
AMD's Stock Price Jumps on News of Earnings Spurred by Ryzen - artsandsci
https://hothardware.com/news/amd-stock-price-jumps-news-stellar-earnings-spurred-ryzen
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bitL
Congrats AMD, I hope you'll sustain it for a few years (or decades)! We need a
great competition in CPU space! ;-)

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majewsky
And GPU space, too.

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bitL
They have some work to do there ;-) I can't use them for Deep Learning at all,
just for mining.

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throwaway84742
They’re getting there with MIOpen etc. It’ll take some more time, but I’m sure
they can pull it off. In terms of raw perf their GPUs are comparable.

~~~
singhrac
This benchmark is worth looking at as well:
blog.gpueater.com/en/2018/04/23/00011_tech_cifar10_bench_on_tf13/

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lowbloodsugar
I went to buy a Ryzen 7/Vega 10 laptop from Dell last Thursday. By Friday, it
was gone, and only Ryzen 5/Vega 8 laptops are available, even for the 17"
Inspiron. Not "Out of stock" gone, but "This product doesn't exist" gone.

Lenovo makes one with only 12Gb of RAM, Asustek's effort is 8Gb, a single
channel. AMD makes the best integrated CPU/GPU for laptops but you cannot buy
it anywhere.

Commentary elsewhere is that Intel is leaning hard on builders not to use the
Ryzen 7/Vega 10, or if they use it, to put it in an otherwise shitty spec box
that cripples it.

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KSS42
There are many in the pipeline. HP is going to launch a bunch in June.

AMD said they expect 25 Ryzen laptops to launch in Q2 and 60 by year end

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hajile
I just hope there's one or two high-end models.

Also, AMD chipsets seem to use more power than Intel. I'd love to see more
work in that direction.

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dis-sys
AMD's share price is still 75% lower than its peak achieved after the release
of AMD64/AMD X2.

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agumonkey
Give them time to breath, they were almost under during the ATi/APU era.

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dogma1138
is it even at 30 day high? it was like $13 in the begining of 2018.

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mark-r
So far today it's at $11.08, which puts it back where it was at on March 22.
So yes, it's a 30 day high, but only just barely.

I love AMD and I'm rooting for them, but the stock price isn't the news - it's
the unexpected sales strength of the Zen architecture. Don't expect Intel to
take their success lying down.

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jandrese
This is what I want to see. Intel finally waking up and working hard again and
maybe trying to compete on price. Without proper competition the market just
goes stagnant.

The most interesting thing is that Intel used to be able to crush their
opponents by being one step ahead on node size improvements, but that's hit a
wall and it has given everyone else a chance to catch up.

~~~
noir_lord
Also meltdown is going to be a problem for them for years.

Intel is vulnerable if they don't get their act together and the competition
do.

AMD has been on a roll since Ryzen was released and as long as time continues
to go past without a meltdown level problem cropping up they might have a shot
at eating some of the data center stuff.

