
AMD stock up 52% - neverminder
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amd
======
bitL
\- Intel plateaued, no significant user-appreciated progress in the past 5+
years

\- problems with scalable 10nm, 14nm might be the next 28nm for a while and
all manufacturers will catch up, obliterating Intel's major advantage

\- Zen might be sufficiently competitive with older Core chips on performance,
power and price, better on GPU side (hopefully not another Barcelona)

\- all major consoles run on AMD

\- Polaris vs Pascal

\- they might survive until 2017 and have cash to produce new chips

~~~
ksec
Agree, last time the world had any significant CPU performance increase was
SandyBridge, and that was the tipping point. Since then we have been using the
same CPU performance with less energy usage. Apple already knows this that is
why they continue to refine in other areas ( Macbook being a prime example )
rather then providing more and more performance where the user don't need /
feel.

Interestingly 2011 was also the year SSD were available in not so luxury
price. It was the when 64GB dropped to around $100. Anandtech has been calling
this as the largest performance upgrade in history. And I would agree you
should trade SSD for ANY CPU performance. That is assuming you are not using
some more then a decade old CPU or you already have 16+ GB memory.

If the rumours are true then it is a combination of things making this a
perfect storm ( not sure if that is the right way of putting it). Intel no
longer has a significant lead in Fab node processing. The money from Mobile
processor has help pure play foundry to catch up big time. Zen would offer
significant performance increase that pass what most consider as enough ( for
now ), and Intel hasn't had much performance gain with Skylake. Running along
is the perfect match of new GPU coming from AMD. Which should be first the
time ever AMD has a APU competitive with Intel in performance and run circles
around Intel in GPU performance.

This sounds all good good for AMD, that is until Intel provides more detail on
Goldmont, their next gen Atom. Goldmont, and its Apollo Lake platform,
provides all the essential features one would expect for the most common PC
user for a very cheap price. Cherry Tail, based on Airmont was already doing
well in Surface 3, if Goldmont as rumours suggest provides much higher IPC (
think Core2 Duo like performance rather then SandyBridge ) and comes with
Skylake Gen9 GPU along with much cheaper price, this could be a tough battle.

Can wait for both to reveal more details, 2016 will be an interesting year for
PC.

~~~
api
How long before we can have open source CPU cores made a la carte by pure play
foundries?

Beyond Moore's Law I wonder if we'll just see a massive drop in the cost of
computing power to the point where something near parity with a 48 core Xeon
is like $10. Then it would become very cheap to put tons of them in a box and
build little desktop supercomputers.

~~~
tcoppi
I think silicon still has a bit longer to go before we will run into the end
of Moore's Law on it(not even counting other substrates for transistors or
logic gates), beyond simply scaling there are a bunch of other techniques to
squeeze performance and lower power usage that will be economically attractive
if you can't shrink anymore, we've already seen some of them like clock gating
and voltage scaling, but they can go a lot further. Once we get to the
terminal node(probably 5nm with our current understanding) I think we will
also see a lot of architecture innovation as well. Not x86 vs ARM or MIPS etc,
but fundamentally different ways of thinking about processing units. I think
FPGAs, GPUs, and other currently specialized architectures will become even
more important, it is possible that everything in a "PC" could be as
configurable as an FPGA is today. A lot of things open up once we hit the
scaling wall and are forced to make better use of the given resources.

I also think die sizes will grow, including the possibility of "3D" wafers,
but that will bring its own manufacturing and design challenges as well.

Anyway I think the end of classic Moore's Law scaling is still far enough away
on the horizon that nobody can really predict what will happen, but if it does
indeed happen as soon as the 2020s we will be in for a treat no matter what
happens I think.

------
chx
So AMD bought ATI for 5.4B only a year later wrote down 2.65B of it, valuing
ATI at 2.75B in 2007. Currently AMD is worth 3B, valuing the AMD part of the
company roughly zero provided ATI had at least 1% growth in each of the past
nine years. Licensing out what a bit ago would've been the crown jewels for
$.3B makes a lot of sense in these circumstances.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
If you go back about 35 years (I'm too lazy to look up the exact details), AMD
was a bigger company than Intel, both in revenue and in market cap.

And then the IBM PC happened, and the rest, as they say, is history.

