
AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings - galeos
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15935/amd-reports-q2-2020-earnings-notebook-and-server-sales-drive-a-record-quarter
======
mythz
Interesting to compare Q2 2020 results between Intel & AMD:

Intel Revenue: 19.7B, Net Income: 5.1B, Market Cap: 209.42B, P/E: 9.06

AMD Revenue: 1.93B, Net Income: 157M, Market Cap: 79.2B, P/E: 133.82

But by the sentiment of all media reports INTC is in sharp decline & AMD is
killing it, yet even in their most recent results Intel revenue/earnings still
dwarfs AMD's.

~~~
orbifold
The stock price is in part determined by the discounted future Cashflow, the
one of AMD is pointing upwards that of Intel seems neutral or declining. Intel
had a long string of failures and bad acquisitions recently, which points to
bad management. AMD has all the potential to attack Nvidia’s deep learning
moat with in house talent. Maybe this is all wishful thinking though, but my
AMD calls jumped 46% within a day.

~~~
hangonhn
This might be wild speculation but I just now realized that AMD, Nvidia, and,
of course, TSMC are all Taiwanese lead. Did Taiwan have some kind of incubator
or have some kind of special emphasis on semiconductors or is this just pure
coincidence? I wouldn't be so surprised if Taiwan isn't such a small country
(relative to its bigger neighbors). Just wondering.

~~~
kenhwang
The government of Taiwan realized that their semiconductor industry might be
the one thing that the US would be willing to go to war with China over to
protect. So the government has invested heavily in ensuring they maintain
critical mass in semiconductor expertise, typically by investing heavily in
university education and research in related engineering fields.
Computer/electrical/materials engineering is pretty much the default major
everyone gets funneled into without capacity limits since at least the 70s.

For example, my parents and all their friends weren't well off enough to
afford private university, but majors at public university were limited by the
government based on projected need with slots offered to only the highest test
scores. They couldn't test high enough to secure a public university slot for
accounting, art, architecture, education, medicine, and trades such as
automotive repair or plumbing. So they all ended up with computer science and
engineering degrees. Fully paid for by the government.

They basically treat the semiconductor industry like how the US treats its
defense industry.

~~~
pickle-wizard
I have long held the opinion that education should be part of national
defense.

I think is a good example of what happens when you do that.

~~~
corin_
There's a fairly commonly held view that improving education access means
giving people more ways out of poverty and therefore less people choosing
armed forces as their career.

It seems intuitive to me that as war technology progresses, number of humans
becomes less of a factor in military strength, but I know so little about this
area that I couldn't guess how greatly alternative educational opportunities
impact military applications, nor at what point in the past/future the scale
might tip between wanting policies that push more into armed forces vs. no
longer being so important (and I assume it would be different for different
countries, too).

But I do believe good, free education should be a key part of any country,
regardless of whether it helps national défense or not. If that drives up the
cost of recruiting people to the armed forces then fine - I'm no fan of them
in general, but if people are going to risk their lives potentially in wars
then it shouldn't be because their choices were limited to that vs a life of
poverty.

------
ckastner
I'm a _huge_ AMD fan but I fear that its current valuation already has an
immense amount of success already priced in.

They are doing absolutely spectacular work, but there's still much to do, and
there are significant risks.

They have been making progress on the GPU side, but as long as they don't
provide a CUDA-like ecosystem _and_ experience, I don't see them challenging
NVIDIA soon in the accelerator market.

I'm pretty confident that they will continue to outpace Intel on the CPU side,
but with Amazon's Graviton2, and the recent TOP500-success of Fugaku -- pure
ARM, no accelerators - there is still a tremendous amount of competition
ahead.

~~~
xwdv
A market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

If you want to sit on the sidelines and watch valuations soar to unreasonable
levels and not try to claim a piece of that fine, but don’t cry when you see
how much you missed out. AMD could be the next NVDA.

~~~
ac29
Congratulations to those who have enjoyed AMD's stock price rise by 30x over
the past few years. If you think its going to rise by another 30x, prepare to
be disappointed. Another decade or more of massive growth is already priced
in.

------
chvid
The real threat to intel comes from arm not amd. Amd is also threatened by
arm.

If you compare with intels numbers. Then amd is a dwarf. And the growth
figures are loosely following intels:

[https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/investor-
education-a...](https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/investor-education-
and-news/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Intel-Reports-Second-
Quarter-2020-Financial-Results/default.aspx)

~~~
emdowling
I agree that ARM is a threat to AMD as well, but AMD has two things going for
it:

1\. Stronger x86 design: AMD's recent CPU releases have shown they are inching
ahead of Intel on x86 design, and are able to achieve significantly better
cost per $. At the same time, AMD are already well into shifting a big chunk
their 7nm manufacturing to TSMC. Intel has only just started this process.

