforce driver or raptr-craptr on amd, just from pure tech point of view).

dragontamer7• 8 years ago

I think your unnecessarily caustic words are reason enough for your downvotes. That kind of language isn't really welcome in ycombinator. This isn't Reddit: there's an expectation for a higher-class of discussion.

With that being said: the 17.12 update, aka Adrenaline December 2017, on Windows, broke DirectX9 and also broke a few OpenGL games. AMD suffered a major PR hit over the winter-break when a few forum moderators said things they shouldn't have said about this issue (which was eventually fixed when the executives returned to work after the New Year and performed PR Damage Control). So there's a lot of latent anger in the gamer community around AMD Drivers right now.

With that said: it isn't too difficult to roll back to an earlier update in these cases, but AMD did release a DirectX9 fix by the next month (January 2018). The OpenGL issues seem to still be a known issue, and that's why a number of people are remaining on 17.7.

admax88q• 8 years ago

The experience can't possibly be that bad for everyone. Some other factor must have been at play with your setup.

jhasse• 8 years ago

At least you don't need to register with a Facebook account to use all of the driver's features.

Zardoz84• 8 years ago

my rx580 is working flawless on Windows and Linux. Perhaps your computer have a problem.

eloff2• 8 years ago

I had no end of issues with Nvidia cards on Linux, I had to buy a ridiculously expensive AMD GPU (thanks crypto miners!) which has since been rock solid. I needed monster card that can drive four 1920x2160 displays, and the liquid-cooled fury didn't dissapoint (plus it's nice and quiet.)

sundvor• 8 years ago

4x 1920x2160 ... is that the same as 2x 4k screens?

My 1080TI is only reasonably happy to run 1920x1200x2 (60hz) + 3440x1440 (95hz); it won't fully idle the clocks, resulting in higher temps.

dingdingdang• 8 years ago

Will be adding to AMD's bottomline since I will be buying their CPU/GPU next time my workstation needs updating. This is fundamentally due to the grief caused by Intel's handling (or the lack of it, is perhaps more accurate description) of Spectre/Meltdown crisis.

Simply do not interested in Intel's kind of mentality when it comes to the hardware that runs all my computing. Nah.

ythn• 8 years ago

Been a loyal AMD user ever since my first laptop which had an Athlon64. They've always given me great performance at a fraction of the cost of Intel.

SG-• 8 years ago

Not for laptops they haven't. Also never understood brand loyalty over so many generations.

ZenoArrow11• 8 years ago

The key part of GPs suggestion again...

"great performance at a fraction of the cost of Intel"

Only two points need to be true for that statement to hold up:

* Performance levels that GP is happy with.

* Cheaper than Intel.

Which point(s) do you disagree with?

rdlecler12• 8 years ago

Why’s Nvidia’s margins so high in comparison? Given the technology and patent portfolio I’m surprised that someone hasn’t tried to take them over.

fermienrico2• 8 years ago

Can you elaborate further why you think their technology and patent portfolio can be taken over by "someone"?

jandrese2• 8 years ago

I thought Intel might have wanted to purchase them years ago when their own homegrown graphics stack was so terrible instead of spending years and millions of dollars to get it up to merely adequate for moderate use.

Today I don't know who would buy them. Intel seems to be ok with being mediocre because they're the choice for people who don't give a shit anyway.

There was an outside chance a car manufacturer might have wanted to buy them up as a strategic move against their competitors if nVidia's autonomous car GPU thing panned out, but I think they were too late to the ball for that one. It's hard to see the value proposition for most companies.

rdlecler12• 8 years ago

China would jump on this in a second but the US government would shoot this down.

lmm• 8 years ago

Are AMD's margins actually any worse in the graphics card market? Or is it just that AMD is also playing in the (lower-margin) CPU market, so their overall margin is worse?

fermienrico2• 8 years ago

There is no way to know their margins for GPU because in their financial reports, AMD combines "CPU and Graphics" into one bucket.

paulmd10• 8 years ago

Nobody here can tell you that officially, at least without breaking an NDA, but the answer is very obviously "yes".

