
AMD Gives More Zen Details - Osiris
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-details-ryzen-34-ghz-nvme-neural-net-prediction-25-mhz-boost-steps
======
dbcooper
Anandtech article:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-
detai...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-details-
ryzen-34-ghz-nvme-neural-net-prediction-25-mhz-boost-steps)

3.4+ GHz for 8-core base frequency (TDP is apparently 95W) is good news.

~~~
walrus01
95W? Given AMD's recent poor track record in terms of $$$/performance for
desktop CPUs...

I'll be extremely surprised if it's faster than a 4-core core i5 skylake which
runs at 65W TDP, in the $200 per cpu price range.

~~~
mrb
_" Given AMD's recent poor track record in terms of $$$/performance for
desktop CPUs..."_

Are you kidding or did you mistype? Current AMD processors don't generally
compare favorably to Intel with respect to some metrics, like absolute
performance per core or performance per Watt. However if there is _any_ metric
where they match or surpass Intel, it's actually perf/$.

The reason is simple: perf/$ is the only metric where AMD has some control:
they can decide to lower and lower their price down to wherever they need to
be. If AMD wasn't competitive on at least perf/$ they would be in a much worse
situation.

Here is one example I witnessed first hand recently when doing some video
work: a good old $100 3.2 GHz 8-core Phenom matches or surpasses most ~$200
Intel processors when encoding MPEG2 files to H.264 with the Linux x264
encoder.

~~~
olegkikin
$100 buys you

Intel Xeon E5-2665 ($80 on eBay) = 8 cores, 2.3-3.1GHz

Intel Xeon E5-2660 ($60-65 on eBay) = 8 cores, 2.2-3Ghz (so you can buy two
for $120-130)

Intel Xeon E5-1650 ($97 on eBay) = 6 cores, 3.5-3.8GHz

E5-2665 beats FX-8350 hands down, and is cheaper.

[http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5-2665-vs-AMD-
FX-8350](http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5-2665-vs-AMD-FX-8350)

[http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5-1650-vs-AMD-
FX-8350](http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5-1650-vs-AMD-FX-8350)

~~~
daveguy
Buying CPUs on eBay is generally a bad idea. When people consider
price/performance they don't generally include second hand cpu markets in the
equation. Also, xeon MBs are more expensive.

~~~
olegkikin
Buying on eBay from reputable sellers is just fine. I do it all the time.

I can buy a whole workstation with E5-2665, motherboard, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD,
all for $414, shipped.

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/162274529994](http://www.ebay.com/itm/162274529994)

I doubt you can find something like that with FX-8350 and cheaper. And it will
still be slower.

~~~
voltagex_
What's the power usage of those things? I think I'd notice the difference in
my power bill vs buying something like an i5.

~~~
walrus01
A xeon e5 2665 is rated at 115W thermal, so two of them at full load (let's
say, calculating prime numbers) would be 230W... plus the overhead for fans,
motherboard, hard drive other heat producing components in the system. I would
guess that the lenovo workstation in the ebay link is probably 310W electrical
load as measured by a kill-a-watt if you run simultaneous full cpu, ram and
disk benchmarks on it.

Depends a lot on your electrical cost. Some people live in places where the
power costs $0.05 per kWh. Some people live in places where it cost $0.36 per
kWh (Hawaii).

------
rl3
During the press event it was suggested the boost mode would operate primarily
off of temperature, taking into account high-end cooling setups. Seemed
interesting, if not innovative. As far as I'm aware, existing boost modes tend
to be static ranges.

I'd really like to see Ryzen meet or exceed Intel i7-6700K/7700K single-core
performance using boost mode clocks with a reasonable cooling setup. That
would eliminate any reason whatsoever to choose Intel for gaming until their
10nm product arrives Q3 2017.

~~~
trome
Yeah, I wouldn't set your hopes that high, if that were the case Intel has 4
to 5 generations of silicon already prepped that they could start churning out
in volume within 3 months.

Comparatively, AMD has been building chips to order as of late, since they do
not have the money to build a bunch of chips that may or may not sell, so your
looking at a 3 to 4 month delay before you can get a new chip like Ryzen after
announcement.

