AMD Reports Q4/FY 2020 Earnings: Record Revenues Repeat

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16455/amd-reports-q4fy-2020-earnings-record-revenues-repeat

by thg • 5 years ago

148 70 5 years ago

Not really surprising news though since It's been a record year for anything semiconductor or tech related.

Even Intel's outdated 9th and 10th gen chips were flying off the shelves and anything truly innovative (RTX 3000 GPUs, Ryzen 5000 CPUs) were paper launches for most consumers with the label "OUT OF STOCK" describing the overall situation.

jeffbee2• 5 years ago

AMD recently announced that the situation with the Ryzen 5000 will continue at least through the end of this quarter. They might as well not exist. If Intel launches Rocket Lake-S in volume — and why wouldn't they, since that 14nm process must be pretty well dialed in by now — they might have the best product on the market again.

mjevans3• 5 years ago

I would really, desperately, like a more equitable way of distributing the option to buy these parts. I absolutely refuse to pay scalpers and let them win... but many others quite obviously are.

Is there some way for me as a consumer to get into a pool and wait for RNG to give me a shot at buying the parts I need for my normal refresh cycle? My 6 year old desktop was due for it's rebuild this last year. X.X

aarongolliver• 5 years ago

EVGA has a sign up sheet. They'll email you when it's your turn and you have some number of hours to complete the order (don't remember the exact amount of time you get). Note that at this point it'll likely be months before you make it to the head of the line.

ficklepickle• 5 years ago

This would be a great option that retailers could implement. A small deposit would give you a lottery entry, max one per person.

Any problems come to mind?

buzzy_hacker• 5 years ago

As someone who knows nothing about this space, is there a reason GPU manufacturers don’t increase their prices so they get the extra money that is now going to scalpers, and then reinvest that into manufacturing so they can increase supply and then lower prices back to current levels but with stock?

monkeydust• 5 years ago

I have always brought Intel but my newest machine is now AMD. This was combination of AMD excelling with their new series of processors but also the lacklustre performance of Intel.

I would by lying if I said that market perception didn't feed into my decision, it did.

I do hope Intel can fight back with their new CEO, ultimately this level of competition should only be a good thing for consumers.

tomnipotent3• 5 years ago

but also the lacklustre performance of Intel

Current-gen Intel & AMD processors are pretty much neck-to-neck in both performance and price.

Jonnax• 5 years ago

How about power consumption?

Or PCIe Gen 4 support?

I wouldn't say Intel has anything worth looking into if you want 32 or 64 cores on the desktop.

simion314• 5 years ago

Current-gen Intel & AMD processors are pretty much neck-to-neck in both performance and price.

I think this is only if you ignore multi-threading but I might be wrong, did Intel release better multi core CPUs or cut down the prices?

beezle2• 5 years ago

While I don't think you should be downvoted, I think you are probably wrong - there is quite a bit difference in the passmark ratings.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5900X&i...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-10900...

neogodless• 5 years ago

https://www.techspot.com/review/2188-amd-ryzen-5980hs/

For example, Cinebench R20: Ryzen 9 5980HS (35W) scores 4517, Core i9-10980HK scores 3484. Other benchmarks follow suit, but that's the first one listed.

With Ryzen 5000, and by extension the Ryzen 9 5980HS, AMD is delivering much better single-thread performance. The 5980HS provides a ~20% gain versus the 4900HS, which is significant for an architectural improvement on the same process node. This takes the 5980HS above Intel’s 10th-gen H-series in all workloads, and allows Zen 3 to trade blows with Intel’s Tiger Lake featuring Willow Cove CPU cores

Tiger Lake is competitive in single core, but I believe they currently top out at 4-core CPUs.

The Ryzen 9 5980HS is by far the fastest mobile processor available in the 35W power class, and easily offers 20-30% more performance than Intel’s best chip, the Core i9-10980HK, at a lower power level.

secondcoming• 5 years ago

Indeed, I had to buy a new laptop before Christmas and reluctantly had to go with Intel. AMD just wasn't available on the spec of machine I needed (Dell Precision)

totalZero6• 5 years ago

I bought a Comet Lake laptop last year, and then later another laptop with Ice Lake. Both i7. So far, so good. Yesterday, I bought a Tiger Lake i5 laptop; I would have been happy to buy a Zen 4 laptop but I couldn't find any at the price point I needed.

