AMD Poised for Explosive CPU and GPU Sales Growth in 2019

https://hothardware.com/news/amd-poised-huge-cpu-gpu-sales-growth-2019-zen-2-navi

by rbanffy • 7 years ago

83 38 7 years ago

joaomacp• 7 years ago

Again?

jagger273• 7 years ago

CPU sales, sure. The value per core is through the roof. Nvidia is just too entrenched with gamers and CUDA users for Navi to have a chance. It would take a silicon miracle for Navi to be good enough to convert team green fanboys.

This piece is fluff.

onli5• 7 years ago

Nvidia is just too entrenched with gamers

No reason to think that. Ryzen showed that despite years of neglecting gamers (FX really was horrible for games) they come back as soon as the offer is better. Maybe less in the first generation, but in the second of just having the better offer they do (with the Ryzen 2000 series).

AMD is already still popular in the RX 570/580 segment, if Navi were competitive AMD would be fine there.

CUDA might be a different story, that depends on the software and if tensorflow etc is even still relevant then.

plopz2• 7 years ago

Ryzen is still worse for games though, it just doesn't have the single-threaded performance.

lagadu2• 7 years ago

"Popular" is a very strong word for the 580 and Polaris in general; according to the steam hardware survey[0], the 1060 has a bit over 15% of the users while the 580, 480, 570 and 470 don't even reach 3% combined.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

sharpneli• 7 years ago

Not just silicon miracle. Especially a driver miracle.

Right now AMD is kinda usable-ish on DX and so and so in OpenCL if one spends a lot of time optimizing specifically for them.

Their OpenGL support is atrocious. Their Vulkan implementation is full of bugs.

AMD has had issues with drivers for ages. And there is no improvement in sight.

avinium2• 7 years ago

I get the feeling that OpenCL is going to become a second-class citizen in favour of ROCm (https://rocm.github.io/), which looks very promising for HPC/deep learning on AMD GPUs.

I haven't got stuck into it yet, but when I was doing some research it seemed like the AMD team had invested a lot of effort in minimizing the work needed to either support/port CUDA-specific code.

I'm optimistic about AMD fighting their way back into contention as far as deep learning goes. I don't know what that means in the gaming world, but I assume a win in the former will help them in the latter.

nabla9• 7 years ago

With CUDA users silicon is secondary. Nvidia has huge edge on the software side that is not going away soon. Even if AMD matches the raw performance, the actual performance and development tooling that allows it is what makes the difference.

AMD just don't seem to push the software side hard enough.

anfilt2• 7 years ago

Really we should be trying to move from the proprietary lock in that is CUDA.

endorphone• 7 years ago

CUDA is fairly entrenched, but there is extraordinary little "loyalty" or stickiness among gamers (nor should there be).

Right now nvidia reigns supreme because they have the best peak performance and value proposition. If AMD presents an option that upends this the ratios would change dramatically.

Just as we saw when ATI/AMD share halved over just two years when their designs were no longer competitive.

jagger273• 7 years ago

The reason I argue this is in part because of what happened with Nvidia's GeForce 400 series (Fermi). That generation was an absolute dog (heat, power, driver issues, you name it) versus AMD's absolutely fantastic Radeon 5000 architecture.

Despite the faults in Nvidia's cards, they still outsold AMD something like 10:1. Jim from AdordedTV goes into great depth on this strange era of GPU competition and dives deep into the press at the time and retrospective statistics.

"Competitive" is more than just raw performance, it seems.

carnagii• 7 years ago

With next-gen xbox, playstation, and Google Stadia all running on AMD they will continue to ship plenty of units on the GPU front. Small market share on discrete GPUs translates to better growth potential, which is the whole point of the article. AMD is already shipping 7nm GPUs, they are just too expensive to be competitive.

As 7nm continues to mature there is significant potential for AMD to grow sales if they are releasing a 2nd gen 7nm product at the same time as Nvidia is releasing 1st gen. Small market share means greater growth potential.

AMD is also in a better position than ever before because of having CPU, GPU, and next-gen custom SOCs consolidated on a single process, which means they are a much higher volume customer for TSMC than ever before, which means priority treatment, and they are manufacturing the broadest range of designs on that node, which means their internal knowledge of it is the best.

3Q is the earliest that they will see any revenue from these products, which is why the are forecasting 2Q decline. 3Q will likely be partial ramp, but 4Q should see a big pop.

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

I have a GTX 970 and would love to replace it with an AMD card.

But that has more to do with Apple's anti-Nvidia vendetta and me wanting to consolidate my gaming computer into an eGPU than any particular preference in GPU manufacturers.

supernes• 7 years ago

Direct quotes from the article:

| If the next-gen CPUs live up to the hype ...

| if Navi ends up being a worthwhile solution ...

| [a] 24 percent year-over-year [decline] ...

| single-digit percentage revenue growth [...] could end up being conservative ...

| depending on how things play out ...

| It's all speculation at this point ...

| though that bit is less clear ...

| There are plenty of "ifs" ...

... there is nothing BUT ifs in this piece.

7dare• 7 years ago

Yeah it's just speculation, sounds even like they're trying to hype up AMD stock...

swarnie_• 7 years ago

Great DD, loading up on AMD calls.

Thanks!

llaqb• 7 years ago

| If they can start writing proper GPU drivers...

ksec• 7 years ago

There has been an increase in submission from poor quality sources in the recent months. I don't mind Rumours, but it needs to be backed up with evidence that make sense. Like the recent Servethehome pieces on EYPC 2 PCI-E count. ( Servethehome is a great news sources anyway )

bitL• 7 years ago

Can't wait to get my hands on a 64 core Threadripper, but I am not sure about Navi; I'd rather pair it with Titan RTX or whatever is next from NVidia on 7nm. Intel is now interesting only for NUCs to me (their quad core little ones are as fast as 4790k, which is unbelievable, and perfect for eGPU setups).

clircle• 7 years ago

I love AMD, own stock in AMD, but I hope someone can flag this article. There's no content here, just speculation.

rbanffy• 7 years ago

Sorry. It seemed an interesting read.

Symmetry• 7 years ago

I'm very bullish on AMD continuing to make gains in server land and workstations but I do wonder what the laptop situation is going to be like in the next generation. Intel put a lot of work into power efficiency not just at a chip level but at the chipset and driver level too. This has brought large gains for battery life and while I expect AMD to catch up eventually I'm not sure that it'll happen in Ryzen 2.

gsnedders• 7 years ago

To really get growth, they need far more OEMs shipping their hardware, surely?

bradenb• 7 years ago

I feel like every year for the last decade I've been reading about how AMD is just about to make major strides in the CPU and GPU markets. It feels like it never comes. I would welcome it, but it doesn't feel like enough to catch up to perceived Intel performance; at this point, it seems like they need to really exceed it.

lousken• 7 years ago

I really hope they don't screw up GPU drivers at launch...

AMD Poised for Explosive CPU and GPU Sales Growth in 2019

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