~~~
chx
Really. In 1971, AMD was selling 4.6M, Intel 9.4M. In 1978 AMD had $100M in
total sales and Intel had 400M.
[https://books.google.ca/books?id=GTwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT51&lpg=PT...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=GTwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT51&lpg=PT51&dq=%22amd%22+1984+sales&source=bl&ots=CzMSb3o5mk&sig=gmfB509HsVPBbjJQb2zNu-
BaSPc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiararOwKTMAhUJ6WMKHWTpA8sQ6AEIIDAC#v=onepage&q=%22amd%22%201984%20sales&f=false)
this page has both '84 and '90 with Intel outselling and outprofiting AMD
several times over. So when was that mysterious year if it was not in the
seventies or the eighties?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I was thinking around 1980 or 1985, back before IBM PC and clones became
popular. Turns out I was wrong, Intel was about 2x to 4x larger than AMD in
those days.

I went back and got some hard figures. I had to average yearly high/low stock
price to compute historical market cap. All values in $millions:

    
    
                     1980     1985    1990    ttm / yesterday
                     ----     ----    ----    ----
       AMD sales      309      576    1059    3990 
           mkt cap    446     1672     617    3170
    
       INTC sales     855     1365    3921   55360
            mkt cap  1667     3091    7990  149260
    

In 1985 Intel sales are 2.37x AMD and market cap is 1.85x.

Currently Intel sales are 13.8x AMD and market cap is 47x.

------
inglor
Everyone who has been paying attention has seen this coming. I've enjoyed
getting my fair share since all the insider movement in the last month.

Here are the recent financial articles about AMD:

[http://www.markets.co/analysts-bullish-on-top-technology-
pic...](http://www.markets.co/analysts-bullish-on-top-technology-
picks-23/24506/)

[http://thefly.com/landingPageNews.php?id=2360810&headline=AM...](http://thefly.com/landingPageNews.php?id=2360810&headline=AMD-
AMD-upgraded-to-Buy-on-THATC-joint-venture-potential-at-MKM-Partners)

And all the bloggers :

[http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/22/buy-
advance...](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/22/buy-advanced-
micro-devices-stock-after-a-36-price.aspx)

[http://amigobulls.com/articles/shorts-are-running-away-
from-...](http://amigobulls.com/articles/shorts-are-running-away-from-amd-
stock)

[http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/14/3-tech-
stoc...](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/14/3-tech-stocks-that-
could-soar-in-2016-2.aspx)

[https://valuestocks.whotrades.com/blog/43296425516](https://valuestocks.whotrades.com/blog/43296425516)

Here are all the insiders buying about 3 weeks ago:

[https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/harry-
wolin](https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/harry-wolin)
[https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/forrest-eugene-
norrod](https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/forrest-eugene-norrod)
[https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/devinder-
kumar](https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/devinder-kumar)

I took this from
[https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/amd](https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/amd)

~~~
ashitlerferad
Isn't insider trading illegal?

~~~
profquail
Insiders are allowed to trade the stock of the company they work for. They
just can't make a trade which is motivated by non-public insider knowledge.
For example, if the company was going to have another bad quarter the insiders
can't dump their stock in advance of the public release date. Most of the
time, insiders will have a schedule set up and announced well ahead of time
for when they want to sell stock, to avoid being accused of selling in
reaction to some negative event for the company.

------
Zenst
This I suspect is more to do with the deal with China made today and times
with the announcement as far as I can see as far as stock price climb. Would
love to see a global hotspot map of share buying for this, might be Chinese
investment, might be many things but certainly event driven.

[http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-
ne...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-
new-293-million-joint-venture-to-build-servers-for-the-chinese-market)

------
tudorw
$9.10 in 2011, 52% looks good on the day chart, not so good over 5 years...

~~~
zymhan
Yeah, I bought some AMD stock when I thought it was undervalued at like $8. It
just proceeded to fall a few bucks over the next year or two.

It is cheap enough now to buy a few dozen shares and get an easy return if it
rises, without hurting too much if it falls again. And it's not like AMD is
going out of business anytime soon. Certainly the value of their IP and assets
would justify a floor in the stock price.

------
csense
Intel Skylake on a Linux laptop is basically unusable (terrible power
management driver issues kill battery life and may even lead to premature
failure). See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11492070)

Just one of the many ways Intel seems to be dropping the ball lately.