I heard on the AMD earnings call yesterday that there was some tightness in the lower end of the Ryzen laptop lineup due to AMD under-anticipating the demand. Here's a quote:

So certainly, when I look at the semiconductor environment in 2020, it was very strong. So we saw a strong revenue ramp in our business, as well as across some of our peers. It's fair to say that the overall demand exceeded our planning.

And as a result, we did have some supply constraints as we ended the year. Those were primarily I would say in the PC market, the low end of the PC market, and in the gaming markets. That being said, I think we're getting great support from our manufacturing partners. The industry does need to increase the overall capacity levels.

And so we do see some tightness through the first half of the year, but there's added capacity in the second half.

So I anticipate that Intel is going to keep the pricing pressure on, to recapture market share. We already see this in the desktop processors, where AMD now sells at a premium versus Intel (admittedly, for good reason).

dblooman• 5 years ago

Where did you bring it?

klelatti2• 5 years ago

From all accounts wafer availability looks like its the constraining factor for AMD (and by implication a key factor in Intel's performance).

All roads lead to TSMC ....

jp555• 5 years ago

... and then on to ASML.

thg• 5 years ago

and from there to Zeiss..

MangoCoffee2• 5 years ago

All roads lead to TSMC ....

there's a need for another foundry like TSMC. Samsung is not cutting it.

bob1029• 5 years ago

Samsung is really close (relatively speaking). They did recently announce a major expansion of their Austin, TX facilities as well.

totalZero6• 5 years ago

I see it differently. The massive global dependence on TSMC is also a reason why Intel's IDM model is a good thing. More companies should set up their own fabs. We need more foundry, sure -- but I disagree with the "like TSMC" part.

I saw two articles that convinced me of this.

First, I saw that Germany asked Taiwan to ease the semiconductor shortage's impact on the auto industry.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-autos-chips/german...

Then, I saw that Germany is sending a warship to the South China Sea.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Ind...

UMC is also exposed to geopolitical risk. Samsung too.

There's a lot of demand for semiconductor fabrication right now, and I don't think that's going away. Why concentrate all of the capex right on China's doorstep? I just don't see the wisdom of that approach.

ksec3• 5 years ago

Good, but not quite Good Enough.

1. Intel single Q4 is double the revenue of AMD FY 2020.

2. On Consumer they have their Laptop APU launch along with decent GPU lineup against Nvidia. But this translate to 20% YoY. Compared to Intel 10%+ YoY. Remember AMD's baseline is a lot smaller. 10% growth from AMD and 10% from Intel is quite a bit different.

3. Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom looks good on paper with YoY. But reality is that PS5 and Xbox contributed more. Which means Server Sales still isn't anywhere good enough. Intel has been defending their territory exceptionally well, as shown with their latest report with large decrease of ASP.

This isn't just some supply constrain. It is also AMD needs to do better forecasting. Although arguably AMD is conservative in nature due to not so long ago they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

What is exceptionally good though was their profitability. Even excluding the one off Tax benefits. Their Net Income in 2020 increased by 5X!

Edit: Just checked in 2019 they were paying down their debt, which was partly why their net income were low. So 2020 is a true reflection of their profitability. All of a sudden their stock price doesn't look so insanely high.

AshWolfy• 5 years ago

Remember that intel's cpus is just one division in a much larger company, where amd is mostly just cpus and gpus, so any comparison of revenue is going to make intel look much better

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Also what about revenue evolution. If intel used to be 4x and and now only 2x, its a whole different picture.

ksec3• 5 years ago

Doesn't make that much difference really. Intel doesn't have GPU market either.

Intel Client and DC are still vast majority of their revenue. Using the example I gave, just these two are $17B in Q4 and $66B in FY2020, vs AMD $9.8B in FY2020.

They need to work on their DC sales. As I have been saying since 2018.

beezle2• 5 years ago

They don't break out specifically cpus but seems that is well the lions share

https://businessquant.com/intel-revenue-by-segment

totalZero6• 5 years ago

This is factually inaccurate. $66.2B of Intel's revenue for 2020 came from datacenter and client computing.