Comparing apples to apples, AMD sells their Vega 64 flagship at a MSRP of $499, NVIDIA sells a product with an equivalent die size at $1200. AMD sells their cutdown at $399, NVIDIA sells theirs at $799. And that's before you figure that NVIDIA is using commodity GDDR5/5X while AMD is using expensive HBM2 on consumer products - NVIDIA charges between $3k and $15k for their HBM2 products. So half the MSRP, with a more expensive BOM.

AMD's margins on Vega are trainwreck bad. Some experts actually think they are losing money on every unit sold at MSRP, hence the "$100 free games bundle" on launch, and the de-facto price increases above MSRP during the fall. They're banking heavily on HBM2 costs coming down, and probably also on NVIDIA not being aggressive with the launch of gaming Volta (aka Ampere). Apart from Vega FE, they really don't see any of the extra revenue from the inflated prices during the mining boom either. That's all going to AIB partners and retailers. All AMD gets out of it is volume, and up until now they've been reluctant to increase production.

In contrast Ryzen is actually dirt cheap to manufacture due to its MCM layout. Their margins there are probably better than Intel, even with prices significantly below the launch prices.

ordinaryradical• 8 years ago

I am curious about this as well and would like the context if anyone has it.

As far as I could find, it seems that the interesting thing about Nvidia is that while they only make GPUs they've learned how to cross-market them across domains (data centers, AI, gaming, automotive) and to charge premiums according to each niche. So I think that while the products themselves have subtle differentiations, you more or less get access to each vertical from doing the same R&D for each chip generation. This may be too much a generalization, but it looks as though Nvidia has figured out how to create wildly different products out of the same GPUs and multiplies its revenue accordingly.

guiomie• 8 years ago

A lot of people are buying AMD/ATI GPUs to mine ethereum, their GPUs do extremely well against this one specific crypto currency. With ETH moving to PoS this year, thus removing the need for GPU mining, I wonder how this will impact the price of AMD stock in the future. Lot of people use Nvidia to mine other GPU compatible atlcoins.

Filligree• 8 years ago

AMD hasn't scaled up their production to meet that demand, and neither has Nvidia; they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs.

Right now that makes things hard for everyone not a miner, but if AMD ends up being the only option for gamers while Nvidia still sells to miners, they might actually gain from the mess.

philjohn2• 8 years ago

Memory shortages have also played their part.

paulmd10• 8 years ago

The thing to remember about NVIDIA is that their production levels are much higher to begin with due to their overwhelming marketshare. They have a lot more inventory in the channel at any given time, which gives them more of a buffer when GPU mining heats up.

I actually think AMD's timing on increasing production is really questionable here. Barring another major runup in Bitcoin prices (altcoin profitability follows Bitcoin prices), which seems unlikely at the moment, network difficulty will continue to increase and mining profits are going to continue to decline. That means miners are going to taper off purchases, and some may even be dumping their rigs.

So AMD is essentially increasing production at the exact moment when they may already have a problem with the market being flooded. The time when they needed to increase production was 4 months ago, it's too late now.

On top of that, NVIDIA may be pushing out their new GPUs within the next few months, implying another step in efficiency which puts AMD's performance/efficiency even further behind. They are already about a generation behind (roughly competitive with Maxwell), despite being on similar nodes. I'd be prepared for NVIDIA to make a minimum of a half-gen step (30%), if not a full-gen step (60%).

AMD's timing seems exquisitely poor here. They didn't want to bet on crypto, and now it's too late. Fortune favors the bold.

sangnoir5• 8 years ago

they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs

Offtopic FYI: GPUs that are in use 24/7 would probably in a better shape than those that encounter more thermal (on/off) cycles. There's obviously more wear and tear on the moving part, but fans are easier to replace than mechanically stressed silicon/PCBs.

paulmd10• 8 years ago

There are significant technical obstacles to overcome with the switchover to PoS. The switchover was supposed to happen more than a year ago (i.e. given the current ETA they are more than 2 years behind schedule) and the release date is being pushed back essentially as we go.

In fact the technical problems are so severe that it's questionable if the switchover will happen at all. All current PoS coins use centralized control due to these technical issues.

NVIDIA GPUs are actually typically more efficient for mining most coins, AMD cards are only preferred because they have quicker ROI. If mining profits continue to decline, that efficiency comes more into play. And, NVIDIA may be about to introduce a new generation which further improves efficiency.

