And they're about to drop their new 24 & 32-core threadripper CPUs in a few weeks, for which Intel has no economically viable response. AMD is going is going to crush their earning reports for the next few quarters.
This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices?
From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?
This is speculation to some extend, but I don't think it'll be that easy.
Intel does have margins on their products but at the same time, the products are still expensive. I fault their production method for that. I bet that even if they sold their CPUs at a loss, AMD could undercut them in the important market segments at minimum.
AMD has struck gold with being able to, in Intel's words, glue together a bunch of desktop CPUs.
Intel's biggest CPU, a 28 core, is a monolithic die. All in one go. Which means the yields are bad. AMD produces basically 1 die and glues together as needed. The yields here are much better due to the smaller die and being able to use basically any die that has functioning 2 cores.
Intel doesn't have a response to that since if their 28 core die has 26 defect cores, they don't have a housing for it to sell in. Their segmentation also means that they don't have compatible sockets in size to even conceivable put the 28 core to use at all.
IMO Intel will have to come up with a similarly modular response or reduce their production cost.
Of course, Intel has a while, they can idle a few years on marketshare and mindshare before they run a risk of loosing the CPU business (and they sell other silicon too where AMD doesn't compete). So likely, they will be able to do it.
Question then is how much marketshare AMD will have eaten by then.
(Personally, I hope AMD will release server cpus for the lower market segment, building an Intel-based Server that doesn't have the suck is rather expensive and low-cost baremetal would be a delight for hobbyists and SMB)
The Zen architecture was built to be able to be glued together with their "Infinity Fabric." That is their trump card. Intels architectures just aren't built with this in mind, so it will be back to the drawing board for them.
What difference does monolithic vs. modular really make? If Intel has a core on their 28 core die that is defective, they just disable it and sell a 27 core chip. Perhaps it's easier for AMD to find 4 8 core chips with no defects than for Intel to find a 28 core chip with no defects, but Intel can just make a 34 core die sold as a 32 core chip with better yields than AMD's 8 core dies.
The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die area then you get double as many defective chips.
Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would be even more expensive to produce.
Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that aren't black, ie defective silicon.
AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their performance (chips can have wildly different performance).
Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that) that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the die.
For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a 32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run fast.
The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is 98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those sockets.
There's lots of reasons why cutting margins is a bad idea. Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value - and reduced margins have a dramatic bad effect on share price, because it's very easy to lose margin but very difficult to regain.
Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that they'll canabalize future sales- if they sell you a 2 core 2GHz processor today, they can sell you a 4 core 2GHz processor in a year. Which is exactly what they've done with Apple, they're basically slowly releasing performance at a given price to ensure a certain refresh cycle. If they give you a 48 core 4GHz processor today they're not going to have anything else to sell you until 2050.
Thirdly, if they start competing on Price they have to work against their entire brand as being leaders in the market. You can't say "We produce the top performance chips" and also "Buy this because it's cheaper than the other options". Again, once you have the reputation as the low cost solution, it's very hard to regain the performance lead reputation.
Fourthly, a lot of the markets they're in aren't growing so they aren't going to increase total sales much by decreasing the margins, they're just going to make less money on what they do sell. So those lower margins don't really stimulate demand.
Finally, Intel has a very strong company brand, but a weak product line brand. Everyone knows Intel - so Intel has to define itself by it's name. It can't say "This is the performance product line", "This is the value product line" because all anyone sees is "This is the Intel product".
Call me cynical, but that doesn't look like a SMART goal, that looks like PR. Maybe I'm mis-remembering and his statements were internal rather than public, but in reality BK's real targets were about Market Cap and Revenue.
First, anti-competitive. They're a monopolist in microprocessors for desktop / laptop. They've been allowed to retain that monopoly so long as they behave a certain way. They could try to squeeze AMD out of the market with very aggressive price cutting, and that would definitely be viewed as anti-competitive behavior by the US Government (and plausibly the EU and China; China is just starting to see the fruits of a very potent deal with AMD that could revolutionize their ability to build domestic processors to compete with Intel, zero chance they want to see Intel bury AMD now).
Second, there are few things investors hate to see more than aggressive margin erosion in a core product. Intel will restrain themselves from using that as a competitive hammer until or unless there are no other options (and by then it may be too late). They have a very large amount of margin to give up, doing so would have very damaging consequences to their stock. Intel's stock was in a pit of hell for 15 years, since the dotcom implosion. They just finally climbed out of that in the last year. They're sporting 25-27% style net income margins, which are classic Intel solid figures. They could smoke AMD any day of the week by smashing their margins, making processors entirely unprofitable for AMD and driving them out of the business, and then raising prices back to where they were. It's likely they simply can't reasonably take the risk entailed in doing that (both regulatory and Wall Street).
