18 ms·
AMD Returns to Full-Year Profitability, Forecasts Strong 2018
- zwieback 9y ago1/3 of the sales increase from crypto, probably not sustainable.
- pythonaut_16 9y agoI don't think it has to be sustainable. They just need more time for EPYC to really take off and for Ryzen to continue gaining market share. I think their strongest areas are going to be CPUs and APUs, and things like Kaby Lake G. They shouldn't give up on graphics but it's going to take longer for them to be super competitive there.
- wastedhours 9y agoIf anything, (having assumed they also know the crypto position might not be sustainable) it's better that it's not. Hopefully that means enforced innovation from them for future products, bank the cash now and invest in newer tech for the future.
- aoeusnth1 9y agoIf it gives them the capital to start seriously competing in deep learning, then it doesn't matter.
- djsumdog 9y agoI realize they've always been an underdog compared to Intel, but they still dominated the console market. When every xbox and PS4 sold as your CPU in it, how were they not profitable? Where they dumping all that money into the Zen code R&D? With the Meltdown craziness, will this be the year we start to see AMD return to the data centre?
- shmerl 9y agoI think console market is an unhealthy case, because consoles are sold at loss by big incumbents (Sony and MS), who try to reap the profits through lock-in rather than hardware competition. So AMD can barely profit on hardware there. It's starting to improve lately since it's becoming a bit more competitive and less stagnated, you can notice that the rate of console hardware upgrades is increasing. Their prices will also become more real in result.
- AlphaSite 9y agoAMD probably used consoles to keep the wafer supply agreement above the minimum threshold.
- oatmealsnap 9y agoAgreement with who?
- dragontamer 9y agoGlobal Foundries (aka: former AMD fabrication lab. GloFo spun off as AMD lost money in the late 00s) Despite spinning off, GloFo and AMD remained tightly aligned businesswise, and AMD signed agreements such as minimum silicon wafer usage.
- shmerl 9y agoWhy did they have to spin off the foundries to begin with?
- foepys 9y agoTo not go bankrupt.
- dragontamer 9y ago
- shmerl 9y agoI wish though they'd produce power efficient Vega for gaming sooner. Looks like it's being pushed off to 2019. Sapphire Nitro version requires 3 (yes, 3!) 8-pin power connectors. That's why I'm staying with RX 480 for the time being. It works very well with Mesa on Linux.
- floatboth 9y agoWhatever they make will be bought up by miners. Wait for the crash of cryptocurrency markets D:
- vetinari 9y agoThat's up to Sapphire, why they did it (probably for overclocking). The reference design (including the LC version) and some other designs, like Asus Strix, require only 2 8-pin power connectors.
- shmerl 9y agoBut they still are quite power hungry at least according to the TDP specs. So it gives an impression that Vega isn't really where it's supposed to be efficiency wise. And I prefer to avoid reference design which is usually too noisy.
- philjohn 9y agoMany people are undervolting them, which brings power draw down considerably and leads to only a miniscule difference in performance.
- shmerl 9y agoSo why are they so overvolted by default?
- sangnoir 9y agoIt's a design decision, which boils down to AMD loves to "overclock" by default to squeeze out as much performance as possible. I could easily imagine the mirror-universe version of this conversation had they done otherwise "You can gain 5% perf by 'overvolting' AMD GPUS. Why don't they do this by default?"
- davedx 9y agoIs it worth picking up some AMD stock?
- mamon 9y agoIt was worth it before the Ryzen premiered. Now all the current and future profits are already incorporated in market price. Currently, you stand a better chance of earning money if you short the AMD stocks. The old "buy the rumor, sell the fact" rule.
- S_A_P 9y agoI bought AMD about a 9-12 months ago, and sold it for what I paid last week. I was just happy it got back to my purchase price. I was expecting a bump with their recent return to relevance. The market yawned apparently. I am also slowly getting out of all my positions of individual companies and into indexes.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoThat's a good thing if you're into value investing for long-term returns. If a strong or strengthening company is selling for less than it's worth, then it's basically on sale. Such irrationalities are bad for short-term trading though unless you find a way to exploit such tendencies consistently.
- m3kw9 9y agoIs a P/E over 300 is that good value?
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoI have no idea, and I have no idea if AMD is actually a good value at the moment. I'm still learning about accounting and investing in my free time. I'm mostly talking about the concept of stock price stickiness despite market changes in general.