The cache arrangement (see pic halfway down) and better branch prediction are
interesting though, cache has always been a space where Intel has been able to
use way less transistors to store the same amount of data.

[http://semiaccurate.com/2016/12/13/amds-zen-becomes-
ryzen/](http://semiaccurate.com/2016/12/13/amds-zen-becomes-ryzen/)

~~~
rl3
> _... if that were the case Intel has 4 to 5 generations of silicon already
> prepped that they could start churning out in volume within 3 months._

Can you elaborate? I'm fairly certain Intel deviating from their existing
roadmap to such a degree and on such short notice would be extremely difficult
at best.

~~~
trome
After the Pentium 4 debacle, Intel Israel came up with the Core micro-
architecture to replace it. Since then, Intel has built up a 4 to 5 year
buffer of developed silicon so that if any generation or two is worse than
their competitors, they won't be caught flat footed & have to pay contra-
revenue to incentivize manufacturers to use their chips.

Most notably this can be seen in review samples of chips sent out, where AMD
and Qualcomm will send out chips dated as being made shortly before being sent
per the packaging, Intel will send out chips that are dated 4 to 5 years old,
as they are from the first or second run of silicon that Intel did with that
chip design.

~~~
rl3
> _Intel will send out chips that are dated 4 to 5 years old, as they are from
> the first or second run of silicon that Intel did with that chip design._

Fabrication process advancements (i.e. die shrinks) in that time span are
enough to rule out what you said with near complete certainty—let alone the
notion Intel is somehow shelving architectures for 4-5 years at a time.

Architectures may be developed over those spans, sure—but not shelved for that
long.

~~~
trome
I'm not saying that they have 4 to 5 full micro-architectures shelved (that'd
be insane), but from talking to Intel Oregon people they do keep a deep stock
that will buy them a few years. Think incremental improvements like you see
from Intel every year, not 20% or 30% performance improvements.

------
keldaris
This being HN, I'm hoping someone more competent than me in the area of CPU
architectures can comment, but as a scientific programmer some of the details
lead me to adopt a very cautious attitude for now, especially given the 95W
TDP. Given the architecture, producing a performance-competitive 8C/16T chip
at 68% of Intel's TDP (95W vs 140W) seems very dubious.

Most of the things they're touting in the slides amount to little more than
finally catching up to Intel (SMT, branch prediction (minus the neural network
thing), cache bandwidth, etc.). Also, some of the areas where they seem to
exceed current Intel architectures may turn out to be a mixed blessing. For
instance, I'm not sure if doubling L2 caches (512kb/core vs 256kb in Intel
CPUs) is a great idea given bandwidth limitations and associativity effects.
We also don't know the amount of vector registers these CPUs will have, which
will greatly influence the performance of optimal CPU-bound code.

Can anyone with more experience comment on the low level details they've
released, particularly the issues per cycle and cache architecture figures?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
The advantages I see over Intel are:

1\. Wider retire (probably only when executing two threads)

2\. 32B fetch from icache.

3\. Wider issue when executing from uop cache.

4\. Larger icache

5\. Larger L2 cache helps hit rate.

6\. Larger schedulers, leading to larger practical instruction window

7\. Split FP/Int pipelines, meaning more execution resources and instruction
window in mixed code.

Mixed:

6\. Very different branch prediction. AMD has used perceptron predictors
before, the talk about AI-driven CPU is just better marketing on this.
Perceptrons work much better on some loads, worse on others. What has been
released about their newest seems to point to some kind of mitigation of the
worst cases of their predictors. Could be great, could be a letdown.

7\. Narrower FPU and load-store. This obviously hurts on wide AVX loads, but
the adoption of wide AVX so far has been terrible. Narrower FPU gets them
shorter distances on chip, leading to higher clocks.

Disadvantages:

8\. Their split integer schedulers can have bubbles caused by their inability
to move instructions between lanes after dispatch. Part of their prediction
talk seems to be focused on mitigating this, but it's still something that
Intel CPUs just don't have to worry about.