This argument is getting very old. Any sources for that first claim?
The multithreaded workloads part is correct, but the argument falls apart when you remember that an average user has hundreds of different processes running in the background, or in other words a workload that can handily take advantage of those cores.
PCMR on Reddit, Intel marketing, and everyone who paid Intel's extreme processor mark-ups because it was "the best money could buy" when they were the biggest game in town and doesn't want to feel like a fool now that they're half the price.
Do you mean the single threaded part or that OP claims that it's what most users desire? If it's about the single threaded performance then OPs claim is true.
In single threaded games this can be even more apparent. But Intel is mainly faster because of a significant clock advantage. Clock for clock the advantage is small.
I'm looking forward to Zen 2 which could allow AMD to close the IPC gap or even get a bit ahead of Intel. Combined with the 7nm process which should allow better clocks it's looking good for AMD.
Question is if AMD uses the high performance process which is touted to allow up to 5 ghz [0] at the cost of increased power usage, or if they use the low power process (which is also more affordable). Since Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc use the same die probably the latter since power consumption is so important in the data center.
I (and many others) would take a 33% increase in core count over a 10-15% advantage in single core workloads. Even the gaming comparison is most of the time overemphasized. Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS?
I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that Intel has employed previously.
> I (and many others) would take a 33% increase in core count over a 10-15% advantage in single core workloads. Even the gaming comparison is most of the time overemphasized. Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS?
Luckily it seems AMD can probably deliver both with Zen 2. For Epyc the roadmap suggest a 50% increase in core count [0] over Zen 1, and since Ryzen and Threadripper uses the same die as Epyc this will most likely trickle down to Ryzen 3xxx and Threadripper 3xxx.
Depends on your game and monitor I guess. Quite a few people seem to buy ugly 144hz gaming monitors and some games like Warhammer and Far Cry 5 can have ~20 fps difference at the same clocks at 1080p.
> I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that Intel has employed previously.
Most of the time the limiting factor is not the CPU but the GPU anyway. The good thing about AMD closing the gap or potentially even overtaking Intel in single threaded performance is that the fanboys, fangirls and corporate shills have one argument less for spreading FUD and suggesting Intel over AMD.
[0] there are even (unlikely) rumors floating around about a 64 core Epyc, but I don't see that happening before 7nm+ on EUV.
> Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS?
It does when you want "the best of the best" for gaming on an expensive 144Hz display, and also spend a ton of money on a GPU to handle that. You don't want your single-threaded CPU performance be the bottleneck in your games then - so for a top-of-the-line gaming PC, Intel is still the best choice.
AMD has been my best investment so far. I've always loved them as they've been the rebellious underdog and have brought competitively powerful CPUs into the affordable range for historically low income computer nerds such as myself multiple times.
Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best-- if only I hadn't had my bitcoins stolen from an early mining pool... oh well.
AMD has historically not been a very good stock to invest in long term. For speculation it can be great as it has had many periods of high volatility (tried to this without much luck in the dotcom era). Check out its price history[1]. It was also worth $16 in 1980, and has not paid out dividends in decades. You should determine a time or price to sell (at least some shares) as it is likely to head back down to $2 eventually. Maybe this time will be different?
I feel this time it really is different. Firstly, there were the anti-competitive practices by Intel (which saw them fined). There are a few other factors as well. The fact that these CPUs really are something special. As they manage to reach the same base clock speeds as Intel - or near enough - you're going to be getting up to 64 cores/128 threads (compared with 24/48 if you used Intel stuff) in a server for about half, or even less, of what the equivalent Intel CPUs would cost.
Another big thing, i feel, these days is people are able to A. communicate this better, and B. call Intel on their bullshit. I've seen a LOT more hype, understanding, and word of mouth via forums etc. than around the 2000s when the stock was last high. Granted there is a bit of a hype at the moment around crypto currency, I genuinely can't see why anyone will be picking Intel over AMD in the future... and that's the crux of why I don't think the stocks going to crash.
Now, Intel's CEO got fired, they also poached one of the top AMD engineers. But these guys move slowly. So i guess we will see.
We may see history repeat itself. Back in 2006, stock prices were really high, like in the 40s. The Opteron was getting heavy adoption in the server market. But the stocks just kept sinking. Purchasing ATI for a huge sum did not help. Intel would need to crawl out from the Pentium 4 architecture, which just did not scale well and was simply not as efficient. Of coarse this did not stop Intel from pressuring all the big PC makers by doing shady deals to have their chips featured rather than AMDs.When Nehalim came out in late 2008, Intel would retain performance crown for the whole decade, which was not so good for the consumer.