- lettergram 9y ago
- matthewmacleod 9y agoThis is great. It's super important to have multiple market players producing CPUs; obviously AMD is not the same company as Intel, but we also really can't afford to have a monopoly in something as important as CPUs.
- dnautics 9y agodon't forget though that intel owns a sizeable chunk of amd (iirc)
- e1ven 9y agoI've heard that they have a patent cross license agreement, which is why AMD can use x86 and Intel can use AMD64, but I hadn't heard about the ownership. I don't see Intel listed at http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amd/institutional-holdings http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amd/institutional-holdings Where do you see they have an ownership stake? How much is it?
- pulse7 9y agoIt was IBM who forced Intel and AMD to sign the agreement. From CNET: "Early 1980s--IBM chooses Intel's so-called x86 chip architecture and the DOS software operating system built by Microsoft. To avoid overdependence on Intel as its sole source of chips, IBM demands that Intel finds it a second supplier. 1982--Intel and AMD sign a technology exchange agreement making AMD a second supplier. The deal gives AMD access to Intel's so-called second-generation "286" chip technology."
- throwaway2048 9y agoYou do not recall correctly.
- dnautics 9y agoactually I do, but it turns out it was not 'sizeable' and it was a long time ago, so it may have been divested by now.
- UK-Al05 9y agoNot surprised. Ryzen was a hit and their GPUs are great for Linux and mining.
- madengr 9y agoI think AMD GPUs are crap; at least their windows drivers. I recently built a gaming PC (MSI RX-580 GPU) for my son, and never had so many frustrating crashes, black screens, etc. Waited for a month for their 5.18 driver release, and no improvement. What a piece of shit. Sold it on eBay in 30 seconds for $40 more than I paid for it, and bought an Nvidia 1060; works flawlessly. The guy I sold it to said the RX-580 is working fine for mining. He got a card for $300 and I got rid of a headache.
- m-p-3 9y ago> 5.18 driver release? How many years ago was this? The latest AMD Adrenalin drivers are at 18.1.1. Oh and on Linux the open-source AMDGPU drivers (made by AMD themselves) are now part of the kernel since not too long ago, so any recent cards will work out of the box on a distro with a recent kernel.
- madengr 9y agoWell 18 whatever; that was released after the 12/17 release. Fuck AMD. Good riddance.
- dragontamer 9y agoAMD's driver scheme is basically year.month.something I haven't figured out the last number. But the 18.1.1 release basically means "2018 January". Similarly, their 17.7 release meant "2017 July". 5.18 seems to predate AMD's current naming scheme. So it was probably something from a long time ago...
- Yizahi 9y agoI had good PSU, MB, mostly clean OS install and no overclock and my AMD card run like clockwork, with zero issues over 3 or 4 years. Literally zero crashes while running almost 24/7 and gaming regularly. Don't skimp on important PC parts and install crapware and you see that both manufacturers produce pretty decent software (putting shady marketing practices aside, like internet account requirement to update geforce driver or raptr-craptr on amd, just from pure tech point of view).
- dingdingdang 9y agoWill be adding to AMD's bottomline since I will be buying their CPU/GPU next time my workstation needs updating. This is fundamentally due to the grief caused by Intel's handling (or the lack of it, is perhaps more accurate description) of Spectre/Meltdown crisis. Simply do not interested in Intel's kind of mentality when it comes to the hardware that runs all my computing. Nah.
- ythn 9y agoBeen a loyal AMD user ever since my first laptop which had an Athlon64. They've always given me great performance at a fraction of the cost of Intel.
- SG- 9y agoNot for laptops they haven't. Also never understood brand loyalty over so many generations.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoThe key part of GPs suggestion again... "great performance at a fraction of the cost of Intel" Only two points need to be true for that statement to hold up: * Performance levels that GP is happy with. * Cheaper than Intel. Which point(s) do you disagree with?
- nottorp 9y agoWere there laptops with Athlon64s back then? Maybe the huge ones with desktop parts. However, at that time, on the desktop, AMD was 80-90% of the performance for 50-60% of the price. Fine with me, I was using one.
- rdlecler1 9y agoWhy’s Nvidia’s margins so high in comparison? Given the technology and patent portfolio I’m surprised that someone hasn’t tried to take them over.