9\. Less AGUs. On any code without rmw ops, they probably can't maintain full
memory throughput.

10\. Larger L2 cache probably hurts L2 latency.

Current Intel CPUs are in effect designed for 4uop/clock throughput, with both
the frontend and the retire limiting them to that over long term. Especially
when both threads are running mixed code, this one appears to have a higher
peak throughput. How often it can hit that peak is another question -- if I
had to make a quess, I'd say that Zen runs highly optimized code better, but
the lower latencies of the modern Intel CPU makes them better at worse-
optimized code.

------
protomyth
Here is an English article: [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-eight-
core-cpu,33...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-eight-core-
cpu,33180.html)

~~~
vcarl
> in a HandBrake-based video transcoding task, Ryzen scored a narrow win
> [against a stock i7-6900k]

Man, if that holds true in more benchmarks, that's fantastic news. AMD chugged
along by "competing" further and further down Intel's product line more or
less since Sandy Bridge, if they can genuinely compete with the i7 now I can't
wait to see the next few years. Intel has always seemed content to release
incremental improvements until they get kicked in the pants by somebody else,
I wouldn't be surprised if they have a bunch of stuff waiting in the wings to
maintain their edge over AMD.

~~~
agumonkey
Delta of 5 seconds (54s for ryzen, 59s for 6900k).

Also IIRC, ryzen wasn't using any form of boost while the 6900k was allowed to
push its enveloppe.

Not a time to buy an intel cpu.

~~~
dogma1138
Tre 6900k was not only not boosting they downclocked it to a locked 3.0ghz....

If there is no room for boost on Zen parts it's gonna be dead in the water for
enthusiasts. My 5820k does 4.6ghz and it's a 6 core part.

That said what's even more important is going to be USB 3/3.1, storage and
PCIe performance which ATM on AMDs current platforms are abysmal.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Tre 6900k was not only not boosting they downclocked it to a locked
> 3.0ghz....

This is incorrect. They did a "both CPUs locked to 3.0GHz" test a few months
back, today they did a "Intel CPU running absolutely stock, AMD one locked to
without boost" test.

~~~
dogma1138
Yes we covered this already check the child posts.

------
zython
Is there a MSRP for the RYZEN flagship that they showed off today yet, because
I havent seen one.

But as long as it stays under the $1100 of the 6900K I think they can secure
the mid to high-end enthusiast grade market which is good because I am tired
of intel controlling that portion of the market

~~~
wmf
There are rumors about $500.

~~~
agumonkey
If they're still making an adequate profit at 500$ they're gonna grab a very
healthy chunk of the market. It's more than half intel's competing product.
Even price cuts ..

~~~
dogma1138
It will depend on how well they'll be able to push the CPU in 4 core mode.

If they can't reach at least 4ghz it wouldn't matter.

Games are not optimized well beyound 3-4 cores these days I can disable 2-3
cores on my 6 core CPU and maybe lose 5% fps in CPU intensive games.

Intel can push their clocks pretty darn high especially with OC which now
comes out of the box with every enthusiast grade motherboard.

If you end up having a 3.4ghz part going against a 4.5ghz part the 4 extra
cores might not matter.

Even in professional use cases adobe doesn't scale above 4 threads like at all
and many video encoders also don't scale some even don't scale beyond 2.

The only thing that really scales well universally is 3D rendering.

~~~
agumonkey
Good points overall, but I wonder what about new usages like neural networks ?
Seems like new tricks might make multi threading a bit more trendy compared to
previous years.

~~~
dogma1138
I don't know what's the use case for heavy ANN work on only an 8 core part.

For ANNs you want as many threads as possible I would think.

Xeon SOCs and what ever AMD would pull out to compete with 48 and 64 thread
parts would probably be something quite different than this.

~~~
seanp2k2
Naples is their 32-core part on Zen: [http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-
naples-32-core-zen-proc...](http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-
naples-32-core-zen-processors-photos.html)

------
mtgx
Can we all give Mark Papermaster a healthy round of applause? Amazing what he
accomplished. Who would've thought AMD would ever even come close to Intel in
performance again?

~~~
peller
In my humble opinion it's probably this guy who deserves at least as much of
the credit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_\(engineer\))
The whole team, really.

