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I really don’t understand the negative market sentiment on expectations of future cashflow. AMD has been building compelling GPU and CPU chips and this is a ris

• grigjd3 9y ago
  AMD isn't in nearly the same breadth of markets as nvidia. Some examples: automotive, super computing (which they dominate due to CUDA), and game streaming services. Also, AMD's driver support on Linux platforms has historically been pretty weak and often broken, further limiting any consideration of uses outside of gaming.
  • Zarath 9y ago
    Can confirm. Dealing with AMD drivers made me switch to Windows.
    • phkahler 9y ago
      They've recently been trying to share a lot of code between windows and linux drivers. That should help them stay closer to parity.
  • AndrewDavis 9y ago
    Inside of gaming, AMD's open source AMDGPU driver+MESA outperforms similar priced Nvidia cards with their closed stack. I find it odd that AMD can get the drivers right for gaming but that's about it.
    • datawarrior 9y ago
      Citation? All the comparisons I've seen still have nVidia way ahead
      • joshumax 9y ago
        I think he's basing it on a price-performance ratio. Phoronix tests show that NVIDIA's closed OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are still ahead of AMD/Mesa's open graphics stack. -- On the bright side the "relative" transparency of AMD with their graphics development does make maintaining the FOSS drivers easier as a kernel maintainer (although I rarely send patches to the graphics subsystem I have friends who do).
      • m45t3r 9y ago
        AMD open-source drivers (new GPUs: amdgpu; old GPUs: radeon) is way better than NVIDIA open-source drivers (nouveau) and is competitive with their own closed-source drivers (new GPUs: amggpupro; old GPUs: catalyst), while losing to the NVIDIA close drivers [1]. If you want good performance using open-source drivers, AMD is the way to go with Linux [2]. [1]: A old comparison (Jan/2017): https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa171-pro60-nvidia https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa171-.... Nowadays the performance is even better. [2]: Open-source drivers is important not only because FSF and all, but because the open-source drivers follows the advancements in Linux graphics stack much closer. Things like KMS and Wayland works much better with open-source drivers than NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Even things simple like Xrandr is ramdomly broken in NVIDIA drivers.
        • shmerl 9y ago
          Comparing amdgpu+radeonsi to nouveau isn't really fair. Nouveau can't use proper reclocking most of the time because Nvidia are being jerks.
  • shmerl 9y ago
    AMD is a clear winner now on Linux. Nvidia will become an underdog, if they won't open source and upstream their driver, which is very unlikely. Nvidia was and will be plagued by integration issues, while AMD already nearly caught up performance wise, and will overtake Nvidia soon enough.
    • wyldfire 9y ago
      I've pinned my compute hopes on AMD for about a decade now. They've been able to hang in there performance-wise, but their solutions on linux just haven't been as stable as NVIDIA's. I hope that's changing, but I'm pretty reluctant to believe it.
      • shmerl 9y ago
        With OpenCL being replaced with Vulkan, things will get in shape.
      • m-p-3 9y ago
        Their new drivers (AMDGPU) are being slowly integrated in the Linux kernel, no closed-source binaries.
        • nhaehnle 9y ago
          Small correction: the amdgpu driver has been integrated and working in the upstream Linux kernel for many years now. The one chink recently was the new display code, which was a requirement for Vega (but not for earlier generations), and which was a genuine open sourcing of an existing, Windows-focused code base. That process took longer than one might hope for, but we're clearly over the hump now with it going upstream.
      • danieldk 9y ago
        The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g. for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that. I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works completely flawless on my machine. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-Device-Memory-API https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-...
  • unsigner 9y ago
    "game streaming services" is a non-market, sorry. Maybe in an investor's checklist of "potentially interesting futuristic-sounding stuff", but nothing that compares to, say, having a chip in every Xbox One and PS4, and dominating game development mindshare for the next years.
    • aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago
      Depends on the margin. Nvidia pulled out of gaming consoles due to the margin MS and Sony dictated. AMD was fine with fulfilling demand at almost any margin.
      • jhasse 9y ago
        The long-term effects are worth much more than the margin on each sold console.
        • jmanderley 9y ago
          What are these "long-term effects"?
          • jhasse 9y ago
            Getting game developers familar with AMD hardware. And in the Xbox One X's case: Getting TV manufactors to support FreeSync.
• kgwgk 9y ago
  I have no opinion on AMD or how it compares to Intel or Nvidia, but this kind of enthusiasm about exponential growth reminds me of how Cisco was the largest company in the world by market cap in 2000.
  • adventured 9y ago
    I agree. The last three AMD booms have tracked to the last three asset bubble periods (1999-2000, 2005-2006, now). They have no earnings to support the present $14 billion market cap, much less higher. When this latest asset bubble party ends, AMD will tank again. They're supposedly in a boom period due to demand for their products, yet they're struggling to even get back to where their sales were in 2014 (when their stock was 1/5th what it is now). It's nothing more than the latest iteration of stock market mania (where stocks like Activision carry near 50 PE ratios while sporting 5-10% type earnings growth). Cisco is still one of the more remarkable stock stories I've seen in the last two decades. Something like ten straight quarters of accelerating revenue growth, quarter over quarter, leading up to 68% growth for the third quarter of 2000. Three quarters later their quarter over quarter growth had evaporated down toward zero. That same shock deceleration basically killed Lucent, Nortel and Sun Microsystems. The three were worth around $600 billion together during the bubble. Sun of course struggled on as their business melted, but they were a shadow of their former self by 2009. Oracle nearly got caught in the same trap (also having a crazy ~$200 billion valuation during the bubble), instead they went on a competitor acquisition spree and created as much of a moat as they could. 17 years later, their stock is finally back to where it was during the bubble (in nominal terms).