- fermienrico 9y agoCan you elaborate further why you think their technology and patent portfolio can be taken over by "someone"?
- jandrese 9y agoI thought Intel might have wanted to purchase them years ago when their own homegrown graphics stack was so terrible instead of spending years and millions of dollars to get it up to merely adequate for moderate use. Today I don't know who would buy them. Intel seems to be ok with being mediocre because they're the choice for people who don't give a shit anyway. There was an outside chance a car manufacturer might have wanted to buy them up as a strategic move against their competitors if nVidia's autonomous car GPU thing panned out, but I think they were too late to the ball for that one. It's hard to see the value proposition for most companies.
- freehunter 9y ago>Intel seems to be ok with being mediocre I have a lot of complaints about Intel and their mediocrity, but the Intel HD graphics have gotten good in the last 10 years. The Intel GMA was awful and could barely run Quake 3. Intel HD will power through quite a lot. Not up to snuff with a real gamer's card, sure, but good enough that a casual gamer won't have a problem with it. And you get it for free, so bonus there. I play relatively recent games on my Macbook and it's a lot better than you might think.
- jandrese 9y agoIt's fine until you actually start pushing it hard. Intel is far less aggressive with driver fixes and the cards will absolutely collapse at higher detail levels on big screens. No argument that they have improved (the many years and millions of dollars I mentioned were spent), so much so that the low end discrete GPU market is completely dead. But there is still a lot of space between the best Intel card and a mid range nVidia or AMD card like a Geforce 1070.
- guiomie 9y agoA lot of people are buying AMD/ATI GPUs to mine ethereum, their GPUs do extremely well against this one specific crypto currency. With ETH moving to PoS this year, thus removing the need for GPU mining, I wonder how this will impact the price of AMD stock in the future. Lot of people use Nvidia to mine other GPU compatible atlcoins.
- Filligree 9y agoAMD hasn't scaled up their production to meet that demand, and neither has Nvidia; they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs. Right now that makes things hard for everyone not a miner, but if AMD ends up being the only option for gamers while Nvidia still sells to miners, they might actually gain from the mess.
- philjohn 9y agoMemory shortages have also played their part.
- paulmd 9y agoThe thing to remember about NVIDIA is that their production levels are much higher to begin with due to their overwhelming marketshare. They have a lot more inventory in the channel at any given time, which gives them more of a buffer when GPU mining heats up. I actually think AMD's timing on increasing production is really questionable here. Barring another major runup in Bitcoin prices (altcoin profitability follows Bitcoin prices), which seems unlikely at the moment, network difficulty will continue to increase and mining profits are going to continue to decline. That means miners are going to taper off purchases, and some may even be dumping their rigs. So AMD is essentially increasing production at the exact moment when they may already have a problem with the market being flooded. The time when they needed to increase production was 4 months ago, it's too late now. On top of that, NVIDIA may be pushing out their new GPUs within the next few months, implying another step in efficiency which puts AMD's performance/efficiency even further behind. They are already about a generation behind (roughly competitive with Maxwell), despite being on similar nodes. I'd be prepared for NVIDIA to make a minimum of a half-gen step (30%), if not a full-gen step (60%). AMD's timing seems exquisitely poor here. They didn't want to bet on crypto, and now it's too late. Fortune favors the bold.
- InTheArena 9y agoAMD is in a great place at the moment - but we need to see what the smaller Zen cores coming this year can do, and what the Zen 2 release next year look like. If they have solid, significant improvements, it means that AMD is set for a bit, and can really compete and take marketshare from Intel. Better yet, I am really hopeful about Epyc - it still doesn't seem to be shipping in huge numbers, but as someone really burned by Meltdown, it seems like perfect timing for AMD to compete.
- lawrenceyan 9y agoIf you don't mind me asking, in what capacity were you affected by the Intel Meltdown exploits? Was it an issue in terms of security, performance, etc?
- e1ven 9y agoNot OP, but I personally was pretty heavily affected - I run Robohash.org, which runs off a bunch of Digital Ocean droplets. I needed to fire up ~ 30% additional nodes after they did their migration. I didn't measure as carefully as I could have, but the existing nodes couldn't keep up with demand after the upgrade.
- InTheArena 9y agoDatabase performance dropped badly, and we had to increase the number of database servers.