If they do, god only knows what the prices are going to be. They're already nuts on Pascal, let alone if miners are snapping them up for the efficiency. Availability is going to be shit too.

rapsey• 8 years ago

NVIDIA GPUs are actually typically more efficient for mining most coins, AMD cards are only preferred because they have quicker ROI.

In what way are nvidia cards more efficient? Vegas are in some cases much faster and at worst equal to gtx 1080.

Yizahi3• 8 years ago

What is more likely - people saying "oh, I can't mine now, guess I'll have to sell all my hardware at a loss" or just switching to whatever next coin will be GPU oriented? For me it is obvious. Until (if) whole crypto market crashes people will continue to mine on GPU whatever they can, propping its valuation.

drakenot• 8 years ago

The /r/buildapc/ subreddit is depressing right now. As long as I can remember, it has always been the case that you can build a higher quality and faster computer than you can get for the same money with a pre-built.

However, there are tons of threads due to skyrocketing memory and GPU prices stating that it doesn't make sense to build right now and you can get better deals on pre-built machines.

InTheArena2• 8 years ago

AMD is in a great place at the moment - but we need to see what the smaller Zen cores coming this year can do, and what the Zen 2 release next year look like. If they have solid, significant improvements, it means that AMD is set for a bit, and can really compete and take marketshare from Intel.

Better yet, I am really hopeful about Epyc - it still doesn't seem to be shipping in huge numbers, but as someone really burned by Meltdown, it seems like perfect timing for AMD to compete.

lawrenceyan• 8 years ago

If you don't mind me asking, in what capacity were you affected by the Intel Meltdown exploits? Was it an issue in terms of security, performance, etc?

e1ven2• 8 years ago

Not OP, but I personally was pretty heavily affected - I run Robohash.org, which runs off a bunch of Digital Ocean droplets.

I needed to fire up ~ 30% additional nodes after they did their migration.

I didn't measure as carefully as I could have, but the existing nodes couldn't keep up with demand after the upgrade.

InTheArena2• 8 years ago

Database performance dropped badly, and we had to increase the number of database servers.

gkgicccj• 8 years ago

Are there thinkpads with AMD?

PS: how does one delete old HN comments? Seems like a major privacy issue to me.

floatboth2• 8 years ago

A series are basically X/T series (exact same chassis) with AMD. The Ryzen versions aren't out yet, but everyone is expecting them "soon"…

kuschku5• 8 years ago

PS: how does one delete old HN comments? Seems like a major privacy issue to me.

There's no option in the interface, the best option right now is asking nicely per email.

Of course, you can just wait until May and then use the rights the GDPR grants you to force them to delete your comments.

e12e4• 8 years ago

Assuming the poster has rights under GDPR, and hn will adjust to follow GDPR. Does seem likely they will (have to).

xedarius• 8 years ago

I recently bought a Ryzen. I was moving from a mac to a pc and I hadn't owned a pc in over 10 years. Thing is, 10 years ago my pc had 4 cores .. and at the time of choosing Ryzen it was the only consumer processor (with a reasonable price tag) that was offering more cores.

I'm very pleased, my Ryzen is fast and stable, I'm glad the company is reaping the rewards.

simcop23874• 8 years ago

Yea the whole zen lineup seems to have been huge for the company. I switched from an older intel platform (i5 4690k) that i was using to host a bunch of virtual machines for development and play to a threadripper. the difference is night and day, and it's an affordable way for me to go to ECC ram since I've got the need for a lot of it with my use case. Very happy to see AMD making great strides again.

jadbox• 8 years ago

Oh, what's your use-case for ECC ram?

loeg2• 8 years ago

Ditto on the affordable option for ECC ram. I've also gone the Threadripper route and it is just fantastic for compile times of large systems.

mike_ivanov• 8 years ago

1. desktop or laptop? 2. does it get hot under load?

soulnothing3• 8 years ago

Another Ryzen owner here. I came from mobile 2nd and 3rd gen i7s.

The price to performance is insanely good. I'm on an x370 desktop, with 2xrx550 and rx560. I'm using it as a virt/dev host. I have 16 docker instances running on the host os (Arch Linux).