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/...

jraby3• 5 years ago

Paying down debt shouldn’t affect net income. That’s a balance sheet item.

If you earn $100, and keep it or use it to pay down debt, net income is still $100.

ksec3• 5 years ago

That is Operating Income. Net Income takes out everything.

lumost• 5 years ago

One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side AMD gear, the state of AMD laptops and linux leaves a lot to be desired.

It'll be expensive for AMD to close the software gap between both Intel and Nvidia.

uncledave• 5 years ago

Surprisingly the only laptop I’ve ever had work reasonably well on Linux was an AMD based one (T495s).

dharmab2• 5 years ago

When was the last time you used AMD on Linux? The intree amdgpu driver is so much easier to deal with than the out of tree nvidia driver and gets support for new hardware much faster than the nouveau driver.

There was even a period of about of month last year where nvidia didn’t support the new kernel.

klelatti2• 5 years ago

One anecdote: I've been using AMD's CPU OpenCL SDK for a while now as the Intel equivalent was a pain to install. Intel have now made it a lot easier so moved to Intel and the performance increase has been ... very material.

And of course that would mean that I'm more likely to use Intel hardware in future as reasonably sure the Intel drivers don't work with AMD CPUs - so sadly no EPYC for me!

microtonal2• 5 years ago

What? I have a Thinkpad T14 AMD and even though it has only been on the market for a few months, it's Linux support is excellent. Everything, including the GPU, works perfectly fine.

olau• 5 years ago

I ran Intel on desktop for many years partly for that reason, partly due to much lower idle consumption, but to be honest, while full of features the Intel graphic drivers were for a long time (several years) a little bit buggy. I wasn't super impressed with that.

I recently switched to integrated AMD graphics, and the only problem I had was occasional render artifacts. Yes, a bit scary, but in practice only an occasional cosmetic problem. I think those disappeared completely some time ago. This is on a stock kernel.

The only graphics-related problems I have these days are with Wine and some old games, where it looks like there's a difference between what Wine emulates and what it expects to get directly from the 3D driver, e.g. with regards to old 16 bit color modes that I suppose the AMD driver simply doesn't bother with.

hehehaha• 5 years ago

Is AMD booking sales before they manufacture the products? I can’t make sense of their sales.

thehappypm• 5 years ago

I assure you they are not, that goes against every accounting principle!

They can however record the cash on their balance sheet.

scrps• 5 years ago

I can't speak to the bigger picture but I ordered an AMD-based laptop on Dec. 23, initial arrival date was Feb. 2, it was moved five times and is now Apr. 1. When I called I was told they (lenovo) were waiting for AMD to "make more".

mariusor• 5 years ago

I had to wait for a Ryzen 7 laptop for about 6 months before it was delivered. The shortage of CPUs has affected everyone I believe.

anthony_r• 5 years ago

Lol no, that would be a very serious accounting fraud. That is exactly what Enron did - they used to sign a contract and immediately book all the projected profits.

Here's how it works:

1) If the goods weren't delivered and the customer hasn't paid then they're in the inventory on the balance sheet (assuming the goods were already produced) and nothing is in the income statement.

2) If the goods were delivered but the customer hasn't paid then this is in accounts receivable on the assets in the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.

3) If the goods were delivered and the customer has paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.

4) If the goods weren't delivered but the customer has already (pre)paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet, but also in deferred revenue in liabilities, and not in the revenue in the income statement.

TL;DR: you can only recognize revenue if you deliver the product/service, until that time it's either just inventory (asset) or inventory(asset)+cash(asset)+deferred revenue(liability). AMD revenue = chips delivered to customers in the quarter.

stuaxo• 5 years ago

And today my laptop froze again because of amdgpu.

They need more Linux developers if they don't want their reputation to suffer.

The laptop is a Ryzen 2500u so not the newest, the one with a 3700u is worse, it barely boots because HPs amd bios has some glaring bugs.

AMD Reports Q4/FY 2020 Earnings: Record Revenues Repeat

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