AMD finally got Jim Keller back in 2012 to help develop Zen. This would prove to give them a fighting chance. He lead development of the Infinity Fabric, successor to his Hypertransport, which would allow the Zen to be so modular in adding more and more cores so easily. He was previously head of K8 architecture which lead to the successful Athlon 64 and Opterons. We also have to thank him for transitioning us to 64bit. He later departed and working on the A4/A5 CPUs at apple in the iphone 4/4s and ipad 1/2 respectively. These chips also helped Apple dominate for nearly a decade in CPU performance. Jim and Raja Koduri made a great team at Apple at that time. Jim would head to Tesla next, and Raja would head back to AMD to help create Vega. And now Intel has the duo. Will they be able to give us another decade of dominance from Intel? Exciting times coming!
I agree, and have bought and sold their stock multiple times as we went between product releases, the current product set does feel like one of their best though after Intel sat on their hands for so long.
They couldn't compete in terms of high end performance for a long time. But nowadays they even lose the price-performance ratio of entry->mid level GPUs.
Not really. Entry->Mid level is RX 560, RX 570 and RX 580. RX 560 is a mixed bag, but both RX 570 and RX 580 are competitive and a bit superior to the Nvidia alternatives - as long as they are not overpriced, which they were till early this month. So the market just has to reach the regular prices AMD aimed for initially for those series to work fine.
But one can be concerned about the utter failure of high end Vega.
I personally have been running a RX480 8GB since the day they were released and I haven't hit a game that can't run at an excellent framerate even for my 144hz monitor, so I don't have a concern yet :) It was a amazing deal for just $263.98 at release. From the looks of the benchmarks the Vega 64 is leaps and bounds faster as well.
As far as VR goes, I think they're in the early stages still -- they need to improve the lenses, resolution and refresh rate before I will be buying in so I don't yet need the VR frame rates. At the current level I'm sure the Vegas would handle VR fine though since it seems to outperform nvidia slightly.
Ive got an RX-580 in my gaming desktop. Couldn't be happier.
And the integrated Vega graphics in their Ryzen mobile processors are nothing to sneeze at. Getting performance comparable to some of the low-end nVidia cards.
If the rumor [0] that Intel's first 10nm server chip will only release mid 2020 is true, then AMD's shares will probably skyrocket again if they truly can release their Zen 2 server CPU mid 2019 (on 7nm which is comparable to Intel's 10nm).
I don't really follow the ML space, but when you have a good GPU in your PC (which I assume quite a few people here have) you can learn/use Tensorflow by running things locally instead of paying for Google Cloud etc. Why pay extra money if you already have a good GPU in your computer (unless you really need to decrease the time it takes to run the computation etc.)
yes. GPUs end up being far more flexible and the latest generation data center GPUs (Volta V100) have dedicated tensor cores. Also, not everyone can (or wants to) use Google Cloud.
Yes. It will always remaining relevant. Google wants a continued supply of GPGPUs from anyone who will sell it to them. They will take TPU to the max, but they are not in it to compete. They are in it to protect themselves first and to have leverage.
They emphasized on their earnings call that their biggest increase in spending is on the software side. They know they have a lot of work to do there and are investing in it, but that it will be a multi-year process.
Frankly, this is starting to become less of a hurdle in that pure CUDA code is now rarely written in the DL community (instead opting to call optimized libraries like CuDNN). The biggest issue is replicating all the good "core computing libraries" that NVIDIA offers: CUBLAS, NPP, CuDNN, Tensor-RT, etc.
Frankly, if AMD can start putting this stuff together over the next 2-3 years it's usually not too bad to have deep learning frameworks leverage this stuff.
Their GPUs for deep learning are nearly non-existant, as others have mentioned there are projects and support, but... not worth the effort essentially.
On the other hand, with the rise of their cheaper CPUs and APUs, I'd actually expect that to change. From a power perspective and eventually the ubiquity, it'll make sense to provide more support.
I will say you can use their gpus for deep learning. Not super performant and stuck on tensorflow 1.4, but it's not terrible, and certainly better than CPU.
It is extraordinary how much AMD is faltering for deep learning, with most projects being built for only nvidia. Their ROCM/HCC thing is neat, but at this stage I would expect AMD to have large scale involvement with all major deep learning projects, ensuring that they fully leverage AMD GPU hardware. Instead it's just a couple of half-baked, half-ready sort of ports.
AMD was literally going bankrupt like 2 years ago. They fired 30% of their staff and then reverse-mortgaged their headquarters. They bet their entire company on "Zen" and... luckily, it paid off.
AMD finally has money to actually invest into long-term projects. But AMD just didn't have the money to do so between 2012 and 2016.
