
AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/amd-stock-price-falls-after-report-predicts-cryptocurrency-slowdown/
======
agumonkey
That report is so negatively biased it's suspicious. AMD finances were known
to be dire for the last decade. They didn't established as just an intel
competitor again, they won hard technical and market praises. The console and
mining markets are not what to look at, what about the rest of the whole
personal computer one ?

~~~
DarronWyke
Of course I'm not shocked that Ars picked it up. Their journalistic quality
has majorly slipped over the last few years.

AMD is punching way above their weight class lately. It's causing competitors
(or really _competitor_ since Intel is their main one) to have to scramble to
counter them.

~~~
Numberwang
Do you have alternative sources you would recommend instead of Ars? I quite
like ars but if there are better publications out there I'd love to know.

~~~
DarronWyke
Not found anything worthwhile really. Slashdot is still decent. Of course HN.
User-run sites tend to be better. But I stopped reading Ars and The Register a
while ago due to slippages in journalistic quality and various other hit
pieces.

~~~
guitarbill
To be fair, The Register is good at UK/Oz/storage news, as well as puns - if
those don't interest you, it's probably not worth reading. Also not sure what
level of "journalistic quality" you're expecting from El Reg? Or any news
outlet for that matter.

~~~
DarronWyke
How about writing and publishing actual _facts_ rather than hit pieces? I've
seen El Reg push out several articles about non-UK things that were patently
wrong -- and that their userbase ripped them for. No apology, no retraction,
no update.

------
totalZero
I used to talk with Joe Moore, who wrote the report, every once in a while in
a past job. In my experience he tries to be very attuned to the development of
technology in the semiconductor industry, but often (1) misses some of the
more technical facts and (2) misjudges how players in the market will react.
When the iPhone 6s was released, he totally failed to identify one of the NAND
suppliers. Nice guy, but I don't think he is any better than an educated
layperson at predicting the future of cryptocurrency mining or video games.
Joe tends to be good at tracking big ticket things (stages of 7nm development,
deal dynamics, catalyst dates, potential M&A targets), but he's a Wall Street
veteran, not a young hacker. And he has been wrong on AMD before.

~~~
dforrestwilson
All valid points about the sell-side in general. I used to work there. That
being said, a downgrade is usually the last resort for an analyst, because
they don't want to risk angering the management teams they interact with. To
your point, according to Tipranks, Joe has a decent record overall and a bad
one covering AMD in particular: [https://www.tipranks.com/analysts/joseph-
moore](https://www.tipranks.com/analysts/joseph-moore) If you click on the
ticker you can see the timing on his Buy/Sell recommendations for AMD.

------
bfrog
Notably the stock has done this repeatedly after ER. Every time taking
anywhere between a few days to a few weeks to start recovering.

Their product line up is very exciting and only going to get better. Mobile,
Server, Workstation, and even still Consumer level CPU/GPU products are all
very competitive and priced to sell. The only segment that sells quickly after
something comes to market is really enthusiast consumer facing products. It
takes time for a product line to build confidence and make a name for itself.
Especially after nearly a decade of being the other guys with the mediocre at
best option. The last AMD system I owned as a Phenom II X6 and it was really
quite nice. I actually owned an Athlon MP (hacked XP chips) all throughout
school a decade ago. Jim Keller is a brilliant CPU designer, and he designed
Zen.

Granted the last time AMD took a significant market share Intel made many
missteps. I don't know if Intel will have another Itanium like failure here.

------
Derbasti
Regardless of how AMD CPUs compare against Intel CPUs, we _need_ AMD to
provide competition.

Personally, I greatly enjoy my 1950X, as it provides just about double the
performance per dollar compared to Intel's offerings. But I can see how that
assessment would not be true for others, especially gamers and servers.

But just look what the last year brought us in terms of performance and price
from both AMD and Intel, after several years of stagnation from Intel, and
duds from AMD. AMD revived the CPU market, by providing competition. We need
AMD.

~~~
make3
wouldn't one of the real answer to this x86 emulation on ARM? is the reason
why it's not happening because of patents only?

~~~
guitarbill
Emulation always involves a hefty performance hit. Many emulators make huge
trade-offs in accuracy vs performance, or are only possible because of orders
of magnitudes difference in performance. But you don't really want to trade
accuracy for most x86 business cases. That's why (backwards) compatible tech
is so alluring (x86-64, x86, Eclipse MV/8000, S/360, etc), whereas breaking
changes aren't (Itanium et al).

So you need either dynamic binary translation, or a processor that can support
both x86-64 and whichever ARM instruction sets. Maybe it's possible, but there
are two hurdles. Doing that for a gigantic instruction set (x86-64) on a
processor with a modest instruction set is going to be challenging. For
dynamic binary translation, it's correctness and speed. For supporting two
ISAs (somehow), it'd be crazy hard to get the micro-codes right for
everything.

