
AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years - kartD
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amd-stock-rises-after-strong-revenue-fuels-earnings-beat-2018-07-25
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chadmeister
And they're about to drop their new 24 & 32-core threadripper CPUs in a few
weeks, for which Intel has no economically viable response. AMD is going is
going to crush their earning reports for the next few quarters.

~~~
zaarn
Well, Intel does want to put out the 28 core i9 eventually. Hopefully with a
free industrial chiller.

~~~
mcny
This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its
offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t
they? Or is it not possible to lower prices?

From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price
segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as
greedy?

~~~
zaarn
This is speculation to some extend, but I don't think it'll be that easy.

Intel does have margins on their products but at the same time, the products
are still expensive. I fault their production method for that. I bet that even
if they sold their CPUs at a loss, AMD could undercut them in the important
market segments at minimum.

AMD has struck gold with being able to, in Intel's words, glue together a
bunch of desktop CPUs.

Intel's biggest CPU, a 28 core, is a monolithic die. All in one go. Which
means the yields are bad. AMD produces basically 1 die and glues together as
needed. The yields here are much better due to the smaller die and being able
to use basically any die that has functioning 2 cores.

Intel doesn't have a response to that since if their 28 core die has 26 defect
cores, they don't have a housing for it to sell in. Their segmentation also
means that they don't have compatible sockets in size to even conceivable put
the 28 core to use at all.

IMO Intel will have to come up with a similarly modular response or reduce
their production cost.

Of course, Intel has a while, they can idle a few years on marketshare and
mindshare before they run a risk of loosing the CPU business (and they sell
other silicon too where AMD doesn't compete). So likely, they will be able to
do it.

Question then is how much marketshare AMD will have eaten by then.

(Personally, I hope AMD will release server cpus for the lower market segment,
building an Intel-based Server that doesn't have the suck is rather expensive
and low-cost baremetal would be a delight for hobbyists and SMB)

~~~
cameldrv
What difference does monolithic vs. modular really make? If Intel has a core
on their 28 core die that is defective, they just disable it and sell a 27
core chip. Perhaps it's easier for AMD to find 4 8 core chips with no defects
than for Intel to find a 28 core chip with no defects, but Intel can just make
a 34 core die sold as a 32 core chip with better yields than AMD's 8 core
dies.

~~~
zaarn
There is a huge difference.

The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die
area then you get double as many defective chips.

Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would
be even more expensive to produce.

Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The
bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher
resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that
aren't black, ie defective silicon.

AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can
produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores
but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their
performance (chips can have wildly different performance).

Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does
not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that)
that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the
die.

For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a
32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run
fast.

The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is
98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to
have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power
desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those
sockets.

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radium3d
AMD has been my best investment so far. I've always loved them as they've been
the rebellious underdog and have brought competitively powerful CPUs into the
affordable range for historically low income computer nerds such as myself
multiple times.

Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best-- if only I hadn't had my bitcoins
stolen from an early mining pool... oh well.

~~~
J0-nas
Are you concerned about the state of AMD GPUs?

They couldn't compete in terms of high end performance for a long time. But
nowadays they even lose the price-performance ratio of entry->mid level GPUs.

~~~
onli
Not really. Entry->Mid level is RX 560, RX 570 and RX 580. RX 560 is a mixed
bag, but both RX 570 and RX 580 are competitive and a bit superior to the
Nvidia alternatives - as long as they are not overpriced, which they were till
early this month. So the market just has to reach the regular prices AMD aimed
for initially for those series to work fine.

But one can be concerned about the utter failure of high end Vega.

~~~
chemmail
Luckily crypto saved the Vega. You can't really buy them for MSRP.

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redtuesday
If the rumor [0] that Intel's first 10nm server chip will only release mid
2020 is true, then AMD's shares will probably skyrocket again if they truly
can release their Zen 2 server CPU mid 2019 (on 7nm which is comparable to
Intel's 10nm).