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• rayiner 9y ago
  AMD doesn’t make money consistently. It’s in an incredibly capital intensive business. Occasionally, one of its chips outmaneuvers the corresponding Intel chips for a generation or two. But in a couple of years, it rolls the dice again. More likely than not, Intel will beat it next few cycles. Then AMD will lose money while it tries to develop another hit.
  • rdlecler1 9y ago
    As an investor I think it’s always important to ask: what’s changed and why now? Discussing the past without addressing those two questions may make you miss opportunities that were obvious in retrospect. You might have been able to say the same thing about Apple when Jobs rejoined the company and started launching new products.
    • rayiner 9y ago
      But nothing has changed. The mechanics of AMD’s business is the same (and indeed the guy who designed Zen is no longer there).
• mbesto 9y ago
  > I think people are massively underestimating the TAM. While I agree, my only criticism would be that the "old" data center market is effectively consolidating to commoditized hardware. In other words - we have less idle CPUs in data centers and the diminishing returns of Moore's Law is hitting. So while the new wave is positive, the underlying revenue stream may not be consistently holding.
• shmerl 9y ago
  Where did you get the $110B number from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia shows something quite different. Nvidia is nowhere near Intel.
  • shyn3 9y ago
    Current share price * outstanding shares. Mkt cap 119.21B
• microcolonel 9y ago
  I saw this all coming from a mile away. I was frankly shocked at how low the price was last year, given they nearing the end of a major development cycle (both AMD [as a CPU vendor] and ATI->AMD [as a GPU vendor], they have a habit of developing a leading flagship product about once every four to five years, but focusing more on making their last flagship more affordable in the years between). It also can not be ignored that until the Switch came out, they were making the SoCs for every current generation console.
  • anon1253 9y ago
    Not to mention AAPL keeps using them for all their desktops and laptops with dedicated GPUs
• dx034 9y ago
  Is agriculture really the least digitised industry? At least in Europe and the US, going to a farm these days you'll find robots and machines everywhere. I would argue construction is probably the least digitised. The Economist had an article recently that construction is the only sector in manufacturing in the UK that declined in productivity over the past two decades. I'm not really in the topic but the construction I see in the city (London) looks not like they adapted any processes developed over the past 1-2 decades. Maybe that's where the next revolution happens.
  • ksec 9y ago
    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-... After reading this, it is clear how much can still be done. Holland has in the past 3 - 4 years consistently been innovating and producing much better yield in all sort of agriculture products. The first two years most US companies has been saying those prices aren't sustainable, and they will come down soon, it is now clear those better then expected yields are not mere coincidence.
  • smcl 9y ago
    While I can't speak for the physical part of construction, I know that the Structural Engineering part was until semi-recently (2007-ish) pretty manual. My flatmate graduated at the same time as me and worked in a local engineering firm in Edinburgh and I was always curious what his work involved. It turns out there were a LOT of extremely manual calculations performed with pen and paper, with datasheets containing commonly used calculations for how structures should behave under different loads and the properties of various materials you could plug into these calcs.
    • friendzis 9y ago
      One of my teachers used to say "what is cheaper: Robert or robot?". There already are constraint based systems for structural engineering that e.g. calculate supports given structure and loads, select materials, etc. I am not too familiar with UK market, but in my country people in civil engineering tell me that significant portion of engineering project costs come not from actual engineering, but rather various permits, coordination and other bureaucracies that do not benefit from single party automating. This makes returns on investment into new software, trainings and lost temporary productivity diminishing. Without government changing standards on engineering output, the market for flexible projects is not that large (which is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem).
• ksec 9y ago
  Yes, but I am worried AMD 's agreement with GF is holding them back. AMD right now is selling as many EPYC, Ryzen and Vega as they could produce. Since they brought back Polaris to GF, the capacity are now shared between both their GPU and CPU product line. It would make sense if AMD sell more EPYC and Ryzen CPU then Vega since those CPUs are have higher margin. But Vega also have much higher market volume due to Crypto mining. Navi, the next gen modular GPU are going back to TSMC 7nm. But that is professional offering appeared to by the end of 2018, and consumer offering in 2019. i.e There is a capacity limitation of how well AMD can do within the next 24 months. That is excluding AMD's APU launching soon which I think is going to be a big hit. P.S - That is GF's Fab 8 20% capacity increase included. It is clear AMD is not the only one using Fab8, I wonder who are these other customer using 14nm in GF.
  • Nursie 9y ago
    > But Vega also have much higher market volume due to Crypto mining. Does it? I'm genuinely interested in this as Vega appears to have high power usage requirements and less than spectacular mining results. I mean they're fine, but not the multiple of current cards that was rumoured before release. I owned a Vega 64 briefly, but sold it on as I didn't really want the noise or heat. And it still doesn't look like any real partner cards have been released, the lineup is all reference cards. Have you seen any sales figures that would show the mining popularity of vega?