~~~
spear
And (unfortunately?) this guy is now at Tesla.

------
elcct
But is it going to support ECC memory?

Also with Intel you can upgrade to more performant Xeons. What can you upgrade
AMD to?

~~~
zlynx
The AMD server line has usually been named Opteron.

And by the way, Xeon CPUs aren't usually faster than regular Intel chips. They
may have more cache or more cores, which might speed up some programs. But
otherwise, they're the same. Or even slower since their motherboards don't
overclock well, overclocking not being a big selling point for servers.

~~~
Glyptodon
One of my machines has a low-end Xeon because at the time it was basically 1:1
performance comparable to an i7, but cost ~$40 less because it had no
integrated graphics.

~~~
krob
[http://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/xeon-vs-i7i5-whats-
differe...](http://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/xeon-vs-i7i5-whats-difference/)

Biggest difference with i7 vs xeon, xeon can handle sometimes upwares of 1tb
of ram now. i7 maxes out at 64gb. You be the judge. i7 were usually 32gb,
especially the LGA1100 series. The LGA2011 were @ i7 handled 64gb. LGA 2011
Xeon's are all 64GB+. Also support for ECC ram. So basically if you are not
pressed for raw CPU, and you need just a lot of cpu for simulations, VM's etc,
xeon is your go to CPU. Xeon LGA2011 series has some crazy CPU Socket
configurations, you can get a lot depending on the motherboard vendor. I think
some as many as 4+ CPU Sockets. i7 cannot run in parallel with another socket
I believe. Just like with the LGA2011 1600 vs 2600 series xeons.

~~~
jsheard
LGA-2011 i7s can handle 128GB of RAM now. 6800k for example:
[https://ark.intel.com/products/94189/Intel-
Core-i7-6800K-Pro...](https://ark.intel.com/products/94189/Intel-
Core-i7-6800K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz)

The previous generation (5820k, etc) were only officially rated for 64GB, but
they too worked fine with 128GB in practice. Intel just never updated the spec
sheets once 16GB DIMMs became available.

~~~
yuhong
8Gbit DDR4, really. In fact, I think the first 128GB (8x16GB) kits that used
it were targeted at Haswell-E.

------
tcoppi
They are staying consistent with a 40% IPC improvement number, which is great.
This should finally be competitive with Intel's current offerings.

------
walterbell
Does AMD now have an equivalent to Intel's open-source tboot for DRTM?

In the past, AMD avoided artificial "enterprise" segmentation with security
features like IOMMU, but did not always have the necessary BIOS, board (e.g.
TPM) and open-source tooling that Intel solutions provided.

------
gbraad
Ars Technica article: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/amd-zen-
performance-d...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/amd-zen-performance-
details-release-date/)

------
pragmar
I want to believe, I really do. Intel can't offer a compelling reason to
upgrade my 5 year old 3930k--there's no question that the desktop market has
stagnated in the face of a weakened AMD. Can anyone enlighten me as to what
video encoding and 3d benchmarks might omit that a more well-rounded passmark
score would not?

------
yakult
It's all wasted ink and pointless flapping of gums until a tech magazine gets
their hands on a production model with a set in stone RRP, and does third-
party benchmarks. You can't eyeball the actual performance from the marketing
material, and neither can anandtech.

------
free652
More competition is good, though I dont have many hopes now. I switched to
Intel starting with "Cores". I don't see myself upgrading my 4690k anytime
soon, but I hope but the time I need, AMD would have some nice offerings.

------
stolk
Does it have AVX512 support? Or at least AVX2?

~~~
keldaris
They claim AVX2 support, yes. No AVX512, but even Xeons don't have that yet
(sadly).

------
deepnotderp
Neural network for memory access huh? Interesting!

