Yes net income may be low but their financials are very good looking forward. The continual increase in gross margin is a very good sign they are building their brand and capitalizing on their investments. Just for reference, Intel and Nvidia have a margin in the 60% area.
AMD has been pumping a ton of money into R&D, which is a good sign they aim to remain competitive.
Not necessarily. They could be giving better value, or it could be that their products are not as good and they simply can't charge as much for them and make sales. For CPUs it's mostly the former for the past few years, unless you need the highest single-core speeds; for GPUs, it's been more the latter - until perhaps very recently, and even then it depends on the game.
Just because Nvidia still have cards that outperform AMD's cards right now, they also cost way more for that performance. AMD hasn't shown off what their big Navi cards can do, but NVidia has shown what big Touring can do (2080 Super/2080ti). But at the 2060/2060 Super level, the same priced RX5700 and RX5700 XT on average beat out those cards, with the 5700XT sometimes reaching 2070 Super territory, an almost 100$ difference for that last card.
So yeah, AMD is pretty good right now. And if I didn't own a G-Sync display (have no need to change my display), I'd seriously consider an AMD card... hell I am still heavily considering them, if they can beat out NVidia's 2080 Super with Big Navi.
Erm, no? 5700XT competes with the 2060S about, it's within 6% performance depending on the game. It's not much of a win as it comes at way higher power envelope to compete.
Personally, I'd go second hand market and look for a 1080 or 1080Ti, can pick them up for about the same price here.
Its for me clear that nvidia allways gives customers alot less than the cards actually can perform. Proof for that is that they even are able to release top models which has outperformed the previous models twice already, I actually would not be surprised if another series get released later with the same chip outperforming the super line. Now do not get me wrong both companies have a long history for releasing products with the same core design in faster and lower performing versions. But nvidia is the clear winner in making the most products with the same design chips in each line. They have broadest range in performance even though its almost silly between most low end models, but in recent years they have added 4+ models so called mid/high performance cards in stead of the 2 we had. We had low, mid and high end cards and now the list is what ... i stopped checking after they released even lower performing products. Ofcourse if i compare nvidia to intel the winner would be intel for sure, but who is counting ;)
Sure, but AMD GPU's are substantially better than Intel's. And you can't compare AMD to nVidia without comparing AMD to Intel, because they uniquely compete against BOTH.
In a company that invests money into future growth, net income will naturally be small. Assuming that AMD has been putting more money into R&D, this is actually good.
One of the biggest things in the earnings report was that AMD now has more cash-at-hand than debt so they are definitely going to be able to start investing even more into R&D soon. 30% of their debt wiped away in 12 months, after carrying most of it for more than a decade.
Considering that AMD is paying down that debt, rather than holding the revenues and sticking money in the bank, that's a part of the issue. $200 million worth of debt removed from second to third quarter. OEMs are still not putting a lot of AMD based machines out there as well. The new generation of Ryzen processors are not going into OEM machines as well(too soon, it takes a minimum of three to six months for a new processor to show up in a machine from HP, Dell, or Lenovo, because inventories have to be above a given point before they even start doing assembly.
paying down debts, invest heavily in R&D, invest in go to market, hire new talents, that is more important than showing a net profit. Gaining market share back is a priority. I own AMD from $2, $3 etc. all the way up to $28..... never look back, never sell, it is here to stay, watching the best yet to come, and stay to play the whole game, the WHOLE multi-year plans. It is not as easy as it looks, AMD teams are sweating~!
Going by the segment revenue either Epyc's got a long way to go in ramping market share, or the enterprise / data center market overall is only a fraction of desktop, which is surprising.
EPYC1 market share is single digit, it was an intro to get back into the enterprise business. EPYC2 wil get double digit market share but those are shipping only recently in volume. Dont forget that business cycles always take a long time to implement.
I hope AMD will focus now a bit more on Workstation business. It is a huge market where a lot of sales are. It is 100% owned by Intel business right now and that is visible in pricing.
Where the hell is all the EPYC revenue? People are claiming that Intel is dead in the water with the onslaught of 64-core EPYC, but Enterprise segment revenue just keeps sinking? Sure, Console cycle is at the lowest point of revenue just before the release of next generation, but surely $5000 unit-price server chips should compensate? And even previous EPYC's were quite competitive.