2\. A strong GPU business: Yes, they are second to Nvidia, but given the
design skills they are showing on the CPU side, I expect that gap will narrow
very quickly. Both Sony and Microsoft have chosen AMD for CPU and GPU in the
PS5 and Xbox Series X, with support for full 4k ray-tracing. Given how long
this generation of consoles will be on the market for (likely 5-10 years at
least), it is a strong forward indicator of roadmap strength.

tl;dr: I expect AMD will weather* the ARM storm better than Intel.

* Originally a typo as "whether". Thanks for the correction!

~~~
jannes
I wouldn't interpret Sony's and Microsoft's decision for AMD graphics as
anything other than Nvidia being dickheads.

Keep in mind that Apple is also exclusively building Macs with AMD graphics
cards. They don't even support Nvidia cards as eGPU anymore. The rumour is
that Nvidia is not willing to do any customised designs and someone at Apple
is very upset with Nvidia.

~~~
SXX
Nvidia simply not interested in consoles because how thin margins are:

[https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-
ps...](https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4-because-
console-margins-are-terrible)

~~~
pjmlp
Unless it is their own one.

[https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/)

~~~
simlevesque
Does everyone here forget that the Switch is a custom NVIDIA Tegra processor ?

~~~
theandrewbailey
Is that Tegra not off-the-shelf? I didn't think it was custom, due to said
reluctance to do custom designs.

~~~
simlevesque
I may have been misled, but here's my source:

> "Nintendo Switch is powered by the performance of the custom Tegra
> processor."

[https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/10/20/nintendo-
switch/](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/10/20/nintendo-switch/)

------
galeos
While most of the focus here is understandably on the CPU side, there seems to
be some interesting shifts taking place on the GPU side.

AMD currently has a process lead over Nvidia (and this is rumoured to be set
to continue for a little while longer - apparently the first consumer Ampere
chips are being fabbed on Samsung's inferior 8nm process due to lack of
capacity at TSMC for the next few months)

Nvidia has clearly had an architecture advantage, although RDNA2 may close
this gap, depending on how Ampere performs.

While Nvidia has had a much stronger showing in the GPGPU space, with CUDA
helping it be the clear current winner, this also appears to have driven
architecture decisions at Nvidia with the focus on tensor cores.

In gaming, Nvidia has put a lot of work into utilising these tensor cores for
Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). The idea being that you render at a lower
resolution and then use deep learning to upscale in real-time to higher
resolutions. DLSS 2.0 made some leaps in quality and DLSS 3.0 is on the
horizon. It will be interesting to see:

a) How well they can get this working b) Is AMD working on its own version of
this? c) If so, how well will the RDNA architecture be suited to this
approach?

Will be interesting to watch how this plays out!

~~~
pjmlp
Lets put it this way, Octane Render has dropped Vulkan support and replaced it
with CUDA based Optix 7.

[https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-
render/](https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/)

So how is AMD going to get relevant in the Hollywood and TV studios that are
the big buyers of OctaneRender?

~~~
Arelius
I wasn't aware that OctaneRender was actually a large portion of the Hollywood
and TV studio segment.

------
tayo42
Random comment about AMD, but damn their cpu line naming is really confusing.
between zen, zen+, zen2, threadripper, ryzen 7,8,9. ryzen is actually 3
different architectures? then there's like ryzen 7 2000, 3000, now 4000. But
for the laptop cpus the architectures are actually different. zen2 isn't used
in the ryzen 3000 mobile cpus. Then you can look at best buy and see a laptop
listed using a 3rd gen ryzen. Im not sure what that is actually referring to.
I'm not sure how this compares to their epyc line either. I still need to read
up on that...

~~~
xorfish
zen, zen+ and zen2 are the architecture. Threadripper and Ryzen are product
lines. I find that quite straight forward.

The really confusing part is, is that the Ryzen 4000 APUs will be zen2
architecture but the desktop CPUs without APUs or the mobile Ryzen 4000 series
are zen3 architecture.

~~~
carlio
And zen3 is planned for release later this year...

~~~
xorfish
zen3 has already launched with mobile processors

~~~
frostburg
Those are Ryzen 4 but Zen 2 (yes, really).

------
liquidise
Good for them. I daily drive an AMD Hackintosh (3900X) and the price to
performance ratio of this chip is excellent.

More broadly, consumers are real winners with this zen-powered competition of
the last few years. Intel first dropped prices aggressively and now with them
shaking up the tech org it seems likely the two companies will have to fight
one another for consumer dollars for years to come.

~~~
Tepix
What are the things that _don 't_ work? Does power management work?
Suspend/resume? Audio? Thunderbolt? Multiple monitors?

~~~
mrgreenfur
Sleep is pretty tough to get working, but some folks have managed recently;
wifi works with a compatible card; facetime/imessage all works flawlessly;

lots more info at amd-osx.com

------
gkkirilov
Looking to buy a Ryzen laptop (G14) in the near future, those chips are
amazing performers and have great battery life.