- gkgicccj 9y agoAre there thinkpads with AMD? PS: how does one delete old HN comments? Seems like a major privacy issue to me.
- floatboth 9y agoA series are basically X/T series (exact same chassis) with AMD. The Ryzen versions aren't out yet, but everyone is expecting them "soon"…
- kuschku 9y ago> PS: how does one delete old HN comments? Seems like a major privacy issue to me. There's no option in the interface, the best option right now is asking nicely per email. Of course, you can just wait until May and then use the rights the GDPR grants you to force them to delete your comments.
- e12e 9y agoAssuming the poster has rights under GDPR, and hn will adjust to follow GDPR. Does seem likely they will (have to).
- kuschku 9y agoThe GDPR applies to (basically) any business on the planet that stores data of EU citizen. So it's quite easy to make that assumption.
- jwineinger 9y agoWouldn't it only matter if the company is within EU jurisdiction?
- kuschku 9y agoNot really. For example, if the company has assets within EU jurisdiction, those can be seized to pay the fine, or if the company has assets outside of the EU, but with EU companies (e.g. banks), they can be forced to help seizing the assets. There is countless precedent of the US using these tactics to enforce IP law, and EU countries using them to enforce consumer laws. It is expected that the EU would do exactly this. For example, if YCombinator refuses to adhere to the law, but holds shares in an EU startup (and they do in several), then those shares could be seized and auctioned off to enforce the law.
- xedarius 9y agoI recently bought a Ryzen. I was moving from a mac to a pc and I hadn't owned a pc in over 10 years. Thing is, 10 years ago my pc had 4 cores .. and at the time of choosing Ryzen it was the only consumer processor (with a reasonable price tag) that was offering more cores. I'm very pleased, my Ryzen is fast and stable, I'm glad the company is reaping the rewards.
- probablynot 9y agoCores are cool, but I'm pretty sure we're still measuring processor performance in mhz.
- simcop2387 9y agoYea the whole zen lineup seems to have been huge for the company. I switched from an older intel platform (i5 4690k) that i was using to host a bunch of virtual machines for development and play to a threadripper. the difference is night and day, and it's an affordable way for me to go to ECC ram since I've got the need for a lot of it with my use case. Very happy to see AMD making great strides again.
- jadbox 9y agoOh, what's your use-case for ECC ram?
- nirv 9y agoGreat news! I hope AMD releases a reasonably priced Intel NUC equivalent with their new APU. In the same compact, businesslike case (without gamers' ridiculousness), with a couple 40gbps USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, powered by USB-C/PD cable.
- bitL 9y agoAMD would have to license Thunderbolt from Intel, so it's unlikely.
- nirv 9y agoApparently, not: "Intel to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free in 2018"[1]. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-to-make-thunderbolt-3-royalty-free-in-2018/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-to-make-thunderbolt-3-roy...
- bitL 9y agoThat's good news! AMD can finally have full stack.
- pacetherace 9y agoWhy is thunderbolt such a big requirement for a NUC equivalent?
- bitL 9y agoI guess external GPU as well as pro-audio equipment. NUC is super small and handy (I have 3 of them) and powerful enough CPU-wise to do almost anything.
- hawski 9y agoIs it possible to have an external GPU via USB-C that would be competitive to one via Thunderbolt? I understand that there may be nothing interesting as of yet.
- topspin 9y agoSure hope AMD can stay on plane this time. Athlon 64 was tremendous and forced a huge opening in the x86 market, but AMD squandered this opportunity in following years. Competing with Intel long term means keeping up on all fronts.
- shiado 9y agoI tried to buy a RX580 a while ago to play some games I have been meaning to play and they were sold out everywhere. Part of me wonders if the long term effects of the mining craze will be negative for the makers of graphics cards and in return PC component makers as a whole. Many people might be turned off of pc gaming by the prohibitive prices of buying cards at 2.5x MSRP and turn to consoles instead. Or in my case I intend to wait and pick up cheap hardware when crypto tanks hard (i.e. Tether fraud collapses), or GPU mining becomes unprofitable, or altcoins switch to proof of stake.
- softawre 9y agoYes, this is a major concern for PC gaming. I have a couple 1070s I bought for 400$/each, now I could get double that used. In-freaking-sane.
- solotronics 9y agojust curious but why not sell them now and buy newer ones later for non-inflated prices? how is it possible that AMD seems to be at the limit of production for their GPUs but barely beat estimated earnings this quarter?