2018 Q4 Total Revenue was $1.4B so guidance of $2.1B shows nice Y/Y growth, but it doesn't really feel like representative of the technology shift that has happened.
GPU space looks tight with Nvidia is getting an easy upgrade to 7nm process, but AMD should at least get nice PS5 / Xbox revenue towards the end of the year.
It takes time. AMD in realy is competitive with Intel in the last 2 years. The biggest money makers like enterprise/ workstation markets usually make huge orders years in advance so they probably ordered intel based equipment so we still can't see the impact there. In the next quater or two the numbers will show up. AMD needs to continue to itrate and be on track with it's new products and results will be there.
As AMD CEO has said, they only way they can succeed in the Server space is to continue to execute. They have to show they are in this for the long haul and not a flash in the pan. They are taking a significant chunk of the Cloud servers already but it's going to take time to build marketshare.
Honestly the market share is where I expected. Single digit for first gen and low double digits for second gen EPYC. I expect higher double digit on third generation EPYC like 20-25% share especially if they beat Intel to the punch with Zen3. It's like turning a battleship, you turn the steering wheel and 5 minutes later you have turned around.
I mean, AMD have had to convince server administrators that their products are even worth considering. Then from those, they've had to get those with resources to spare/play with to buy products. And then, they've had to show that they can support their products over a long period of time. Only then will anyone significant meaningfully put any of their eggs in AMD's basket. AMD are only just at that point. However, consideriing how intrangent the server space is and how slowly it changes, it's looking very good for AMD.
Epyc 1 revenue is in there. Epyc 2 hasn't been out long enough to effect the prior quarter's numbers.
AMD is doing very well for the competitive position they are in with Intel's market manipulations. AMD is beating doing better in servers than they'd hoped. Servers is an area where it take a long time to build up market share, it can take almost 5 times longer to build marketshare in the server market than it takes in the retail side.
Intel is easily 10 times bigger than AMD so them taking even a double digit in server sales is a major achievement considering the dollars Intel can dump at marketing and incentives. In the past Intel used these marketing slush funds to keep AMD locked out of the OEM marketplace. Lets not forget, when Athlon was king Intel payed Dell almost $5 Biillion to keep them from buying AMD chips. Intel plays dirty so AMD taking marketshare means they are providing much better products for the price.
It is not just this. Intel is also struggling to produce enough chips to keep up with demand due to 10nm struggles simultaneously lowering the total number of chips produced and forcing more concurrent products to use their 14nm node than they planned for. From a business standpoint, there is a lack of confidence when your supplier doesn't have enough supply to go around. When Intel finally gets 10nm manufacturing up to the point that they are comfortably meeting both 14nm and 10nm product demand, then this confidence issue will disappear. Hopefully, AMD will have sufficiently proven their merit to the enterprise customers by then. Otherwise, it will be hard to hold on to the market share they've earned since producing Zen. I'm cautiously optimistic about their outlook here.
How about "Intel not inside" as a good thing, since Intel chips have so many security holes, most people who are concerned about security should avoid them.
Most of those security holes are fixed in Ice Lake. Also, those security holes were pushed by several, not very good intended people, to create bad press for Intel and lead people like you to believe Intel doesn't give a shit about security. You are very wrong. All pieces of hardware have security holes, AMD does, ARM does, nobody escapes from it. The fact that Intel took some wrong decisions when designing its uArch, doesn't mean they did it on purpose. So lets stop with this BS and move on.
EPYC is doing fine, as AMD had essentially 0 presence in the DC 5 years ago. That means they had little to no validation in place, which is important in enterprise spaces. The EPYC sales you see so far are for DEV environments, so businesses can validate their software stacks for production. From what I've seen, AMD has been pretty good with working out firmware/software issues between hardware/software vendors. The change in NUMA from Naples to Rome is a good example of that. Naples let you carve out really nice 4-8 core VMs, where Rome should handle 32 vCPU VMs with little overhead. The future is virtualization, so Intel is pretty hamstrung until they can cram 64+ real cores with good IPC and decent clocks (at decent power levels) into the same socket. Once you add in the lack of arbitrary segmentation, there is little reason to buy Intel at the moment unless you simply MUST scale production RIGHT NOW.