Then 3 vms with PCI pass through. One for windows gaming/development. Until about three weeks back I was getting a solid 60fps @ 1080p on high across most games, but recently it's been down below 10fps. The next VM is a Linux developer desktop. Lastly, an emulator box connected to a projector away from my desk.

To switch between I just have dongles, 1xhdmi and 1xusb, behind my keyboard, and alternate the plugs. I did this because I couldn't find a good hdmi kvm that did 4k above 60hz.

This year has really been amazing for enthusiasts.

1123581321• 8 years ago

Why has the framerate dropped so much?

usernam33• 8 years ago

Sounds like an awesome setup :) How much load does your cpu have running so many containers and vm's? I have heard of software solutions for io switching. So you could get rid of usb switching.

I run an Arch host with passthrough myself but it was really a long project setting everything up just right. Especially for gaming.

Really looking forward to buying a Ryzen or Threadripper to go further and virtualize my working enviroment etc.

jagger27• 8 years ago

This year has really been amazing for enthusiasts.

I mean, graphics card prices have been pretty horrific, but I agree on the CPU side.

kayoone• 8 years ago

Awesome, what do you use to run the VMs ?

simcop23874• 8 years ago

Only KVMs that I'm aware of that'll work for this are expensive and display port rather than HDMI (not a big deal, passive adapters exist).

https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-single-mon...

https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-dual-monit...

nirv2• 8 years ago

Great news! I hope AMD releases a reasonably priced Intel NUC equivalent with their new APU. In the same compact, businesslike case (without gamers' ridiculousness), with a couple 40gbps USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, powered by USB-C/PD cable.

bitL3• 8 years ago

AMD would have to license Thunderbolt from Intel, so it's unlikely.

nirv2• 8 years ago

Apparently, not: "Intel to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free in 2018"[1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-to-make-thunderbolt-3-roy...

pacetherace• 8 years ago

Why is thunderbolt such a big requirement for a NUC equivalent?

dannyw• 8 years ago

Some of the new Intel processors come with AMD Radeon graphics, so...

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/moorins...

pythonaut_162• 8 years ago

I would love to see them release something that competes with or beats the new Kaby Lake G NUCs

topspin• 8 years ago

Sure hope AMD can stay on plane this time. Athlon 64 was tremendous and forced a huge opening in the x86 market, but AMD squandered this opportunity in following years. Competing with Intel long term means keeping up on all fronts.

shiado• 8 years ago

I tried to buy a RX580 a while ago to play some games I have been meaning to play and they were sold out everywhere.

Part of me wonders if the long term effects of the mining craze will be negative for the makers of graphics cards and in return PC component makers as a whole. Many people might be turned off of pc gaming by the prohibitive prices of buying cards at 2.5x MSRP and turn to consoles instead. Or in my case I intend to wait and pick up cheap hardware when crypto tanks hard (i.e. Tether fraud collapses), or GPU mining becomes unprofitable, or altcoins switch to proof of stake.

softawre• 8 years ago

Yes, this is a major concern for PC gaming. I have a couple 1070s I bought for 400$/each, now I could get double that used. In-freaking-sane.

solotronics2• 8 years ago

just curious but why not sell them now and buy newer ones later for non-inflated prices?

how is it possible that AMD seems to be at the limit of production for their GPUs but barely beat estimated earnings this quarter?

dragontamer7• 8 years ago

Ryzen looks really, really good. I'm planning on upgrading to Team Red over Intel as soon as DDR4 prices come down a bit. Intel's only advantage seems to be AVX512 (and that comes with a clockspeed penalty), and a truly unified L3 cache (good for databases).

But Ryzen's "split" L3 cache seems to be great for process-level parallelism (think compile times), and seems to scale to more cores for a cheaper price. They have an Achilles heel though: 128-bit wide SIMD means much slower AVX2 code, and no support for AVX512.

But for most general purpose code, Ryzen looks downright amazing. Even their slower AVX2 issues is mitigated by having way more cores than their competition. AMD sort of brute-forces a solution.