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder how this will affect the software side. Programmers and compilers..
how do you interface with a NN based prefetcher to avoid regression and
hiccups.

~~~
snerbles
If it's a truly adaptive branch predictor, one could naively believe it will
yield good results for most inputs. Even if it's an absurdly deep pipeline
with a cache miss penalty worse than the Pentium 4, it would be premature
optimization for the vast majority of programs.

------
shmerl
What about Vega? When is it going to be released?

------
revanx_
Will the new Zen include the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP)?

(To those asking, PSP is the equivalent of the Intel Management Engine).

------
randiantech
Is it plausible a procesador like this to be used on new Xbox scorpio, later
next year?

~~~
peller
The original Xbox One used a Jaguar[0] based chip, which is really quite a
different bread than the Bulldozer or Zen micro architectures. (It's closer to
what you'd find in a netbook than in a high end machine, minus the custom
memory cache/controller setup AMD designed for Microsoft.)

While it's possible they'd switch micro-architectures, if history is any
indication, I suspect it's more likely what you'll see is a die-shrink (28nm
-> 14nm) combined with higher clock speeds. And hopefully a faster memory
controller (I think that's more the bottleneck than raw CPU power). But that's
entirely my speculation.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(microarchitecture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_\(microarchitecture\))

------
geezerjay
Support for multi-processor systems would be very awesome.

------
mSparks
you've seriously never heard of pcmark or passmark?

noob alert :p

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13174901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13174901)
and marked it off-topic.

------
smegel
Flagged for non-English link.

------
hellofunk
An interesting read about the Zen by a financial analyst:

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/4030174-advanced-micro-
devic...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/4030174-advanced-micro-devices-
quite-filter)

~~~
mmanfrin
Seeking Alpha is so pushy about registration. 2nd page or below the fold, it
stops you. Use mobile and it stops you (and forces you to use their app).
Their app continually pushes for registration and is very neutered without it.

If they are this pushy to get my information, how pushy are they in selling it
or in spamming me?