As for AMD's enterprise revenue being only a tiny portion of the overall, see the above statement about their presence in enterprise. They know they have to grow this market, and I think it shows in how they have allocated silicon in their Zen launches. That's a whole other game on top of building an architecture, making sure you can make enough to sell enough to keep on trucking. You really want a shock? Compare these financials to similar from Intel and figure out how AMD is even being considered an option.
The near future for AMD is desktop, next-gen consoles, and mobile. Looking at what AMD did with the new Surface model, I can't wait to see what they can do with Zen2 in mobile. I think the coming fight in Mobile between AMD and Intel will be pretty exciting. Thin and light laptops that can pull off AAA 1080P gaming sound cool to me. Heck, even ARM is making moves.
The real question is if AMD can keep it up. They are in sweet spot right now, having caught the dragon sleeping. What kind of traction can they build before Intel sorts itself out and achieves good volumes with SunyCove/10nm? I mean, Intel will be fine, with their many verticals and established contracts. But, they can't stand another 2-3 years of not being the defacto choice without opening the door to actual, long-running competition. Sunny Cove shows some decent IPC gains, but that was a long time coming, and resulted in lower clocks. Given how long it took to come to market, I don't think we can make the usual assumption that Intel will have a newerfasterbetter version out any time soon. I think they will be busy trying to push it up into DT/HEDT/ENT. Can AMD keep ramping clocks AND IPC? They have pretty much saturated core count for the near future as far as I'm concerned. 16 cores on desktop, 32 cores on HEDT, and 64 cores per socket in servers sounds like a nice stack compared to Intel. Can AMD keep pushing clocks, can they keep improving IPC, can they do both? How fast can Intel counter? Isn't Keller still working there?
It's fun being excited about CPUs again. I hope the coming GPU wars are as much fun.
As for GPUs, the 5700 XT has turned out to be a proper foil for the 2070 Super launch. Most people I know, even avid PC gamers, simply won't spend more then $400+shipping on a GPU. And of the rest, most won't go over $300. AMD has this whole market tied up, with the exception of those with G-Sync displays and those that just have to have RT. The thing is most with G-Sync monitors likely shop higher anyways (they got the moneys) and RT is pretty much crap on anything below a 2080/2070s. Honestly, the 5700 XT is the $400 upgrade from the GTX 1070 everyone has been whining for. If they can scale it up and keep improving, we could have actual competition for high-end GPUs.
Like I said earlier for Intel, Nvidia will be fine. The question is, "Can AMD make this a real fight or just another decent round where they get in a few more hits but gain no meaningful ground?". I like the spending on R&D, we just have to see what it's buying.
@Furzeydown ... "has AMD ever had a $2 billion quarter"
Looking at quarterly data going back to 2005, their highest revenue was $1839M. Before 2005, their highest annual income was $5B in 2004, so I doubt they have ever had a $2B quarter.
TBF a $1.8B quarter in 2005 > 2B quarter in 2019 in real money terms. Its an important milestone for them and a good return to form, but they're still not as big as they were back then in terms of revenue when you consider the time difference
Give it another year. Third generation Ryzen was a big step forward, the new Epyc and Threadripper chips based on Zen2 will be amazing as well. When the Zen2 based laptop and desktop APUs hit the market, that's where sales will really improve.
I did a (very) brieg Google, and everything around the 2001-2004 period seems to be in the region of $900 million to $1.2 billion. Their era of dominance was a narrow one that ended decisively with Conroe, so I think a $2 billion quarter might well be a new high for them.
