
AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings - baazaar
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/amd-earnings-stock-price-q3-results-2017-10-1005485288
======
rdlecler1
I really don’t understand the negative market sentiment on expectations of
future cashflow. AMD has been building compelling GPU and CPU chips and this
is a rising tide market driven by new solutions to longstanding problems
(AI/robotics/driverless cars/drug prediction/VR/AR/big data). These
technologies will applied to every industry on the planet including huge
industries like agriculture that are today the least digitized of all major
industries. Exponential growth in IoT devices and AI2AI interactions will
generate tremendous amounts of data as well as the meta data that sits on top
of that. Then there is bitcoin. I think people are massively underestimating
the TAM. This era will require massive new computing power and especially for
big data centers it makes sense to diversify your supplier. It’s a rising tide
that will be much higher than AMDs last high watermark. AMD is a measly $10b
company, compared to NVIDIA ($110b) and Intel ($160b). A 10% move by NVIDIA
exceeds AMDs entire market cap. Would love to hear some counter opinions on
this.

Disclaimer: I own both NVIDIA and AMD.

~~~
grigjd3
AMD isn't in nearly the same breadth of markets as nvidia. Some examples:
automotive, super computing (which they dominate due to CUDA), and game
streaming services. Also, AMD's driver support on Linux platforms has
historically been pretty weak and often broken, further limiting any
consideration of uses outside of gaming.

~~~
shmerl
AMD is a clear winner now on Linux. Nvidia will become an underdog, if they
won't open source and upstream their driver, which is very unlikely. Nvidia
was and will be plagued by integration issues, while AMD already nearly caught
up performance wise, and will overtake Nvidia soon enough.

~~~
wyldfire
I've pinned my compute hopes on AMD for about a decade now. They've been able
to hang in there performance-wise, but their solutions on linux just haven't
been as stable as NVIDIA's. I hope that's changing, but I'm pretty reluctant
to believe it.

~~~
danieldk
The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between
an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary
driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g.
for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers
because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via
EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source
amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that.

I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I
use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau,
there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other
problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works
completely flawless on my machine.

[1]
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-Device-
Memory-API)

~~~
lmm
> I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card.
> I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau,
> there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other
> problems.

nouveau was always pretty awful, but the nvidia binary drivers always Just
Worked, across many models for many years, whereas with AMD it's always been a
crapshoot whether a given card would work properly or not.

The binary drivers always kept up with the important things (indeed they were
well ahead of AMD in terms of doing accelerated video decoding on linux via
Xvmc and later vaapi, their xinerama integration was always better...). Sure,
they don't support Wayland, but that's a solution in search of a problem; if
and when there's actual value to be had by using it I have confidence that
nvidia will support it.

~~~
Fnoord
Just worked? The amount of security advisories for Nvidia kernel module or
Nvidia X module are staggering.

X is also insecure from the ground up, that alone is enough incentive to move
away from it.

------
sandworm101
Some of that is my cash. I bought into ryzen recently, breaking from a decade
of intel on all my home machines. The chip is working. It is very fast. Maybe
I'd get a few more fps from intel, but not at the same price.

~~~
Boothroid
I've been AMD only since 2004. Feels good.

~~~
freedomben
Do you run Linux with your AMD cards or just Windows? Wondering what the Linux
experience is like these days with all the Linux driver improvements AMD has
made.

~~~
dualbus
I recently bought an HP laptop which has a AMD A10-8700P APU and was very
surprised to find out that basic display functionality is very glitchy under
Linux (backlight would flicker, or in some cases it wouldn't work at all). I
tried with Debian unstable first, then with Ubuntu (17.04 and now 17.10) and
none of the vanilla kernels in these distros worked for me (with the amdgpu
driver, ), so I'm now running 4.9.51+ from [https://github.com/M-Bab/linux-
kernel-amdgpu-binaries](https://github.com/M-Bab/linux-kernel-amdgpu-binaries)
(the most recent versions crash when I use HDMI output).

You can read more about it in:

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6m2jvn/eli5_of_amd_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6m2jvn/eli5_of_amd_dcdal_issues/)

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/754uh6/update_on_dcd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/754uh6/update_on_dcdal_support_on_linux_for_amd_cards/)

* [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-1...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-120-More-For-DC)

* [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-D...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-DC-More-June-Work)

------
twistedanimator
I don't understand why this good news translates into the stock being down
over 12% after hours.