~~~
buzzrobot
Well, no, not precisely.

The issue at hand affects only mobile Skylakes. Skylakes targeting desktop use
are not affected.

The caveat Intel published re: Skylakes is the same caveat it has published
for the previous two generation of CPU's.

What we seem to be lacking is actual evidence -- numbers -- that Linux users
running on those units have seen more failures than users not running Linux.

------
celticninja
Any news that would have influenced this?

~~~
srikz
One factor may be that they expect 1.5 billion in revenue from 3 devices
(Playstation 4.5, Nintendo NX, Microsoft Xbox One.5???) [1] But the chinese
deal is probably the main reason

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/amd-promises-three-
new...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/amd-promises-three-new-gaming-
processors-coming-soon-is-one-for-xbox/)

~~~
LoSboccacc
Also intel just had a big layoff and wants to call out from that segment

------
m0rganic
I worked for AMD in the x86 64bit multicore expansion days (2006ish) There
really has been much since then except the ATI acquisition. Selling to Chinese
manufacturers sound like a last ditch effort unfortunately.

------
based2
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548354)

------
pearjuice
It is quite surprising that AMD has been undervalued for so long. Would't be
surprised by more radical upwards corrections.

~~~
arca_vorago
I have a slightly different take on AMD these days, in that I don't think they
were undervalued, at least not too much, but rather I think they saw the
direction the future held and jumped at it, thinking they would be ahead of
intel, mostly in their understanding of the merging of cpu and gpu. I simply
think they did it a bit too fast and left their other offerings with too
little resources, but now that they are using the 14nm and 16nm manufacturing
process, Zen is poised to be a much heavier hitter than I think most people
understand yet.

So they _werent_ undervalued too much, but they are now, and so I think you
are probably correct about more radical upwards corrections.

I am especially excited to see their server cpus with zen. My favorite machine
I have ever built is actually an AMD machine, and I built it fairly recently
because there are some models in which they excel. (Its a quad opteron 6380
system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz, and I did it for less than 5k$
Something I theorycrafted while in bioinformatics, though I didnt get to buld
it until I was no longer in that industry.)

Also, I'll say that I have been looking at building a new system for my
gamedev purposes, and I have concluded that I am going to wait for Zen. If
they miss the q4 2016 release though they may lose the mindshare momentum they
are bulding up.

~~~
tcoppi
The ATI acquisition was very forward looking, the problem is the hardware and
software stack required to make APUs successful was nowhere close to ready at
the time. We are just now seeing small enough process nodes that can support
real GPU performance on the same die as a decent CPU, though the software
isn't there yet still it is much closer. If Zen can match/beat Intel and it
scales well enough down to APUs I think they might finally find their market,
and Zen on the server should be a killer as well if that is the case, as AMD
has always done really well at shoving lots of cores in small packages.

------
ohaal
Here's a good explanation of why AMD is on the rise:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSYBO1BrB1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSYBO1BrB1I)

------
mtgx
I was just thinking these past few days how AMD is highly undervalued and
would likely see a big boost from the launch of Zen. Since Zen is still not
launched yet, I think there's opportunity for the stock to grow even up to
100% or more from where it was.

As a little side note, I think it's fantastic that AMD is replacing its
E-series APUs that used Atom-like CPU cores in low-end notebooks, at a time
when Intel is doing the exact opposite by replacing the Core micro-
architecture in Celerons and Pentiums with Atom, so it can sell what are
essentially $30-$40 chips for $107-$160.

[http://fudzilla.com/images/stories/2015/April/amd-
desktop.jp...](http://fudzilla.com/images/stories/2015/April/amd-desktop.jpg)

Intel did this because it thought AMD is no real competition technically, but
more importantly from a brand point of view (Intel thought people will keep
buying its chips at the same price points even if it replaces them with a much
weaker core with many fewer hardware features). With Zen in general (thank you
Jim Keller! [1]), but also with Zen in the low-end of the market, AMD just
called Intel's bluff - and I think it will win this one while Intel is stuck
with Atom in Celerons and Pentiums for the next few years.