The comparison is complicated by their 2006 purchase of ATi, though. You'd kind of expect revenues to be higher for a company that
Its very hard for a company the size of AMD, people allways argue but look at the figures both nvidia and intel are hugely making profits each year. ATI was doing only well at a small market share and would have gone under, if it would not been taken over by AMD. Now lets be honest AMD still only survives because some very large investors are paying every year alot of money to keep AMD alive. So without these investors AMD was already years gone from the market. Intel has been dominating almost every market at almost anything you can imagine beside the gpu market. nvidia still is dominating the GPU market for many years, even though for a few years AMD had the fastest ones but saleswise nvidia still was king (companies almost allways buy intel and nvidia products for what an age). For a while AMD had a few succes products in both their dominated markets, but because AMD has to invest hugely to be able to get a better product in both markets is unbelievable hard to accomplish. The proof for that is the many releases of attempts to get a product on the market to eat away a share of the 2 ruling kings. This far it has been a rough time for AMD which was still loosing alot of money year after year. So we must be glad that they still am here else we all would still be using a core2duo at 2.1 ghz with 2c/4t
While I am happy for AMD and i hope they remain, now more than ever, competitive, I also gotta point it out.. the number of fanboys AMD has on this site is both staggering and pretty annoying. How much more “AMD /EPYC is doing fiiiiine” are you gonna write before admitting that they’re far from “fine”. They didn’t operate at a loss and had *some* revenue but this against “Intel is dead in the water” is not even close to reality.
Intel isn't dead in the water. They just had an engine stall and had to restart the engine. It appears they've got the engine started again (10nm finally in high volume manufacturing), but are just starting to hit the accelerator. The question is more how much traction did AMD gain (can they continue to grow or maintain the market share gains they've earned) while Intel was stalling. I think people forget that Intel had significant momentum carrying them through this stall. They are still selling everything they are making and have yet to lose much ground in their most profitable market.
The only big advantage AMD has now (besides 7nm) is their bet on chiplet architecture. Intel seems to also have thought about this (see EMIB) while waiting for 10nm process to work, but they just couldn't fab anything yet. I am pretty sure they will also go on this route after Ice Lake SP.
Well not fab anything .... the yields are bad that is the issue. It would make them loose alot of money on every batch they create. So they can make them but at a premium cost.
I full agree on your comment many people do not want to see the reality. As i posted above AMD has very lucky for us gained a small gain in money, but compared to the profit of intel and nvidia the numbers of AMD are bleak both giants have a huge amount of all markets they are in. While AMD is trting to get some foothold its still a small competition for the 2 others which both make insane profits year after year. And both hate to loose a share to the any of the competition. Since intel has decided to build their own gpu also, this might gonna hurt nvidia as well, but surely is going to hurt AMD as well. I am going back to AMD as soon as my current machine is no longer fast enough. But for what i am doing my current system is at the moment overkill already. I am only playing my oldest titles games again, because the new titles are all online crap which is not my cup of tea. I hate the cheating and whining in those online games. The reason is that i know a few developers who make cheats for every game online, and allways seem to be able to let their paying customers win. When i ask do the security of the server detect your cheats??, they allways start to laugh loud and say what security??. Meanwhile they eran enough to buy fast cars and a huge house at ages you would not believe. Anyway i am currently doing my c&c collection and am trying out tips from a friend to stay alive in stellaris. He actually gifted me a few steam keys to avoid me from deleting the game again from my machine. I still think its a totally crappy game, so because i am bored i keep it and try their tips. But i admit most fun games got destroyed by the owners. Eurotruck and the american version where fun untill they started to screw players into submission. No more ability to turn anywhere in the game besides on roads, and no more faster driving because they made it so that you crash. Anyway all fun parts had been broken and now its a boring overpriced piece of crap. Back on topic i am waiting to see what AMD is cooking up with TR40/80 because i need more pci-e lanes because cpu wise the lanes are very limited on the new consumer products with only 24 lanes. Which is not enough for my taste and the limitations it will have for what i want todo. I want to use the machine for both gaming and server tasks while running 24/7/365.
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shabby - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
👍quorm - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
I'm happy for AMD, but it's amazing how little net income there is in a successful quarter. It's a tough business.evernessince - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Yes net income may be low but their financials are very good looking forward. The continual increase in gross margin is a very good sign they are building their brand and capitalizing on their investments. Just for reference, Intel and Nvidia have a margin in the 60% area.AMD has been pumping a ton of money into R&D, which is a good sign they aim to remain competitive.
