
AMD's Hidden Strategy - x0054
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4142634-amds-hidden-strategy
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anonymousab
Pressed the button to show the full article and was greeted with a full screen
demand to download their stock news app.

> Welcome to Seeking Alpha, please complete your setup with our FREE app

Do the metrics really say that these approaches gain more users than they
lose?

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brador
You can't measure lost users, only installs. 1 > 0 so it's inevitable to show
an increased number of installs with popup vs without.

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sgarman
You can with A/B testing though?

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jitl
Here’s the tl;dr:

On the server, AMD is making a security play w/ EPYC arch.

\- AMD not vulnerable to Meltdown

\- SEV allows encryption of a VM’s memory, further mitigating read attacks

On the consumer side, AMD is selling on-package Vega to Intel. This should
increase market penetration, and thus get more games optimized for the AMD
arch.

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ksec
Vega M ( On package Vega ). I dont understand how this will work.

Let say AMD makes a profit on their Vega Chip sold to Intel.

Intel will now have to sell this CPU+Vega chip ( Raw Cost ) @ Intel Margin.

So Intel either sell a very expensive package, or sell it at the same cost (
or slightly higher ) to customer as if they were to buy them separately, which
hurts Intel margin. ( Because Intel earn less on Vega )

And it has been a long time Intel dont care about margin at all.

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annywhey
Contrary to how the article frames it, the play here is to starve Nvidia of
oxygen by hitting their gaming business. Intel's biggest worry now is that
they lose whole market segments to ARM-based systems with Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia
has long had ambitions to own more of the platform, and there is a serious
threat of them running away with the market by being the best at GPU
performance and good enough everywhere else.

Intel has already made a move to rework their GPU development by effectively
starting over(see: recruiting Raja Koduri to work in the same kind of
leadership position he had at AMD previously while developing Vega). But they
need a stopgap for the coming years, and this is one way to attack.

The Vega M package is a technically interesting product(size, integration,
possible economies of scale), but it's primarily a win for market share
because Intel can cram it down the throat of OEMs to stop them from using
Nvidia. They would happily cut their margins to do so.

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ksec
>They would happily cut their margins to do so.

Let hope they do.

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hnov
AMP version without login required
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/41...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4142634-amds-
hidden-strategy)

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netsharc
It un-amps itself when I load this.

Even the print trick doesn't work, it just prints the current page, so for a
6-page article you'd have to print 6 times (and each virtual page probably
takes up 1 full paper page + 1 line of a 2nd paper page...). Although, who
still prints articles anyway?

Guess whose article won't be read past page 1...

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LamaOfRuin
Firefox reader view.

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generic_T
I found it very surprising that the article didn't mention machine learning
applications. Machine learning and scientific computing is where a company
like NVIDIA really shines. The reason for this is CUDA. Nearly all deep
learning frameworks, such as tensorflow, use CUDA to run on GPUs. Until AMD
comes up with their version of CUDA, and convinces the authors of deep
learning frameworks to support it, they will be behind. NVIDIA.

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nonbel
>"Until AMD comes up with their version of CUDA, and convinces the authors of
deep learning frameworks to support it, they will be behind."

I agree AMD needs to do this badly, but don't think it will take much
convincing as long as it works. You can read reddit/etc ml forums and see
people are desperate for some alternative (AMD or otherwise) due to Nvidia's
abuses of its monopoly.

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generic_T
I would definitely like to see more competition.

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rogerbinns
Can anyone comment on mainline kernel drivers for an entire AMD based laptop?
For example if you get a Thinkpad you get Intel CPU and GPU, but other parts
like wifi and bluetooth are Intel too. All of these are covered by mainstream
Linux kernel drivers.

(I'm thinking of years past when Broadcom wifi etc were a problem under
Linux.)

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mixedCase
I have a Kaveri era HP laptop (read: old). No issues with wifi. Fairly sure it
had an Atheros chip which has amazing Linux support.

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loeg
Note that if you don't make it to page 6, there is a disclaimer that the
author is long AMD.

