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AMD's Stock Price Jumps on News of Earnings Spurred by Ryzen
- observr 9y agoThanks to Jim Keller.
- tambre 9y agoHe did just quit Tesla after a short time there and re-joined Intel.
- observr 9y agoHe was the architect of Ryzen.
- tambre 9y agoI'm aware.
- dman 8y agoI have been watching the dynamics between AMD and Intel recently and some interesting things are happening. Jim Keller and Raja headed to Intel. Intel announcing plans to get into the discrete GPU space (a place ridden with patent landmines). The KabyLake chip released with Intel CPU + AMD GPU. Wonder if the companies are aligning to work closely to counter NVidia or if something else entirely is at play.
- monocasa 8y ago> Wonder if the companies are aligning to work closely to counter NVidia I mean, yeah, that's actively happening, as can also be seen by the Intel/Vega combo.
- CodeArtisan 8y agoSure but also thanks to a few patents having expired, especially that one about hyper threading[1]. edit: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138 [1] Should have said simultaneous multithreading (SMT) instead of hyper threading which is specific to Intel.
- Moto7451 8y agoWeren't those patents part of the AMD-Intel cross licensing deal or are there some x86 CPU related patents that are kept separate?
- monocasa 8y agoThose are 1971 IBM patents. It would be interesting to know anything more on the AMD/Intel agreements than the vague "x86 cross licensing" though for sure.
- Moto7451 8y agohttps://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-and-amd-settle-agree-cross-licensing-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-and-amd-settle-agree-cro... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236705/dex102.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236... The first will be a quicker read than the second ;). The other commenter mentioned SMT was an IBM patent rather than an Intel one, so that's probably the answer to my question. It seems weird that they wouldn't have just licensed that from IBM as well.
- monocasa 8y agoThe IBM patents have been expired for decades though. There's nothing to licence. But that SEC link is awesome; I though the agreement was completely confidential and we'd only ever see it in a historical context. Thanks!
- 8y ago
- ken47 8y agoThat's a common misperception. Michael Clark played a larger role in Ryzen: https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/24/how-amd-designed-what-could-be-its-most-competitive-processors-in-a-decade/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/24/how-amd-designed-what-cou...
- bazooka_penguin 8y agoIirc Jim Keller's title was VP and chief of the microprocessor division. So he was probably more of a technical manager anyway. I believe Suzanne Plummer and Mike Clark were project directors so they'd be more hands on anyway
- nicoburns 8y agoAnd Lisa Su.
- observr 8y agoAgreed. Su had the smarts to get a performant chip made and hire the people to make it happen. You don't get market share with an also-ran offering.
- bazooka_penguin 8y agoDidn't Rory Read hire them and start the projects?
- observr 8y agoI thought Read was a placeholder CEO who was installed to conduct cost cutting. But you're right - a quick google search confirmed that Keller was hired during Read's tenure.
- ksec 8y agoAnd he has decided to join Intel. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933931
- dogma1138 9y agois it even at 30 day high? it was like $13 in the begining of 2018.
- ianai 9y agoYes their current dollar range is slightly more exposed to volatility given it’s price range. We’d all wondered whether they would get a perk after the rounds of flack Intel’s received. From the little research I’ve done though I’m unsure whether their new CPUs really compete with Intel. Any anecdotes here?
- dogma1138 9y agoWell it looks like Bulldozer was still 60% of their client revenue, Ryzen is selling well the deal with Intel was also quite good but it looks like their enterprise figures are still abysmal Epyc double digit growth sure but considering that the majority of those 500 mill was still from semi custom it looks like Epyc is still struggling to get traction.
- AstralStorm 8y agoQuite expected too. Server markets tend to buy rarely, conservatively and in late volumes at a time. It will take a few new data centres to nudge it.