Unfortunately, it will take until 2020 before AMD puts something together. It just takes a long time to build software and hardware. But ROCm shows how AMD is beginning to accelerate, finally, into the GPGPU compute sector.
Businesses "reverse mortgage" their real estate all the time, including extraordinarily profitable businesses. I also don't see what some links from 2012 have to do with "like 2 years ago", though we all know that AMD went through some down times -- the CPU side did, though the GPU side never did and kept paying the bills.
A segment of their business was promising, and they could see a hugely emergent demand growing. Instead of getting in on the projects that matter, they just ignored it turning it into an entirely nvidia market. Yes, that is irrational and self-defeating. If they were so self-sabotaging in the GPU market they should have sold that business (and it makes one wonder why they ever bought it in the first place).
Of course CUDA is a moat. AMD sat doing nothing allowing it to get dug further and deeper, becoming completely synonymous with deep learning. A small scale, inexpensive software project to keep official, supported branches of major projects wholly functional on AMD hardware (e.g. Tensorflow) would have done great things. Instead they made some completely irrational solutions that tried to move the market somewhere completely different.
This has nothing to do with how they bet on "Zen". It isn't either or.
2016 AMD began to stabilize, as they focused on Zen. They still were losing tons of money per quarter, but they refocused their efforts. And 2017 they finally delivered. AMD didn't actually turn a profit until late 2017.
I think the question is how many truly great engineers would it take to build some of the necessary APIs. Why spend hundreds of millions in hardware R&D and then underinvest in software that makes the hardware valuable. While the CEO has been doing a stellar job Turing around the company it still feels like they underinvested in software.
I'm not sure if you really understand the peril or how deeply AMD cut back on their R&D Efforts.
Small Cat (Puma cores) were cancelled and that entire department was laid off. This is the core that won AMD the Xbox One and PS4. Small Cat was also their low-power architecture designed for tablets (notice that AMD literally gave up on the growing Tablet market?)
AMD cut DEEP to stay out of bankruptcy. They were cutting known, successful projects and were still losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.
Lets be frank here: if AMD were today, in a position where they had better ROCm or OpenCL or Tensorflow support but say... no "Zen" or "EPYC" ?? They'd be worse off. The CEO made the right bet to focus on Zen as their comeback strategy.
Zen is successful because it demonstratively does something better than Intel. It also doesn't need much software support or tooling, and was designed to be relatively cheap to make. I don't think AMD would have done the same with the NVidia GPGPU compute world, especially since CUDA is a proprietary technology. Even if AMD were to make something better than NVidia, they wouldn't reap any rewards because CUDA is a big moat.
I wanted a GPU to dabble in mining, machine learning, and games in my new Ryzen build. I went Nvidia becuase of CUDA. That is too bad. I'd have liked to buy the AMD gpu
Oh hell yeah. So glad to see this new competition from AMD. Looking at getting a Ryzen laptop for my next personal workstation. The benchmarks looks fantastic.
Arg, I sold out of my position in $AMD in January after growing impatient waiting for Ryzen profits to show up. That proved to be a mistake, should have held onto my guns and thesis.
I bought AMD at $2.87 after someone on HN or Reddit (can't remember which) from AMD was discussing their new architecture and how it could be manufactured cheaper and was as performant.
Thank god someone spilled the beans; also incentives me read HN all the time -_-
I sold it far too early for the profits, not because I didn't have faith in AMD, but I thought Intel noticed, and they are going to make a move. At least by Intel's roadmap which there were already changing it the third of fourth time by then. It would have 10nm, better IPC and other Server oriented SKUs. They didn't admit XMM7480 was fabbed by TSMC until later. By mid 2017 it was clear to me Intel is nothing but giant elephant that doesn't know how to move. Its execution was appalling, and they have been able to make improved sales only via market conditions or lack of competition.
I didn't say I expected anything else. The point is it's not secret information that Jim Keller's Zen was going to change the landscape, people were shouting it from the rooftops. It was all just a matter of whether you believed them or not.
idk about shilled on /r/wsb.. The sub just loves volatile stocks and everyone was making money on it so people talked about it. For a while it was $IQ and in the days leading towards earnings it was msft.
Not a stock investor but AMD looks like a solid but for the next few years especially given the fact that Intel is in disarray and will be for a few more years. $100 amd shares by 2021 is not out of the question imo as I believe amd will reach at least 40 percent market share by then in the pc market and probably around 20-25 in servers.
Come on - the relationship between good earnings and stocks going up is not the news. The news is that AMD HAD unexpectedly good earnings in the first place.
Yep this is indicative of future IT trends and current. Plus we should all be applauding any competent competition for Intel. Imagine where we’d be if AMD had been a more credible threat sooner. I bet Intel wouldn’t be able stagnate as much.