Well deserved record quarter.

~~~
cpursley
I really want the G14 as a durable performant work machine but it has no
webcam :(

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Yeah, you can tell they designed that machine way before the pandemic and WFH
was the norm and they switched to a no-webcam-on-gaming-laptops mantra.

ASUS engineer: "laptop webcams have shitty quality and gamers don't use them
anyway, let's just not include one and save ourselves the BOM cost; _applause
from bean-counters_ "

Covid-19 WFH: "I'm gonna end this man's whole career"

I'm sure their hindsight is now 20/20 though.

~~~
xiphias2
MacBook Pros got the right balance between usability, features and power a
long time ago, other companies should just copy & modernize it. Not having
webcam on a laptop is unacceptable (though having a physical switch on it is a
great feature for privacy).

~~~
ChuckNorris89
I disagree, other companies should definitely stay away from copying the
modern Macs.

I like having choices regarding OS, hardware configuration, ports, keyboards,
displays, upgradeability, reaprability etc..

If you want a Mac copy then the Mac will be the best anyway.

~~~
xiphias2
I don't like the post Steve Jobs direction that the Macbook Pro took, so it's
a no-go for me. I had a company macbook pro in 2008 and I loved it (except the
OS and the keyboard layout). It had great sound (I had more expensive laptops
with worse speakers since then). Also the display was perfect for me
(especially outside in sunshine...). Maybe it's just my memory, but I don't
feel that the current laptop offerings are that much better.

------
rubber_duck
A couple of years ago I remember seeing a video where a Google engineer said
they were working on CUDA to AMD compilers and a push to standardize CUDA -
what happened to that ? Or am I misremembering something ?

~~~
shaklee3
This?
[https://research.google/pubs/pub45226/](https://research.google/pubs/pub45226/)

AMD already has a cuda to rocm transpiler, but their libraries are so lacking
that many things cannot be converted.

------
x3haloed
The real question facing us now, I believe, is how is AMD going to compete
with ARM-based silicon?

I believe that ARM is on the path to dominance due to performance per watt.
Does AMD have a path to continue to win at that game?

~~~
bob1029
I think it ultimately boils down to who has the best CPU architecture if you
are talking exclusively about performance-per-watt. Right now, it feels like
AMD/ARM are going to be very competitive with each other in the mobile
segment, but only on paper. They mostly stay in their own separate market
arenas. Apple may disrupt this soon.

The bigger picture is that x86 is a platform that most of the business world
runs on top of right now. ARM is certainly pushing into that arena, but AMD is
keeping the x86 offering very attractive.

I am of the camp that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with x86, and
especially not its recent implementations. It is an old & dirty ISA, but it
gets the job done. Every scenario on earth has been thrown at it and it has
adapted to suit. Decades of iteration and testing with billions of
participants.

All AMD needs to do is continue cranking out 100W+ TDP parts that tear through
workloads. The current style of ARM devices cannot keep up with power budgets
like that. I believe they would have to completely redesign their architecture
if they wanted to move from 5-15W up to something like the toasty 225W TDP of
the 7742.

------
microcolonel
Side note: is there some reason why the columns in the tables are ordered
most-recent, least-recent, second-most-recent?

~~~
ksec
It is not least-recent, it is YoY.

Current Quarter, YoY Quarter, last Quarter.

------
Teknoman117
Man I really wish I bought AMD stock when Ryzen was announced.

------
rydre
If Intel has another delay, they're dead. They'll be like Boeing (but their
mistake won't directly kill people). It'll mean that all engineering culture
is dead and the best minds have already left the company. Everyone who at
Intel who predicted the wrong schedule and not a realistic one should be
fired. They have destroyed a national champion in their short term greed.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Their best minds have definitely not left the company. Probably, just like
with Boeing, they're just watching the clock, waiting for their retirement and
for the quarterly bonus to come in.

Let's not pretend Intel is dead, they just had a record quarter and my friends
working there still got sizable bonuses.

~~~
jimbob45
What’s the best case scenario for them though? The mobile market is already
permanently blown for them. Best case AMD chips are heavily defective next gen
and Intel price/performance blows AMD out of the water with 7nm...which AMD
has now already shipped.

My pet theory is that the Trump funds to keep American microchip manufacturing
afloat has made a Intel complacent. Maybe they’re just dunces though.

~~~
ac29
Best case for them is TSMC continues to be heavily capacity constrained for
the next few years, handicapping AMD's ability to pick up significant market
share while Intel resolves their fab issues. Intel may also have to heavily
lean into backporting new designs that have been sitting on the shelf waiting
for new nodes. 14nm is finally moving past Skylake-based architectures with
Rocket Lake, and there should be opportunities to backport 7nm designs to 10nm
as well. Not ideal, but if they can remain roughly competitive with AMD and
just out-ship them, that could get them through the next few years without
losing much market share.

A US government injection of cash to Intel's fab business seems like it could
get bipartisan support if Taiwan/China continue to lead the market, but
Intel's problems don't appear to be be cashflow related.