The dual-core Zen CPUs in the E-series should absolutely trash the Atom-based
Celerons and Pentiums, and likely the scammy $280 Core M chip as well. APUs
like the A4 and A6 were already destroying Atom-based Celerons in terms of
price/performance.

Looking forward to the quad-core/8 thread Zen APUs that will compete against
the dual-core/4-thread Core i3 and Core i5 as well, and may even beat them on
single-thread performance, if the price is equalized. From some calculations
I've seen Zen may come within 10% of Intel's IPC at the same clock speed, even
for Kaby Lake. But you may be able to get say an AMD chip that has the same
performance as Core i3 in single-thread, almost twice the performance in
multi-thread, and still cost 10% less.

As another side note, I really hope Qualcomm ends up buying AMD, though it
probably should've done it last year, and it may have done it, too, if it
wasn't for their own Snapdragon 810 blunder, which almost got its board to
sell the chip division (a huge mistake, which I'm glad they eventually
rejected).

Now the price is going to increase by 2x or more. Hopefully AMD's shareholders
won't get greedy and sell for cheap, because AMD needs an infusion of cash as
well, so it can adopt the latest process nodes as quickly as they are
available, and so it can develop and launch multiple lines of products at the
same time. That's how it can become much more competitive.

I think Qualcomm would be a good steward of AMD (it already bought the mobile
GPU division from AMD a decade ago, and has taken full advantage of it). It
has the commitment and incentive to want to beat Intel and go after its
profits in the PC and server markets, while operating on much lower cost
structures (Innovator's Dilemma and all that). But it can't do that with ARM
chips alone, in part because Windows' universal apps are still a no-show for
now, and in part because ARM's entrance into the server market is going to be
a very slow and long process. Qualcomm's entrance into those markets would be
much accelerated through an AMD acquisition (as long as it's not bank-breaking
one that starves Qualcomm out of resources to invest).

Another decent buyer would be Samsung, but I only hope they do it if they are
truly committed to being a chip powerhouse and to compete against Intel toe-
to-toe, no matter how much it costs them to do it, otherwise it's better to
stay out of it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_\(engineer\))

~~~
osivertsson
I sure hope AMD can compete on both price and performance with Zen but:

As you say it is not released yet, let's hope they really achieve a 2016
rollout.

Is there really any money in the lowend notebook market for CPU vendors?

I think what Intel realizes is that no one really wants a fan in a notebook.
Not consumers (noise), not manufacturers (less parts, cheaper). For some the
performance is worth the noise, but that is only at the high end, and will Zen
be able to compete there?

Who will buy Zen? What is the market? Lowend is mobile + RPi3 etc. Mid doesn't
exist anymore, and highend they will still not be able to compete?

~~~
mtgx
<15W TDP is enough for just about any notebook. Any 5W "fat core" CPU is
mostly a scam at this point, and they aren't really viable until at least
10nm. They throttle too much (in the ultra-slim devices in which they are
put), but Intel wanted to sell them anyway (Broadwell Core M was a _complete
dud_ because of this). And Core M is also eating a big chunk out of
manufacturers' profits. It's more expensive than a Core i5.

Zen will be competitive at all levels in terms of performance, price and
power, not just the low-end. Now, if Intel makes the highest-end Core i7
Extreme Ultra Edition chip for say $800, and AMD only makes a highest end chip
one that costs $600, then yes, I would imagine Intel would still be the
"winner" in "peak performance" in the PC market. But that's an out of context
comparison.

The price metric should always be included in the context. What I want to know
is if I have to spend $200 on a chip and for a TDP of 15W, which one has the
best CPU at that price point? AMD or Intel? What about at the $300 price point
and a 30W TDP? If it's AMD, then I don't care that Intel can make a 5% faster
one for $350.

I only said the Zen-based E-series, which will go into things such as
$200-$300 Chromebooks, will _destroy_ Intel. And I'm not sure what you mean by
"there's no mid-range". The average price for a notebook is around $500.

------
hoodoof
Anyone care to predict if I invested say $1,000 ASAP open trading, if I would
be up or down 24 hours after that?

~~~
umrashrf
"Buy when everyone is selling and Sell when everyone is buying."