~~~
Dagwoodie
I don't trust them either, in fact no "pay" wall I've ever seen has pissed me
off more than Seeking Alpha.

~~~
kefka
Im currently using Throw Away Email, and wow, they are nasty pushy. And yes,
I'm polluting their Database. Too bad, so sad :)

Theyre digging in "what kind of brokerage work do you do" and then asking very
pointed money-market questions.

When you get to "Suggestions" they aren't suggestions; they force you to enter
multiple stocks.

So fuck them. Here's a Copy/Paste.

_______________________________________________

Summary

In my previous article I showed how speculation going into Zen's launch
greatly exceeded speculation going into the Athlon and Opteron launches.

In this article, I take the comparisons further.

I compare both the revenues expected/attained by AMD and the market caps into
the 3 launches.

The Investors of today like AMD nearly 4x better than when Opteron (or Athlon,
for that matter) was looking pretty.

My thesis on Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) is as follows:

    
    
        I am negative on AMD because it is my belief, based on leaked benchmarks, that the company's incoming Zen-based CPUs will still underperform Intel's offerings materially, when it comes to single-threaded performance. I believe AMD will compensate for this the same way it has, historically: by selling CPUs with a higher core count. This puts AMD at an intrinsic margin disadvantage, which is made worse by the fact that AMD is fabless whereas Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) runs its own factories (so AMD loses the foundry margin as well).
        I also think AMD got way ahead of itself. In my last article, titled "Advanced Micro Devices: Then And Now", I explained this by showing AMD's behavior versus how it behaved during 2 extraordinary past events: the launch of the original Athlon and original Opteron. In both those instances AMD stepped ahead of Intel while with Zen AMD is only expected to get close to Intel. Still, in both of those instances AMD had nothing like the present run going into those launches.
        While I am negative on AMD, I am not negative enough to sell it short. I don't think the timing is right for such a move. I also think that there's the chance Zen gets "close enough" even if it underperforms, allowing for substantial share gains while selling at a discount. Thus, before considering selling short AMD, I'm waiting to see how Zen actually performs.
    

With that being put out of the way, I'm writing this article because I think
the prior one didn't quite filter through. From the comments, one would guess
that the message "AMD is much more speculative going into Zen than going into
Athlon or Opteron" didn't register. The criticism was far and wide, including
such things as:

    
    
        This time is different because the market is larger.
        This time AMD is different because it also has GPUs and custom silicon and whatnot.
        That's only share price (it was an adjusted share price …), not market capitalization.
        AMD was thought to go bankrupt this time, and back in 1999 or 2003 that wasn't the case.
        Etc, etc.
    

Well, I feel I need to give some more detail here. This detail will show that
sentiment today is even more extraordinary than what the previous charts
showed. So here we go.

Revenues, Now And Then

Over the last 12 months, AMD has produced $4.24 billion in revenues. For 2017,
including the early Zen launch, expectations are for $4.55 billion in
revenues. Now, remember:

    
    
        This includes Zen.
        This includes GPUs.
        This includes custom solutions (consoles, etc).
    

Why is this revenue number relevant? Consider the following regarding the past
two episodes I mentioned:

    
    
        Athlon. In 2000, AMD had revenues of $4.64 billion.
        Opteron. In 2004, AMD had revenues of $5.0 billion.
    

In short, AMD's revenues were larger in both those years, versus those
expected for 2017 including Zen. This includes Zen, GPUs and everything else,
thus rendering the arguments that AMD is "much more" today completely moot.

Market Capitalization, Now And Then

In my previous article I compared just the relative share prices going into
product launches. Of course, AMD has had many losses and M&A (acquiring ATI)
throughout the years. This naturally led to a much higher share count today,
versus what it was back in 1999/2003\. How much higher?

    
    
        As of the last 10-Q, AMD reported a diluted share count of 815 million shares. Potentially, the actual diluted count is over 1 billion shares (diluted shares for the quarter don't include all potential dilution because AMD reported a loss).
        As of 1999 year-end, AMD had a diluted share count of 294.6 million shares.
        As of 2003 year-end, AMD had a diluted share count of 346.9 million shares.
    

Now consider the following:

    
    
        After the current run, AMD sits at $10.75. This gives it a market capitalization of around $10.75 billion.
        When AMD released the Athlon, the stock stood at $9.58. This gave it a market capitalization of around $2.82 billion.
        When AMD released the Opteron, the stock stood at $8.47. This gave it a market capitalization of around $2.94 billion.
    

It's easy to see that AMD's market cap today is wildly higher than what it was
back then (1999, 2003). That is, while the share price isn't much different,
due to the share count AMD today is valued at a significant multiple of AMD
right before either the Athlon or Opteron were launched.

Conclusion

From this exercise we see that:

    
    
        AMD today is expected to have lower revenues when it starts selling Zen, versus the revenues it reached when it was selling the Athlon and Opteron. Perhaps estimates will be revised higher. Perhaps even much higher. But the present estimates are factually lower than what was attained back then.
        Yet, at the same time, AMD goes for a market capitalization that's 3.6-3.8x higher than it was back then, going into the Zen launch.
    

Thus, it isn't hard to conclude that the AMD of today is massively more
speculative than the AMD of either 1999 or 2003. All the arguments that it has
more products now are also rather irrelevant when we consider that today's AMD
is still expected to be smaller than the AMD which resulted from those past
(successful) launches. Never mind that we're comparing numbers after a
verified success (1999, 2003), to an uncertain success (2017).

Finally, yes, AMD is more diversified today. However, AMD isn't potentially
more profitable because back in 1999/2003 it controlled its own foundry and
now it doesn't. Instead, right now AMD has contracts which try to assure the
foundry's economic returns, while punishing AMD's.

All of this being factual, what we can easily say is that today AMD's stock
discounts improvements wildly in excess of the analysts' expectations. If
those improvements don't materialize -- well in excess of expectations -- the
stock will have very significant downside.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to
initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not
receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no
business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this
article.

~~~
Blackthorn
Short AMD has been the only real drag on my otherwise excellent trades this
year. I've learned my lesson -- I won't short a growth stock anymore.

That said, puts were fairly cheap so I took some as my last gasp effort to see
if AMD actually tanked.