[0]
[https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977](https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977)

~~~
ksec
And they just announced in their conference call, Zen 2 Rome will be Fabbed
with TSMC 7nm.

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Teknoman117
"Epyc data-center graphics processing unit (GPU), which has been out for a
year"

Uh, do they mean vega GPUs or EPYC CPUs?

That aside, the experience I've have had with the EPYC cpus has been awesome.
They are truly amazing for the price tag.

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eachro
How is AMD doing in the GPU for deep learning business? Have they completely
ceded that market to Nvidia?

~~~
striking
They've made a CUDA competitor
([https://rocm.github.io/](https://rocm.github.io/)) and it works well enough
to port Tensorflow to
([https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow](https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow)).

Not super impressive, but we'll see what happens I guess.

~~~
spockz
Is running TensorFlow on GPUs still relevant now that google has their TPUs?
Other dedicated hardware is also coming.

~~~
redtuesday
I don't really follow the ML space, but when you have a good GPU in your PC
(which I assume quite a few people here have) you can learn/use Tensorflow by
running things locally instead of paying for Google Cloud etc. Why pay extra
money if you already have a good GPU in your computer (unless you really need
to decrease the time it takes to run the computation etc.)

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SubiculumCode
I wanted a GPU to dabble in mining, machine learning, and games in my new
Ryzen build. I went Nvidia becuase of CUDA. That is too bad. I'd have liked to
buy the AMD gpu

~~~
droidist2
I think you were right to stick with Nvidia. I have an AMD in my MacBook and
it sucks that I can't use it for most deep learning stuff.

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amiga-workbench
Very pleased to see AMD doing well again, vigorous competition in this market
is very much required.

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holtalanm
Oh hell yeah. So glad to see this new competition from AMD. Looking at getting
a Ryzen laptop for my next personal workstation. The benchmarks looks
fantastic.

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nodesocket
Arg, I sold out of my position in $AMD in January after growing impatient
waiting for Ryzen profits to show up. That proved to be a mistake, should have
held onto my guns and thesis.

Perfect buy was on April 25th, up 75% since then.

~~~
citilife
I bought AMD at $2.87 after someone on HN or Reddit (can't remember which)
from AMD was discussing their new architecture and how it could be
manufactured cheaper and was as performant.

Thank god someone spilled the beans; also incentives me read HN all the time
-_-

~~~
nodesocket
lol, insider trading? :-) Do have the original comment thread?

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
Probably not insider trading lol. AMD was extensively shilled on
/r/wallstreetbets and /r/amd_stock for 2 years now.

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Phlarp
I'm not sure what else you expected from /r/amd_stock.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
I didn't say I expected anything else. The point is it's not secret
information that Jim Keller's Zen was going to change the landscape, people
were shouting it from the rooftops. It was all just a matter of whether you
believed them or not.

~~~
Phlarp
Right, but the point is that particular sub would be shouting it from the
rooftops regardless of the underlying truth.

I think most would look at the situation and conclude that even broken clocks
are right twice a day.

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senatorobama
Anyone increased their NW substantially betting on AMD?

~~~
aoeusnth1
Yep, I gained low 6 figures so far

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senatorobama
Enjoying CGT? ;)

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admyral
AMD should thank Nvidia for failing to produce enough cards to meet demand.

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jaas
Word is Nvidia overproduced and is sitting on a lot of current gen stock.

Miners bought AMD because AMD cards are usually better at mining for the
money. They started buying more Nvidia when AMD didn't make enough cards.

In any case though, the success of Ryzen is the interesting thing, not the
mining sales.

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Avshalom
I mean I'm happy for AMD but "company makes money: stocks go up" is pretty
much dog-bites-man non news.

~~~
wmf
There's a narrative that Intel will keep AMD down no matter what, so it's good
to see the market working and refuting that.

~~~
ianai
Yep this is indicative of future IT trends and current. Plus we should all be
applauding any competent competition for Intel. Imagine where we’d be if AMD
had been a more credible threat sooner. I bet Intel wouldn’t be able stagnate
as much.