Count Rushmore - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
That shows AMD is the champion in performance per $.GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Not necessarily. They could be giving better value, or it could be that their products are not as good and they simply can't charge as much for them and make sales. For CPUs it's mostly the former for the past few years, unless you need the highest single-core speeds; for GPUs, it's been more the latter - until perhaps very recently, and even then it depends on the game.Korguz - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
not as good ?? some one needs to read more reviews...inighthawki - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
AMD's GPUs are definitely not as good as nvidias right now. I'd certainly like to know which reviews you're reading...Xyler94 - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Pretty much any RX5700 XT review?Just because Nvidia still have cards that outperform AMD's cards right now, they also cost way more for that performance. AMD hasn't shown off what their big Navi cards can do, but NVidia has shown what big Touring can do (2080 Super/2080ti). But at the 2060/2060 Super level, the same priced RX5700 and RX5700 XT on average beat out those cards, with the 5700XT sometimes reaching 2070 Super territory, an almost 100$ difference for that last card.
So yeah, AMD is pretty good right now. And if I didn't own a G-Sync display (have no need to change my display), I'd seriously consider an AMD card... hell I am still heavily considering them, if they can beat out NVidia's 2080 Super with Big Navi.
RSAUser - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Erm, no? 5700XT competes with the 2060S about, it's within 6% performance depending on the game. It's not much of a win as it comes at way higher power envelope to compete.Personally, I'd go second hand market and look for a 1080 or 1080Ti, can pick them up for about the same price here.
bronan - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
Its for me clear that nvidia allways gives customers alot less than the cards actually can perform.Proof for that is that they even are able to release top models which has outperformed the previous models twice already, I actually would not be surprised if another series get released later with the same chip outperforming the super line. Now do not get me wrong both companies have a long history for releasing products with the same core design in faster and lower performing versions. But nvidia is the clear winner in making the most products with the same design chips in each line.
They have broadest range in performance even though its almost silly between most low end models, but in recent years they have added 4+ models so called mid/high performance cards in stead of the 2 we had. We had low, mid and high end cards and now the list is what ... i stopped checking after they released even lower performing products.
Ofcourse if i compare nvidia to intel the winner would be intel for sure, but who is counting ;)
Samus - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Sure, but AMD GPU's are substantially better than Intel's. And you can't compare AMD to nVidia without comparing AMD to Intel, because they uniquely compete against BOTH.ET - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
In a company that invests money into future growth, net income will naturally be small. Assuming that AMD has been putting more money into R&D, this is actually good.SaberKOG91 - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
One of the biggest things in the earnings report was that AMD now has more cash-at-hand than debt so they are definitely going to be able to start investing even more into R&D soon. 30% of their debt wiped away in 12 months, after carrying most of it for more than a decade.Targon - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Considering that AMD is paying down that debt, rather than holding the revenues and sticking money in the bank, that's a part of the issue. $200 million worth of debt removed from second to third quarter. OEMs are still not putting a lot of AMD based machines out there as well. The new generation of Ryzen processors are not going into OEM machines as well(too soon, it takes a minimum of three to six months for a new processor to show up in a machine from HP, Dell, or Lenovo, because inventories have to be above a given point before they even start doing assembly.stephenho - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
paying down debts, invest heavily in R&D, invest in go to market, hire new talents, that is more important than showing a net profit. Gaining market share back is a priority. I own AMD from $2, $3 etc. all the way up to $28..... never look back, never sell, it is here to stay, watching the best yet to come, and stay to play the whole game, the WHOLE multi-year plans. It is not as easy as it looks, AMD teams are sweating~!ABR - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Going by the segment revenue either Epyc's got a long way to go in ramping market share, or the enterprise / data center market overall is only a fraction of desktop, which is surprising.yeeeeman - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Bothduploxxx - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
EPYC1 market share is single digit, it was an intro to get back into the enterprise business.EPYC2 wil get double digit market share but those are shipping only recently in volume. Dont forget that business cycles always take a long time to implement.
I hope AMD will focus now a bit more on Workstation business. It is a huge market where a lot of sales are. It is 100% owned by Intel business right now and that is visible in pricing.
zepi - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Where the hell is all the EPYC revenue? People are claiming that Intel is dead in the water with the onslaught of 64-core EPYC, but Enterprise segment revenue just keeps sinking? Sure, Console cycle is at the lowest point of revenue just before the release of next generation, but surely $5000 unit-price server chips should compensate? And even previous EPYC's were quite competitive.2018 Q4 Total Revenue was $1.4B so guidance of $2.1B shows nice Y/Y growth, but it doesn't really feel like representative of the technology shift that has happened.