- selectodude 9y ago>just curious but why not sell them now and buy newer ones later for non-inflated prices? At least in my case, it’s because I want to play games in the meantime between now and when mining finally dies.
- maksimum 9y agoIf you're trying to be economically rational you're better off simply using the GPUs to mine while you're not using them. ROI time is around 6-9 months for most GPUs these days.
- outworlder 9y agoDoes that include electricity costs? For which cryptocurrency?
- dragontamer 9y agoRyzen looks really, really good. I'm planning on upgrading to Team Red over Intel as soon as DDR4 prices come down a bit. Intel's only advantage seems to be AVX512 (and that comes with a clockspeed penalty), and a truly unified L3 cache (good for databases). But Ryzen's "split" L3 cache seems to be great for process-level parallelism (think compile times), and seems to scale to more cores for a cheaper price. They have an Achilles heel though: 128-bit wide SIMD means much slower AVX2 code, and no support for AVX512. But for most general purpose code, Ryzen looks downright amazing. Even their slower AVX2 issues is mitigated by having way more cores than their competition. AMD sort of brute-forces a solution. AMD's GPGPU solution looks inferior to NVidia, but for my purposes, I basically just need a working compiler. I don't plan on doing any deep learning stuff (so CuDNN is not an advantage in my case), but I'd like to play with high-performance SIMD / SIMT coding. So AMD's ROCm initiative looks pretty nice. The main benefit of ROCm is AMD's attempts to mainline it. They're not YET successful at integrating ROCm into the Linux mainline, but their repeated patch-attempts gives strong promise for the future of Linux / AMD compatibility. The effort has borne real fruit too: Linux accepted a number of AMD drivers for 4.15 mainline. NVidia's CUDA is definitely more mainstream though. I can get AWS instances with HUGE NVidia P100s to perform heavy-duty compute. There's absolutely no comparable AMD card in any of the major cloud providers (AWS / Google / Azure). I may end up upgrading to NVidia as a GPGPU solution for CUDA instead. OpenCL unfortunately, doesn't seem like a good solution unless I buy a Xeon Phi (which is way more expensive than consumer stuff). AMD's ROCm / HCC or CUDA are the only things that I'm optimistic for in the near future.
- frozenport 9y agoBut most general computing is single threaded, while high core counts work well for code that often benefits from AVX512. High core counts are also good for webservers, but here AMD is once again going to have an underpowered consumer chip.
- sangnoir 9y ago> I'm planning on upgrading to Team Red over Intel as soon as DDR4 prices come down a bit. You probably want to buy that DDR4 as soon as you can - memory prices (DDR3, DDR4) have been consistently going up - not down[1]. It's insane. The price-fixing fines the memory manufacturers paid were clearly not punitive enough, we need more anti-trust action in this area. I recently made a build on a budget, I had to snipe online specials on DDR4; waiting for the prices to come down is not a winning strategy. 1. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
- Dolores12 9y agoIt is due to crypto miners. Once crypto coins goes down the market will be flooded with used graphic cards. Hence sales will decrease.
- freehunter 9y agoWould you buy a used GPU if you knew it was used for mining? I'd feel like it was pushed too hard and could be ready to burn out. Makes me wonder if the secondhand market for video cards will tank for a while after mining stops.
- vesrah 9y agoCheaper GPUs for me then. I don't see a difference between buying used parts from someone that browsed the internet versus playing games. CPUs/GPUs don't just 'wear out' on a normal time scale before they are obsolete. We've got companies that have been running the same mainframes for 50 years.
- matte_black 9y agoIt is in no one’s interest except the miners to promote used mining GPUs as a viable used part. If you simply continue the narrative that used mining gpus are bad, the prices will be pushed down as people refuse to buy them. If you are looking to buy those used GPUs for cheap you should avoid any public language that tries to downplay the impact of 24/7 mining.
- ihattendorf 9y agoMaybe instead of trying to influence the market, he's trying to have an honest discussion about the viability of GPUs used for mining?
- matte_black 9y agoThat is best done behind closed doors.
- thisisit 9y agoTotal debt at 1.4 billion dollars looks huge. So while revenues look great I wonder if their cash flow has improved as well?