~~~
silotis
The direction a stock moves after an earnings announcement has nothing to do
with how good the earnings are in absolute terms. What matters is where they
ended up relative to what the market was expecting. If AMD announced a 300%
increase in earnings, but the market was expecting 400%, their stock is going
to go down because 400% was already priced in. Similarly, a company's revenue
can be down 300%, but if the market was expecting it to be down 400% the stock
will rise.

~~~
FridgeSeal
In other words: your share price is a function of the emotions of fickle
investors and their expectations (regardless of plausibility) rather than how
well your company actually did.

~~~
barrkel
Share price is an estimation of future performance, not past or current
performance. Specifically it's supposedly the net present value of all future
cash flows, discounted appropriately.

~~~
ZenoArrow
How do you respond to the comments of stock market investors that suggest the
market is frequently irrational?

~~~
lmm
The market is inherently volume-weighted, and there is much more "smart money"
than "dumb money".

~~~
ZenoArrow
To give an example of something a smart investor would do, Warren Buffett
supposedly only invests in industries he understands in depth:

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/05/012705.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/05/012705.asp)

What proportion of investors would you suggest show such restraint? Over half?

~~~
lmm
The proportion of "investors"? Low. The proportion of market capital
allocation, among people doing active allocation for long-term buy and hold
strategies? Very high.

------
anjc
Article with figures:
[http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced-
Micr...](http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced-Micro-
Devices-Inc-Announces-307-Increase-In-Q3-Earnings-1005488192)

110m profit vs 27m, year on year for the quarter. Revenue is up 27% over the
same period

------
fizixer
So are machine learning framework developers going to stop being so
subservient to CUDA and start supporting OpenCL now?

~~~
hedgehog
I would give the framework developers some credit, they shipped and the field
made a lot of progress on their tools. Getting good performance out of GPUs
(CUDA or OpenCL) is quite difficult, cuDNN has historically been the only good
low-level deep learning library, and NVIDIA makes great hardware. My company
is building a fully open source low-level framework called PlaidML bringing
OpenCL support and other benefits to the existing frameworks. We're starting
with Keras, first code was posted last Friday:
[https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml](https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml)

------
dingdingdang
And additionally they made Intel up their game - honestly appreciate that!

~~~
yayana
I really hope Intel doesn't fix it's game before AMD and Arm seriously
sandwich them out of the consumer market.

5 years of decline in PC/x86 sales.. Intentionally terrible product lines of a
monopoly not wanting to canabalize any higher pricing potential. Insubstantial
profits available if they ever get their mobile chips on track after some
terrible attempts. CPUs based on cheery forecasts of the high 5 years ago
should be hitting the end of their pipelines.. A Microsoft that isn't reaĺly
sure if/why it still does desktops.

As someone who has been more occupied with Arm CPUs, I wonder what someone who
was paying more attention to Intel would notice and I look forward to being
able to scale up straight from Arm64 to genuine AMD64.

~~~
Lramseyer
I hope Intel does step up their game, but assuming that there's healthy
competition with good ARM and AMD chips. Competition is good for the consumer.

But I also want to see ARM based laptops from both Microsoft and Apple (Though
Intel has Apple by the ears with Thunderbolt until USB 3.2 becomes a viable
alternative on the low end.)

~~~
digi_owl
Dunno about Apple, but i find it unlikely from Microsoft. They have tried
again and again to go beyond x86, only to find that they can't escape the
weight of win32.

Our best bet would have been ChromeOS, as it is a platform with no legacy to
deal with. But even there new models are now Intel based rather than ARM.