GPU space looks tight with Nvidia is getting an easy upgrade to 7nm process, but AMD should at least get nice PS5 / Xbox revenue towards the end of the year.
Alien959 - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
It takes time. AMD in realy is competitive with Intel in the last 2 years. The biggest money makers like enterprise/ workstation markets usually make huge orders years in advance so they probably ordered intel based equipment so we still can't see the impact there. In the next quater or two the numbers will show up. AMD needs to continue to itrate and be on track with it's new products and results will be there.Spunjji - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
This. they won't make significant inroads until their platforms have been available for a few years and people know what to expect.rahvin - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
As AMD CEO has said, they only way they can succeed in the Server space is to continue to execute. They have to show they are in this for the long haul and not a flash in the pan. They are taking a significant chunk of the Cloud servers already but it's going to take time to build marketshare.FreckledTrout - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Honestly the market share is where I expected. Single digit for first gen and low double digits for second gen EPYC. I expect higher double digit on third generation EPYC like 20-25% share especially if they beat Intel to the punch with Zen3. It's like turning a battleship, you turn the steering wheel and 5 minutes later you have turned around.Tams80 - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
I mean, AMD have had to convince server administrators that their products are even worth considering. Then from those, they've had to get those with resources to spare/play with to buy products. And then, they've had to show that they can support their products over a long period of time.Only then will anyone significant meaningfully put any of their eggs in AMD's basket. AMD are only just at that point. However, consideriing how intrangent the server space is and how slowly it changes, it's looking very good for AMD.
rahvin - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Epyc 1 revenue is in there. Epyc 2 hasn't been out long enough to effect the prior quarter's numbers.AMD is doing very well for the competitive position they are in with Intel's market manipulations. AMD is beating doing better in servers than they'd hoped. Servers is an area where it take a long time to build up market share, it can take almost 5 times longer to build marketshare in the server market than it takes in the retail side.
Intel is easily 10 times bigger than AMD so them taking even a double digit in server sales is a major achievement considering the dollars Intel can dump at marketing and incentives. In the past Intel used these marketing slush funds to keep AMD locked out of the OEM marketplace. Lets not forget, when Athlon was king Intel payed Dell almost $5 Biillion to keep them from buying AMD chips. Intel plays dirty so AMD taking marketshare means they are providing much better products for the price.
BurntMyBacon - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
It is not just this. Intel is also struggling to produce enough chips to keep up with demand due to 10nm struggles simultaneously lowering the total number of chips produced and forcing more concurrent products to use their 14nm node than they planned for. From a business standpoint, there is a lack of confidence when your supplier doesn't have enough supply to go around. When Intel finally gets 10nm manufacturing up to the point that they are comfortably meeting both 14nm and 10nm product demand, then this confidence issue will disappear. Hopefully, AMD will have sufficiently proven their merit to the enterprise customers by then. Otherwise, it will be hard to hold on to the market share they've earned since producing Zen. I'm cautiously optimistic about their outlook here.FreckledTrout - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
AMD is doing everything right. They really need some decent marketing like "Intel Inside" next level marketing.Targon - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
How about "Intel not inside" as a good thing, since Intel chips have so many security holes, most people who are concerned about security should avoid them.yeeeeman - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Most of those security holes are fixed in Ice Lake. Also, those security holes were pushed by several, not very good intended people, to create bad press for Intel and lead people like you to believe Intel doesn't give a shit about security. You are very wrong. All pieces of hardware have security holes, AMD does, ARM does, nobody escapes from it. The fact that Intel took some wrong decisions when designing its uArch, doesn't mean they did it on purpose. So lets stop with this BS and move on.TechIsFun - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
EPYC is doing fine, as AMD had essentially 0 presence in the DC 5 years ago. That means they had little to no validation in place, which is important in enterprise spaces. The EPYC sales you see so far are for DEV environments, so businesses can validate their software stacks for production. From what I've seen, AMD has been pretty good with working out firmware/software issues between hardware/software vendors. The change in NUMA from Naples to Rome is a good example of that. Naples let you carve out really nice 4-8 core VMs, where Rome should handle 32 vCPU VMs with little overhead. The future is virtualization, so Intel is pretty hamstrung until they can cram 64+ real cores with good IPC and decent clocks (at decent power levels) into the same socket. Once you add in the lack of arbitrary segmentation, there is little reason to buy Intel at the moment unless you simply MUST scale production RIGHT NOW.As for AMD's enterprise revenue being only a tiny portion of the overall, see the above statement about their presence in enterprise. They know they have to grow this market, and I think it shows in how they have allocated silicon in their Zen launches. That's a whole other game on top of building an architecture, making sure you can make enough to sell enough to keep on trucking. You really want a shock? Compare these financials to similar from Intel and figure out how AMD is even being considered an option.