- zdw 9y agoMight be relative. I'm no financial expert, but intel has something like 26B in debt, compared to 226B in market cap: https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC It doesn't seem so out of line for AMD to have 1.4B in debt to 13B market cap.
- thisisit 9y agoThe question is really on whether they are generating enough cash. Intel for example has 11.8 billion in Free cash flow: http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=INTC®ion=usa http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=INTC&r... whereas AMD seems to be still losing cash, currently at 217 million in loss: http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=AMD http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=AMD
- Animats 9y agoWow. 34% gross margin in a competitive hardware business. AMD is doing OK.
- TomVDB 9y agoIntel and Nvidia have gross margins of 58% or higher. Other semiconductor companies like Broadcom are around 50%. 34% is better than the 30% of last year, but it's still really bad.
- matte_black 9y agoI recently doubled my position in AMD prior to earnings, mostly from discussions on HN. Here’s hoping they will have continued success in the long term.
- m3kw9 9y agoTheir P/E is now over 340. I’m not sure if that’s new territory do a stock that is not penny? Or is it because they just became earnings positive?
- aoeusnth1 9y agohttps://finance.yahoo.com/quote/amzn/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/amzn/ Not new territory at all. P/E is not a good indicator of future earnings, because it artificially penalizes capital investments. Cost of revenue is a better metric.
- jnordwick 9y agoProb. PER is only really useful for a firm with a stable and positive net income (think of things like industrials where growth capex isn't such a major factor). For something like a firm fluttering around zero EPS you would use a more forward measure of expected profit. The problem with PER is that stock price is forward looking while EPS is backwards looking.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoFor those that haven’t seen it, intel is releasing a new chipset that has an integrated AMD GPU on it; I am eager to see how the sales for that go. It does seem to imply that intel has given up on their own iGPU aspirations, which makes no sense given how much they’ve doubled-down on the GPU tech in recent years. But it may be just intel playing the long game to compete with nVidia, which is just killing it in the GPU department in recent years. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/kaby-lake-g-unveiled-intel-cpu-amd-gpu-nvidia-beating-performance/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/kaby-lake-g-unveiled...
- def- 9y agoIntel's plan seems to be doing this temporarily until their own high performance GPUs are ready.
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoDon't they say this every year? That their integrated GPU will be better, but it's still crap.
- paulmd 9y agoWell, to be fair, Intel HD graphics is a lot better than GMA. With Crystal Well, it's actually pretty close to something like a GTX 750 and outperforms even the new Vega APUs. But this time they're actually making a play for the discrete graphics market. They've hired Raja Koduri and everything. Not the first time they've done that either (see: Larrabee) but they do look to be making a serious attempt.
- throwaway2048 9y agoif it genuinely outpreformed the vega apus why would intel put an vega apu core on a new processor line...
- paulmd 9y ago
- currymj 9y agoi'm optimistic AMD GPUs will be usable for general purpose computing soon. ROCm seems to be coming along nicely, and they have various deep learning frameworks functioning to various degrees. in particular, I think there's buy-in from the framework maintainers, they're not going to go out of their way to port but they also aren't averse to merging in code written by AMD engineers. i don't think people in research have any particular loyalty to NVIDIA, and everybody's macbook pro now has an AMD GPU, so there are also personal incentives to get this stuff working properly.
- tsmarsh 9y agoStrong forecasts with Spectre still around seems very optimistic. Can AMD or Intel release another generation of chips with Spectre vulnerabilities? Do we think they're going to have a solution to Spectre within a year? Can x86 survive without out of order processing? Can any architectures perform at modern levels without it? Is x86 relevant in the server if you use Linux/BSD and can recompile your deployables? Without Spectre I'd be very bullish on AMD. With Spectre, I'm bearish for the entire sector.
- tyingq 9y agoTotally rooting for AMD to be the AVIS to Intel's HERTZ. The early Opteron/x64 days were great when I actually had a credible alternative to the status quo. Go AMD! Competition benefits everyone, everyone, even Intel.
- enzolovesbacon 9y agoI was about to buy a Ryzen workstation, but ended buying an (used) HP Z600 (2x E5620, 48GB ECC RAM, 2TB HD) because it was the best bang for the buck; just the Ryzen 1800x + motherboard would cost me what I paid for the Z600 (I live in Brazil, prices here are crazy). That said, I'm really rooting for AMD here. It's very nice to have this kind of competition and customers will benefit a lot from this.