------
jonathankoren
Can someone please update the headline, or update the link? They're out of
sync. Alternate link:
[http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced-
Micr...](http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced-Micro-
Devices-Inc-Announces-307-Increase-In-Q3-Earnings-1005488192)

------
bratao
I´m very excited for upcoming AMD EPYC enabled dedicated servers and what it
means for the market. The number of cores and memory channels is unmatchable
by Intel

~~~
syshax
And PCIe lanes.

------
kopos
AMD vs NVidia novice here.

My untested understanding has been that even though AMD is performance-to-
dollar higher performance than nVidia, it is plagued by not having a stellar
software support that nVidia enjoys either via CUDA and consequently to
cudaNN, software drivers not as fully compatible with games as is nVidia. AMD
has OpenCL but I understand that most vendors / users are not exactly great
supporters for OpenCL.

Since the hardware is just the trojan for software and nVidia has solved that
problem, will not having the s/w support be a great factor for AMD not getting
the same value as nVidia? Unless AMD puts in great effort to get its software
game as good as its hardware, is it still DoA?

~~~
nhaehnle
(Disclaimer: I work on AMD's Mesa driver)

There's also ROCm, which is AMD's attempt at an answer to CUDA. It's hard to
unseat the incumbent just because it's always hard to get people to change
their software environment, but I think we're getting there.

~~~
kopos
Thank you. This is the first time I heard about ROCm.

I sincerely wish that ROCm adoption takes off - been a AMD / ATI fanboy - so
have been wanting to see AMD make a great dent.

Any numbers / etc to get more info on adoption of ROCm? Are there any specific
usecases where ROCm well suited / performs on par / or above par cuda?

------
baazaar
[http://www.nasdaq.com/article/advanced-micro-devices-inc-
ann...](http://www.nasdaq.com/article/advanced-micro-devices-inc-
announces-307-increase-in-q3-earnings-20171024-01609)

------
shmerl
Vega had a bumpy start. Rather limited availability, lack of custom design
models and etc. I'm still waiting for Sapphire to make one.

~~~
andyana
I just bought a Sapphire 56... is it just a rebranded AMD board?

~~~
shmerl
Yes. Compare it to their Nitro models for Polaris chips.

------
mikkelam
I wonder how much of this is due the huge demand for AMD GPUs for mining
cryptocurrency coins

------
senatorobama
Let's see what they do with 60G WiFi.

------
gruez
what's up with the article title?

    
    
        AMD says its going to see a big drop in revenue, shares sink (AMD)
    

It seems to have an anti-amd bias.

~~~
TacticalTable
It's 100% factually accurate. After hours trading is down 10%, and drops in
revenue were announced. How was it biased?

~~~
akvadrako
Well AMD has a cyclical business, and a Q3 to Q4 drop is always expected. But
Q3 outperformed and Q4 guidance was raised, while both are massive increases
from last year.

Simplifying an announcement that exceeds expectations and raises revenue
trends to "a drop in revenue" is absurd.

------
lawrenceyan
This is a misleading title, and the poster has a clearly biased stake in AMD.
Hopefully no one made any rash decisions to buy stock because of this post, as
of trading day close, AMD is down 12%.

~~~
KSS42
I am curious how do you know that the poster has a clearly biased stake in
AMD?

Business Insider did have an article with that exact title.

The results were announced after hours and the stock had already dropped
before this posting.

~~~
lawrenceyan
Click the article link. What does the title say?

~~~
sangnoir
The correct question is: What did the title say at the time of submission?

~~~
lawrenceyan
No, the reason why I asked you to look at the title and see that the title had
been changed is to understand the fact that the original title "AMD Announces
307% Increase in Q3 Earnings" was misleading. If it was a good summarization
of the news, why then, did the author change it? Because it's fundamentally
flawed.

Yes, AMD did see a significant increase in earnings, but the profit was far
below expectations. Additionally, AMD during their investor statement lowered
their guidance for Q4 profitability by over 10%. Do you see how such a title
might be misleading?

------
xchaotic
If the earnings bump is really driven by the Threadripper CPUs, then earnings
mean very little as AMD cost are much higher due to much larger die and lower
yields. For every $100 worth of CPU sold, Intel is making orders of magnitude
more profit.

~~~
loeg
Threadripper is a multi-chip module composed of two Zeppelyn dies (the same
8-core die used in the desktop part). There is no larger die or lower yield
problem. This is the whole value proposition of the Zen microarchitecture —
high yields, low per-CPU costs, typical MCM drawbacks (high interdie
latencies, duplicated functional blocks, etc).