AMD's GPGPU solution looks inferior to NVidia, but for my purposes, I basically just need a working compiler. I don't plan on doing any deep learning stuff (so CuDNN is not an advantage in my case), but I'd like to play with high-performance SIMD / SIMT coding. So AMD's ROCm initiative looks pretty nice. The main benefit of ROCm is AMD's attempts to mainline it. They're not YET successful at integrating ROCm into the Linux mainline, but their repeated patch-attempts gives strong promise for the future of Linux / AMD compatibility.

The effort has borne real fruit too: Linux accepted a number of AMD drivers for 4.15 mainline.

NVidia's CUDA is definitely more mainstream though. I can get AWS instances with HUGE NVidia P100s to perform heavy-duty compute. There's absolutely no comparable AMD card in any of the major cloud providers (AWS / Google / Azure). I may end up upgrading to NVidia as a GPGPU solution for CUDA instead.

OpenCL unfortunately, doesn't seem like a good solution unless I buy a Xeon Phi (which is way more expensive than consumer stuff). AMD's ROCm / HCC or CUDA are the only things that I'm optimistic for in the near future.

frozenport• 8 years ago

But most general computing is single threaded, while high core counts work well for code that often benefits from AVX512. High core counts are also good for webservers, but here AMD is once again going to have an underpowered consumer chip.

sangnoir5• 8 years ago

I'm planning on upgrading to Team Red over Intel as soon as DDR4 prices come down a bit.

You probably want to buy that DDR4 as soon as you can - memory prices (DDR3, DDR4) have been consistently going up - not down[1]. It's insane. The price-fixing fines the memory manufacturers paid were clearly not punitive enough, we need more anti-trust action in this area.

I recently made a build on a budget, I had to snipe online specials on DDR4; waiting for the prices to come down is not a winning strategy.

1. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

dragontamer7• 8 years ago

The price-fixing fines for memory manufacturers were clearly not punitive enough

This commonly touted meme seems to ignore market realities:

https://www.dramexchange.com/WeeklyResearch/Post/2/4879.html

Data-centers buy TBs (not GB, but Terabytes) per machine. And then they buy ~20 machines per rack, and then fill an entire room full of racks.

When Data-centers decide its time to upgrade from old 1.5V DDR3 machines (or 1.35V "low voltage" LDDR3) to 1.2V DDR4 2666 MT/s like they have been doing in late 2017 through (estimated) 1H 2018, it is only natural to expect DDR4 prices to rise.

The power-savings from switching from 1.35V "low-voltage" DDR3 to 1.2V DDR4 are big enough that there are lots of upgrades incoming from the biggest purchasers of RAM in the world.

waiting for the prices to come down is not a winning strategy.

2H 2018 seems to be the current market predictions. This also works in line with waiting for Zen+ (aka Ryzen 2). If DDR4 prices are still high at that point, I'll reconsider then.

I plan on recycling my old R9 290x until GPU prices come down... but waiting till August 2018 may be long enough for GPU prices to normalize as well.

paulmd10• 8 years ago

That trend seems to be over. China's antitrust regulator has put the DRAM cartel on notice, and they're willing to stand up state-sponsored fabs to deal with it if necessary. Coincidentally just after that, Samsung announced production is going up and prices are expected to decline over this year.

http://www.china.org.cn/business/2017-12/23/content_50157479...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/21/china_memory_insour...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-chips-outloo...

Pretty blatant market manipulation here by the DRAM cartel - and China has enough downstream manufacturing at stake here that they're willing to go to the mat over it.

Dolores12• 8 years ago

It is due to crypto miners. Once crypto coins goes down the market will be flooded with used graphic cards. Hence sales will decrease.

freehunter4• 8 years ago

Would you buy a used GPU if you knew it was used for mining? I'd feel like it was pushed too hard and could be ready to burn out. Makes me wonder if the secondhand market for video cards will tank for a while after mining stops.

vesrah• 8 years ago

Cheaper GPUs for me then. I don't see a difference between buying used parts from someone that browsed the internet versus playing games. CPUs/GPUs don't just 'wear out' on a normal time scale before they are obsolete. We've got companies that have been running the same mainframes for 50 years.

mizzack• 8 years ago

I would in a heartbeat.

The mining meta has changed. In 2013 it was about squeezing max perf out of cards at any cost. Now the focus is on efficiency. Most miners will undervolt and underclock cards.