The near future for AMD is desktop, next-gen consoles, and mobile. Looking at what AMD did with the new Surface model, I can't wait to see what they can do with Zen2 in mobile. I think the coming fight in Mobile between AMD and Intel will be pretty exciting. Thin and light laptops that can pull off AAA 1080P gaming sound cool to me. Heck, even ARM is making moves.
The real question is if AMD can keep it up. They are in sweet spot right now, having caught the dragon sleeping. What kind of traction can they build before Intel sorts itself out and achieves good volumes with SunyCove/10nm? I mean, Intel will be fine, with their many verticals and established contracts. But, they can't stand another 2-3 years of not being the defacto choice without opening the door to actual, long-running competition. Sunny Cove shows some decent IPC gains, but that was a long time coming, and resulted in lower clocks. Given how long it took to come to market, I don't think we can make the usual assumption that Intel will have a newerfasterbetter version out any time soon. I think they will be busy trying to push it up into DT/HEDT/ENT. Can AMD keep ramping clocks AND IPC? They have pretty much saturated core count for the near future as far as I'm concerned. 16 cores on desktop, 32 cores on HEDT, and 64 cores per socket in servers sounds like a nice stack compared to Intel. Can AMD keep pushing clocks, can they keep improving IPC, can they do both? How fast can Intel counter? Isn't Keller still working there?
It's fun being excited about CPUs again. I hope the coming GPU wars are as much fun.
As for GPUs, the 5700 XT has turned out to be a proper foil for the 2070 Super launch. Most people I know, even avid PC gamers, simply won't spend more then $400+shipping on a GPU. And of the rest, most won't go over $300. AMD has this whole market tied up, with the exception of those with G-Sync displays and those that just have to have RT. The thing is most with G-Sync monitors likely shop higher anyways (they got the moneys) and RT is pretty much crap on anything below a 2080/2070s. Honestly, the 5700 XT is the $400 upgrade from the GTX 1070 everyone has been whining for. If they can scale it up and keep improving, we could have actual competition for high-end GPUs.
Like I said earlier for Intel, Nvidia will be fine. The question is, "Can AMD make this a real fight or just another decent round where they get in a few more hits but gain no meaningful ground?". I like the spending on R&D, we just have to see what it's buying.
Furzeydown - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
General question to anyone : has AMD ever had a $2 billion quarter, or would meeting their forecast be a first?ilt24 - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
@Furzeydown ... "has AMD ever had a $2 billion quarter"Looking at quarterly data going back to 2005, their highest revenue was $1839M. Before 2005, their highest annual income was $5B in 2004, so I doubt they have ever had a $2B quarter.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/...
Furzeydown - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
grazieowan - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
TBF a $1.8B quarter in 2005 > 2B quarter in 2019 in real money terms. Its an important milestone for them and a good return to form, but they're still not as big as they were back then in terms of revenue when you consider the time differenceTargon - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Give it another year. Third generation Ryzen was a big step forward, the new Epyc and Threadripper chips based on Zen2 will be amazing as well. When the Zen2 based laptop and desktop APUs hit the market, that's where sales will really improve.Spunjji - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
I did a (very) brieg Google, and everything around the 2001-2004 period seems to be in the region of $900 million to $1.2 billion. Their era of dominance was a narrow one that ended decisively with Conroe, so I think a $2 billion quarter might well be a new high for them.The comparison is complicated by their 2006 purchase of ATi, though. You'd kind of expect revenues to be higher for a company that
Spunjji - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
... deals in more markets. Derp.bronan - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
Its very hard for a company the size of AMD, people allways argue but look at the figures both nvidia and intel are hugely making profits each year.ATI was doing only well at a small market share and would have gone under, if it would not been taken over by AMD.