We upgraded our Xeon servers the week before meltdown hit, if we'd know we'd
have held on another year and gone EPYC.

~~~
dogma1138
Meltdown would likely increase Intel sales not decrease them.

The problem with AMD is that it stopped making server CPUs for 5 years, Epyc
was their first release since December of 2012 and that is what essentially
prevents any serious ramp up of Epyc currently.

Not having the fastest CPU out there isn't a problem if you can price it
correctly but when you don't give your customers any options to upgrade or
grow you essentially give them only one option and that is switch the the
competition completely.

If people can't trust that AMD won't abandon them again for half a decade to
sort their shit out they will never take the risk of using them again at
scale.

That 5 year gap also essentially killed the AMD optimized software ecosystem
and toolset which now needs to be built from the grounds up again.

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AnthonyMouse
> The problem with AMD is that it stopped making server CPUs for 5 years, Epyc
> was their first release since December of 2012 and that is what essentially
> prevents any serious ramp up of Epyc currently.

I don't see why that should be a concern. It's not as though the effect is any
different than switching to a new socket. Existing systems can't be upgraded
to the newer processors, which is mostly irrelevant anyway because by the time
the processor is stale so is the rest of the system.

It's not as if they're different instruction sets. It's perfectly reasonable
to buy Opterons in 2009, replace them with Xeon systems in 2014 and then
replace those with Epyc systems in 2019.

> That 5 year gap also essentially killed the AMD optimized software ecosystem
> and toolset which now needs to be built from the grounds up again.

The Zen microarchitecture isn't based on bulldozer. Even if they had kept
iterating on bulldozer in the interim, none of that ecosystem work would have
been applicable to Zen regardless.

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dogma1138
Your thinking is too narrow.

Let’s take simple examples

Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non
heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live
migrate between them.

You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be
much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use
specific kernels for each CPU vendor.

Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide
completely different remote management solution. Does your management stack
supports DASH? Are your IT peeps familiar with it? Doesn’t have sufficient
traction and market adoption? Likely not and that is again because AMD slept
for half a decade.

Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected
yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who
previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs?

Heck even if you aren’t going to grow what about dealing with disasters? Do
you really want to compound an already huge risk with another one?

And about what you said about Zen. Zen isn’t that different to bulldozer in
many aspects I suggest you should read the intrinsics guides for both.

And even if it was 100% different it doesn’t matter a 5 year gap kills the
entire infrastructure of partners and provide tools and education. If I need
to optimize software today for an Intel CPU I have a plethora of resources,
AMD can’t even release their instructions latency tables for 17h.

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AnthonyMouse
> Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non
> heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live
> migrate between them.

> You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might
> be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might
> use specific kernels for each CPU vendor.

The premise is that you're migrating from one vendor to the other, so once you
move something to the other pool it shouldn't have to move back. Having to
reboot each guest once is inconvenient, but aren't you already doing this
every month or two for security updates?

> Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide
> completely different remote management solution.

This absolutely is AMD's fault, but the real issue is that their remote
management solution (like Intel's) is a closed source black box. If they would
open it up then it might be adopted by ARM vendors and so on and no one would
have to worry about being abandoned because the community could continue to
support it for as long as enough people want to keep using it. And it would
put pressure on Intel to do the same thing, at which point they could be
consolidated.

> Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected
> yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who
> previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs?

That would be the case if we were talking about some low volume product at
risk of becoming unavailable. You can still source Opteron systems even today
if you really want them. But nobody has wanted them for five years because the
migration cost _isn 't_ that high.

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dogma1138
Migrating VMs between vendors isn’t a reboot and you are done.

And as far as sourcing Opterons are you serious? Sure you can source them on
eBay but take a look at when the likes of HP stopped supplying them.

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anon1253
I got in at ~$12 two years ago, was down 26% for most of that (I'm long, and
don't care much for intra-day volatility). I hope it will crawl back up, but
I'm increasingly bearish on this one.

Without investors pouring money in it, the R&D will stall and that's not
something they can sustain. One of the few reasons they haven't been bought
yet is because that will invalidate their license sharing with Intel. So I
guess the other strategy is to simply bleed them dry. I mean just think about
it. They build GPUs, just like NVidia. They build CPUs, just like Intel. They
have their own fabrication process, logistics, research, the whole thing.
Their chips don't perform much worse, even better in the mid-range tier. Yet
AMD is valued at 9, instead of like 5x or even 10x as much. The people with
the money are holding a grudge or something, and I can't see them keeping it
up for much longer.

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azinman2
But hasn’t it been that way for many, many years now?

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anon1253
Yes, but I was being naive and thought the Vega/Epyc/ThreadRipper stuff with
the Intel Specter/Meltdown and crypto craze would help them more. I know my
next machine will be an AMD one, if only just for wishful thinking

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observr
Thanks to Jim Keller.

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tambre
He did just quit Tesla after a short time there and re-joined Intel.

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dman
I have been watching the dynamics between AMD and Intel recently and some
interesting things are happening. Jim Keller and Raja headed to Intel. Intel
announcing plans to get into the discrete GPU space (a place ridden with
patent landmines). The KabyLake chip released with Intel CPU + AMD GPU. Wonder
if the companies are aligning to work closely to counter NVidia or if
something else entirely is at play.

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monocasa
> Wonder if the companies are aligning to work closely to counter NVidia

I mean, yeah, that's actively happening, as can also be seen by the Intel/Vega
combo.

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throwaway84742
FWIW my next “office” PC is based on an AMD Ryzen APU. Price/perf of that
can’t currently be beat by anything.

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ksec
Why hasn't EPYC picked up stream? It's been a year since release, some say
they were already selling as many as they can. GF capacity problems again?

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dragontamer
It wasn't until recently that Dell and HP were offering fully tested EPYC
servers in their server lines. Many IT professionals were complaining that
EPYC was simply unavailable from their suppliers last year.

The typical server-farm waits for OEMs to make well-tested complete machines.
So it won't be till this year that EPYC even has a chance to make it to your
typical serverroom setup.

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shmerl
AMD should put a good effort into GPUs too, and replace GCN with brand new and
efficient architecture.

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hajile
Most of Nvidia's architectural changes have moved it closer to GCN (eg, adding
async compute in Pascal). In other areas like multiple compute engines (A
reason GCN generally has better VR latency numbers), Nvidia still lags behind
(not sure if Volta changes that). AMD generally does quite well on compute
tasks compared to Nvidia and is still generally much faster for anything using
Vulkan.

[http://ext3h.makegames.de/DX12_Compute.html](http://ext3h.makegames.de/DX12_Compute.html)

The big issue with AMD is software and money. Even with the most talented
engineers it takes loads of man hours to build up an ecosystem. AMD's is
currently valued at 8.3B. Nvidia currently has 7.1B cash on hand. With that
kind of money, Nvidia will do things like loan AAA gamemakers some devs to re-
write large parts of the game to optimize them for Nvidia graphics cards or
build up the CUDA ecosystem.

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ahartmetz
It seems like AMD has hardware bottlenecks (or missing optimizations relative
to Nvidia) in the fixed-function geometry processing parts of GCN. The compute
benchmarks are always better than the graphics benchmarks. If it was only
optimizations in games, there would be outliers in less popular games (Doom is
a bit of an outlier but popular). And in any case, Xbox and PS4 consoles use
AMD GPUs so game devs have reason to optimize for AMD.

Also, AMD has been improving its Windows drivers in the last 2-3 years
according to reports. I use AMD GPUs on Linux where the driver codebase is
different - the improvements there are huge. So much so that it may make sense
for AMD to switch to that stack on Windows in the future.

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copperx
I'm old to remember the excitement over AMD's K6 processors, which were
quickly overtaken in speed by Intel for a decade. I just hope that AMD
continues to be competitive.

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bitL
I was a kid so I might be wrong, though I seem to remember there was some
crazy overclockable Celeron that was killing K6, right?

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spamizbad
Yep. And you could even run a pair of them with SMP with delicate
modifications.

I used to have a 440BX board with a pair of 300A's clocked to 450mhz and 128MB
of SDRAM. Excellent poor-mans workstation.