~~~
tinco
I reason about jumps like this in terms of two components. A 'real' component
and an 'emotional' component. When a stock moves it moves R% + E%, for real
and emotional. The real component in this case seems to be the 200MM+ deal
they struck that. R and E are of course unknown, the big investors make their
money calculating these values as best they can.

Calculating R is hard to do precisely for an amateur (such as me), but E has a
nice predictable effect. E mostly consists of the uncertainty of the big
investors, and the opportunism of the speculative traders.

I mostly do reactive investments based on stock that has just moved in some
significant way that companies that I have a lot of fundamental knowledge in
(mostly IT industry companies).

The way it works is I make a bet on whether the cause for the stock move has
any fundamental effect on the future of the company. If I feel I can make that
bet more accurately than guys reading the news sitting in cubicles analyzing
graphs and industry summaries then I assume I can make a ~5%+ profit on a
trade (with a chance of a similar loss of course).

For example: The launch of the Kindle Fire by Amazon was a complete flop. This
was widely anticipated, I felt very confident in that it would flop. The AMZN
stock dropped as people lost confidence (E) in the Fire and I bought when I
felt it was pretty much solid that everyone agreed that the Fire had flopped.
Unfortunately I was naieve, and a few weeks later Amazon released its earnings
report that undeniably confirmed the flop, and E was eliminated, and R
adjusted causing another drop. At this point I was in the negative, so there
was a lesson for me there. Anyway, my bet was that the Fire was just some
largely irrelevant side strategy for Amazon. Sure they invested too much, and
their chance for rivalling Apples iPad or whatever insane plan they had was
ill conceived, but it was just something they had to try. The big plan of
Amazon however did not suffer from this failure. They were still on track to
becoming the force of nature they want to be so the lack of confidence
(negative E) of the daytraders was in my opinion unjustified. A few months
later this showed, the dip of the Fire was gone, and if I sold then I would've
made a cool ~10%.

I didn't sell though as I thought Amazon was a cool company to hold stock in
for the long term, so the bet was just a gimmick to get some long term stock
for cheap. I ended up making a lot more money on AMZN than I expected as for
some reason the fact that Amazon makes a lot of money on AWS was big news to
the financial world and slapped a big markup on the stock after which I sold,
because I don't pretend to actually know what an Amazon stock should really be
worth.

------
rajeemcariazo
Is this related to the deal with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology
Investment Co?

------
shiftb
Why?

Is anyone else surprised that up 50% is $4?

~~~
tome
Why do you think the price per share is relevant?

~~~
kwsmith
Because while _logically_ the price is irrelevant, in practice is isn't.
Prices below $5 often indicate that a company is in trouble.

Which I think is what the unfairly downvoted comment above was referring to.

~~~
lottin
A stock is just an arbitrary fraction of the capital stock, therefore the
price in absolute value of a single stock is completely irrelevant. Suppose a
company has a market value of $1,000. The company can divide its stock into
1,000 one-dollar shares, or into 500 two-dollar shares. Either way in makes no
difference as far as the total worth of the company goes.

~~~
reddytowns
The NASDAQ market, which AMD is in, and the NYSE require that the price of its
stocks are traded at or over $1 to avoid delisting.

------
steplee
Made 900$. I was probably the only one dumbest to have AMD stock, but when you
have a feeling you have a feeling

------
agumonkey
Reminds me that Zen is coming in a few months too.

bandwidth rumors: [http://techfrag.com/2016/04/02/first-amd-zen-benchmarks-
leak...](http://techfrag.com/2016/04/02/first-amd-zen-benchmarks-leaked/)

CERN rumors: [http://seekingalpha.com/article/3961536-amd-zens-release-
wil...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/3961536-amd-zens-release-will-taking-
names-kicking-bandwidth-sooner-rather-later)

~~~
sveme
OT: Seriously, I cannot read the seekingalpha article without installing their
app? No way!

Ad-blocking-related or is this the same for everyone?

~~~
agumonkey
Sorry it happened, I had no issue on my side (otherwise I wouldn't have posted
it). Here's a simpler rendering
[http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http...](http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http%3A%2F%2Fseekingalpha.com%2Farticle%2F3961536-amd-
zens-release-will-taking-names-kicking-bandwidth-sooner-rather-later)