Now lets be honest AMD still only survives because some very large investors are paying every year alot of money to keep AMD alive. So without these investors AMD was already years gone from the market. Intel has been dominating almost every market at almost anything you can imagine beside the gpu market. nvidia still is dominating the GPU market for many years, even though for a few years AMD had the fastest ones but saleswise nvidia still was king (companies almost allways buy intel and nvidia products for what an age). For a while AMD had a few succes products in both their dominated markets, but because AMD has to invest hugely to be able to get a better product in both markets is unbelievable hard to accomplish. The proof for that is the many releases of attempts to get a product on the market to eat away a share of the 2 ruling kings.
This far it has been a rough time for AMD which was still loosing alot of money year after year.
So we must be glad that they still am here else we all would still be using a core2duo at 2.1 ghz with 2c/4t
liquid_c - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
While I am happy for AMD and i hope they remain, now more than ever, competitive, I also gotta point it out.. the number of fanboys AMD has on this site is both staggering and pretty annoying. How much more “AMD /EPYC is doing fiiiiine” are you gonna write before admitting that they’re far from “fine”. They didn’t operate at a loss and had *some* revenue but this against “Intel is dead in the water” is not even close to reality.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
Intel isn't dead in the water. They just had an engine stall and had to restart the engine. It appears they've got the engine started again (10nm finally in high volume manufacturing), but are just starting to hit the accelerator. The question is more how much traction did AMD gain (can they continue to grow or maintain the market share gains they've earned) while Intel was stalling. I think people forget that Intel had significant momentum carrying them through this stall. They are still selling everything they are making and have yet to lose much ground in their most profitable market.yeeeeman - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
The only big advantage AMD has now (besides 7nm) is their bet on chiplet architecture. Intel seems to also have thought about this (see EMIB) while waiting for 10nm process to work, but they just couldn't fab anything yet. I am pretty sure they will also go on this route after Ice Lake SP.bronan - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
Well not fab anything .... the yields are bad that is the issue. It would make them loose alot of money on every batch they create. So they can make them but at a premium cost.bronan - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
I full agree on your comment many people do not want to see the reality.As i posted above AMD has very lucky for us gained a small gain in money, but compared to the profit of intel and nvidia the numbers of AMD are bleak both giants have a huge amount of all markets they are in. While AMD is trting to get some foothold its still a small competition for the 2 others which both make insane profits year after year. And both hate to loose a share to the any of the competition. Since intel has decided to build their own gpu also, this might gonna hurt nvidia as well, but surely is going to hurt AMD as well.
I am going back to AMD as soon as my current machine is no longer fast enough.
But for what i am doing my current system is at the moment overkill already.
I am only playing my oldest titles games again, because the new titles are all online crap which is not my cup of tea. I hate the cheating and whining in those online games. The reason is that i know a few developers who make cheats for every game online, and allways seem to be able to let their paying customers win. When i ask do the security of the server detect your cheats??, they allways start to laugh loud and say what security??. Meanwhile they eran enough to buy fast cars and a huge house at ages you would not believe.
Anyway i am currently doing my c&c collection and am trying out tips from a friend to stay alive in stellaris. He actually gifted me a few steam keys to avoid me from deleting the game again from my machine. I still think its a totally crappy game, so because i am bored i keep it and try their tips.
But i admit most fun games got destroyed by the owners. Eurotruck and the american version where fun untill they started to screw players into submission. No more ability to turn anywhere in the game besides on roads, and no more faster driving because they made it so that you crash.
Anyway all fun parts had been broken and now its a boring overpriced piece of crap.
Back on topic i am waiting to see what AMD is cooking up with TR40/80 because i need more pci-e lanes because cpu wise the lanes are very limited on the new consumer products with only 24 lanes. Which is not enough for my taste and the limitations it will have for what i want todo.
I want to use the machine for both gaming and server tasks while running 24/7/365.