In this scenario, cards used for mining see less heat cycle stress than the cold/hot workloads a typical gaming PC sees. The primary stress is on the fans. However, even those are rated for 5-10 years MTBF under constant use.

thisisit2• 8 years ago

Total debt at 1.4 billion dollars looks huge. So while revenues look great I wonder if their cash flow has improved as well?

zdw• 8 years ago

Might be relative. I'm no financial expert, but intel has something like 26B in debt, compared to 226B in market cap: https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC

It doesn't seem so out of line for AMD to have 1.4B in debt to 13B market cap.

thisisit2• 8 years ago

The question is really on whether they are generating enough cash. Intel for example has 11.8 billion in Free cash flow:

http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=INTC&r...

whereas AMD seems to be still losing cash, currently at 217 million in loss:

http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=AMD

Animats2• 8 years ago

Wow. 34% gross margin in a competitive hardware business. AMD is doing OK.

TomVDB• 8 years ago

Intel and Nvidia have gross margins of 58% or higher. Other semiconductor companies like Broadcom are around 50%.

34% is better than the 30% of last year, but it's still really bad.

matte_black3• 8 years ago

I recently doubled my position in AMD prior to earnings, mostly from discussions on HN. Here’s hoping they will have continued success in the long term.

m3kw92• 8 years ago

Their P/E is now over 340. I’m not sure if that’s new territory do a stock that is not penny? Or is it because they just became earnings positive?

aoeusnth14• 8 years ago

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/amzn/

Not new territory at all. P/E is not a good indicator of future earnings, because it artificially penalizes capital investments. Cost of revenue is a better metric.

jnordwick• 8 years ago

Prob. PER is only really useful for a firm with a stable and positive net income (think of things like industrials where growth capex isn't such a major factor). For something like a firm fluttering around zero EPS you would use a more forward measure of expected profit. The problem with PER is that stock price is forward looking while EPS is backwards looking.

ComputerGuru• 8 years ago

For those that haven’t seen it, intel is releasing a new chipset that has an integrated AMD GPU on it; I am eager to see how the sales for that go. It does seem to imply that intel has given up on their own iGPU aspirations, which makes no sense given how much they’ve doubled-down on the GPU tech in recent years. But it may be just intel playing the long game to compete with nVidia, which is just killing it in the GPU department in recent years.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/kaby-lake-g-unveiled...

def-• 8 years ago

Intel's plan seems to be doing this temporarily until their own high performance GPUs are ready.

forgot-my-pw• 8 years ago

Don't they say this every year? That their integrated GPU will be better, but it's still crap.

currymj• 8 years ago

i'm optimistic AMD GPUs will be usable for general purpose computing soon. ROCm seems to be coming along nicely, and they have various deep learning frameworks functioning to various degrees.

in particular, I think there's buy-in from the framework maintainers, they're not going to go out of their way to port but they also aren't averse to merging in code written by AMD engineers.

i don't think people in research have any particular loyalty to NVIDIA, and everybody's macbook pro now has an AMD GPU, so there are also personal incentives to get this stuff working properly.

tsmarsh• 8 years ago

Strong forecasts with Spectre still around seems very optimistic.

Can AMD or Intel release another generation of chips with Spectre vulnerabilities?

Do we think they're going to have a solution to Spectre within a year?

Can x86 survive without out of order processing? Can any architectures perform at modern levels without it?

Is x86 relevant in the server if you use Linux/BSD and can recompile your deployables?

Without Spectre I'd be very bullish on AMD. With Spectre, I'm bearish for the entire sector.

tyingq• 8 years ago

Totally rooting for AMD to be the AVIS to Intel's HERTZ. The early Opteron/x64 days were great when I actually had a credible alternative to the status quo. Go AMD! Competition benefits everyone, everyone, even Intel.

enzolovesbacon• 8 years ago

I was about to buy a Ryzen workstation, but ended buying an (used) HP Z600 (2x E5620, 48GB ECC RAM, 2TB HD) because it was the best bang for the buck; just the Ryzen 1800x + motherboard would cost me what I paid for the Z600 (I live in Brazil, prices here are crazy).

That said, I'm really rooting for AMD here. It's very nice to have this kind of competition and customers will benefit a lot from this.

AMD Returns to Full-Year Profitability, Forecasts Strong 2018

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