And most applications aren't multi-threaded, so you're limited by single-core
performance. And that has been x86's bread and butter for decades (also
POWER/SPARC I guess), whereas ARM has been power efficiency, multiple cores,
specialised cores/silicon. (Edit: This also explains why neither Intel nor ARM
has any incentive in making a chip that supports both ISAs, even if it took
the dreaded mode-bit)

But if it could be done, then yes, probably patents. IBM brought Transitive
Corp, who's tech Apple had licensed for Rosetta (dynamic binary translation
PowerPC -> x86, although even that didn't support PowerPC 970). Of course, IBM
then did fuck-all with the tech and people of that acquisition, but they still
have that IP.

~~~
make3
i thought Microsoft had a system of the sort working, to make "legacy" (aka
x86) work on an eventual return to ARM with the Surface notebook/tablet

------
wjd2030
I'm calling total BS on this article. Graphics chip sales will continue to
grow. These people are crazy.

------
et2o
Good luck to anyone trying to predict the cryptocurrency market, which as it
related to AMD was the major finding in this report.

------
sundvor
Weird / sad / hope it corrects soon. My last 6850k / Asus Strix motherboard
purchase was a major mistake; CPU frying with too high voltages just because I
chose the default 3200 DDR4 XMP memory profile. Didn't realise I had to check
every single voltage setting there was; a lot had changed since my 2600k.

My next desktop system will be a Threadripper for sure. But here's to hoping
they can make a move in the mobile market too; would love a multicore X1
carbon.

~~~
wil421
I had a core i7 gen 2 Bloomfield? Asus motherboard that was solid and still
is. In Jan/Feb I got a Asus Strix board for a Kaby Lake i7 and it’s already
giving me issues. The onboard Bluetooth chip stops working randomly and other
weird things are happening.

~~~
sundvor
I'm totally not a fan of Asus anymore. My old 2600k system (an Asus) which I
have my 7y son using now is still rock solid. New one... I'm on my third
6850k, and only discovered what I think was the crazy-as-hell offending
default high voltage when using XMP after 6 weeks on the third, so I'm
expecting some degradation to have taken place.

I should have demanded the dodgy Asus Strix X99 board be replaced at with the
first CPU replacement (it was 99.999% likely the Asus' board's fault, not
Intel's CPU - even though they got fried), alas now it's too late.

I have weird issues such as not being able to get it to boot every time if
Hyper V is enabled, so I have to run Docker using Virtualbox. I'm really quite
over the Asus QC and will go e.g. Threadripper + Gigabyte next time.

------
mizzack
Market manipulation, plain and simple.

------
bkeroack
Compare these financials to Uber, Snap or even Twitter. It's not even the same
league of money loss. Furthermore, AMD actually was competitive with Intel for
a period, and may do so again.

------
thisisit
Is it really due to the report? The slide seems to have started after the
quarterly reports on October 24th. Now with the continuing slide, it seems
news writers are trying to attribute a particular reason.

Here's the Q&A which happened during the call:

Joseph L. Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:

Great. Thank you. I was interested in your comments that the sequential growth
in the Computing and Graphics business was driven primarily by graphics. How
literally should we take that? And I guess, if graphics is up close to $150
million sequentially, is that business now on par with the CPU business? Can
you just give us a general sense of the size of the two businesses there in
that segment?

Dr. Lisa T. Su - Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. :

Yeah. So overall, the growth in Computing and Graphics, when you look over the
past few quarters has been very strong. And we've seen growth both on the
Ryzen side, particularly in the desktop side of the business as well as on the
graphics side. So in terms of size of the business, again, I think we stated
in the prepared remarks that the GPU business had a record quarter for us and
we're seeing very strong growth.

We're seeing strong growth as a result of the new product launches. So the
Vega product actually did very well for us in the quarter as well as overall
Polaris in both gaming and blockchain markets. But yes, we're pleased with the
graphics performance. But I'll also say Ryzen did very well in the quarter. We
look at the progress that we're making in the desktop channel when you look
across retailers and e-tailers across the world. And in the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen
7 segment, we're seeing significant share gain in those parts of the business.
So I think both parts of the Computing and Graphics business are doing well.
And we continue to expect growth as we go forward.

Joseph L. Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC:

And is it possible to size the blockchain portion of that?

Dr. Lisa T. Su - Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. :

I think the blockchain tends to be, again, it's hard to separate because it
goes through some of the same channels as gaming does. I will say that
blockchain sort of behaved as we expected in Q3. So we didn't see anything
that we didn't expect. We did see some benefit of channel restocking. So if
you look at our channel inventories today compared to July, we had healthier
channel inventory levels. And we expect that consumer blockchain will level
off a bit as we go into Q4. But there's also commercial blockchain component
that we believe is interesting and likely to continue into the medium term. As
we look into Q4, though, we also see growth from just the OEM side of the GPU
business as we start ramping Vega into OEMs.

So the part in question is this:

> And we expect that consumer blockchain will level off a bit as we go into
> Q4.

~~~
mtgx
I think post-Ryzen launch a lot of speculators jumped on the AMD stock
bandwagon. The majority of speculators tend to jump on board when they see
some "hockey stick growth" for a stock, and then jump off in group the moment
there's some moderately negative news about the company/stock, because they
don't understand the fundamentals, so they want to play it safe.

AMD is doing very well and its chips are only going to become more and more
competitive with Intel's. That's all you need to know really. The market is
irrational, so it's best to ignore it. I don't know why all the tech writers
are making such a big deal out of this. They should stick to chip reviews.

------
whataretensors
I wish AMD would target AI more. They could create a niche unique offering,
something like a 128 GB video card with float16 support. Then optimize and
open source a cuda replacement.

~~~
viewtransform
AMD has a Radeon Pro SSG card with 16GB + 2TB on board memory.

You address the 2TB NVMe SSG memory as a filesystem directly from the card
itself - no PCIe system transfer involved. 24.6TFLOPS half-precision.

You can program using OpenCL or HIP (opensource cuda replacement )

[https://pro.radeon.com/en/product/pro-series/radeon-pro-
ssg/](https://pro.radeon.com/en/product/pro-series/radeon-pro-ssg/).

[https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP](https://github.com/ROCm-
Developer-Tools/HIP)

~~~
whataretensors
Thanks! I didn't realize.