- dogma1138 8y agoThe first part of your sentence is true, the second isn't. Intel couldn't make Skylake Xeons fast enough it became their fastest ramp up of any Xeon release to date. https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/12/01/booming-server-market-wake-skylake/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/12/01/booming-server-marke... The problem is that AMD has lost the trust of the enterprise market because they gave up and stopped making Opterons without even a good reason to do so. That screwed up their entire customer base because they had no option to expand or upgrade other than just replace all of their servers with Intel. Opteron was the king and yeah they were losing the pure performance crown but in 2012 it wasn't that bad, server software could be optimized and an acceptable performance per dollar ratio could've been maintained. Before Epyc the last enterprise Opteron that AMD was released was in December of 2012 on 32nm SOI process 16 core CPU (technically 8 since it's bulldozer but who cares) that's 5 years without an upgrade option. If I would be a bet on the number 1 question AMD receives today about Epyc is what happens when you stop making CPUs again to which they would probably reply "we won't cuz we can't afford too" and then the cheeky retort "you couldn't afford it last time either". Epyc ramp up was expected to be slow but I don't think this slow the amount of resistance I think it experience is above even AMDs internal pessimistic predictions.
- dis-sys 9y agoAMD's share price is still 75% lower than its peak achieved after the release of AMD64/AMD X2.
- agumonkey 9y agoGive them time to breath, they were almost under during the ATi/APU era.
- shmerl 9y agoAMD should put a good effort into GPUs too, and replace GCN with brand new and efficient architecture.
- IntelMiner 8y agoATi hasn't really competed with Nvidia at the top end of the market for a very long time They've basically thrown in the towel as far as the datacenter went with CUDA
- shmerl 8y agoSo they should make an effort to compete more.
- IntelMiner 8y agoThat's an incredibly ignorant comment Just because they can trade blows with Intel in the CPU space, doesn't automatically translate to them having equal engineering talent to take on Nvidia on GPU's
- shmerl 8y agoI didn't say they have talent (which they might have anyway). I said they should compete, which means they should find needed talent obviously if they don't have it.
- dragontamer 8y agoThey're behind in a number of areas. Their ROCm environment finally is catching up with NVidia's software / CUDA environment. OpenCL was simply a disaster and hampered AMD's role as a serious software solution for years. I think its more important to get ROCm fully functional with Tensorflow and other technologies (their current path). AMD can compete on price/performance, selling Vega HBM2 chips at ~$1000 to $2000 (compared to NVidia's chips at $8000 for their HBM2-based V100). With AMD's drivers properly in the Linux kernel and a nicer licensing model, AMD can achieve a position in the server world. But only if developers start coding in ROCm instead of CUDA. Honestly, I bet you that software is the bigger issue in the near term. No one wants to code in OpenCL / separated C-environment. ROCm achieves CUDA-parity to some degree with "single source" C++ programming and is beginning to become compatible with Tensorflow. Sure, they'll be slower than NVidia. But at least your python machine learning code will actually run at all. And paying 1/8th the price for ROCm acceleration will be fine as long as AMD is 1/4th the performance or better. That's how you can actually build a value argument.
- copperx 9y agoI'm old to remember the excitement over AMD's K6 processors, which were quickly overtaken in speed by Intel for a decade. I just hope that AMD continues to be competitive.
- snvzz 9y agoI'm not sure what you mean. From the time AMD released the K7 'Athlon' CPU, until the time Intel released Core2, AMD was king of performance. That's a long spawn of time. To understand why Intel kept selling CPUs like pancakes despite this, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSMJRyxG0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSMJRyxG0k
- bitL 8y agoI was a kid so I might be wrong, though I seem to remember there was some crazy overclockable Celeron that was killing K6, right?
- creaturemachine 8y agoThe Celeron 300 could hit 450MHz and barely break a sweat. Of course I discovered that after splashing big cash on a P2 450. 50% OCs are unheard of today.
- spamizbad 8y agoYep. And you could even run a pair of them with SMP with delicate modifications. I used to have a 440BX board with a pair of 300A's clocked to 450mhz and 128MB of SDRAM. Excellent poor-mans workstation.
- bitL 9y agoCongrats AMD, I hope you'll sustain it for a few years (or decades)! We need a great competition in CPU space! ;-)
- majewsky 8y agoAnd GPU space, too.
- bitL 8y agoThey have some work to do there ;-) I can't use them for Deep Learning at all, just for mining.
- throwaway84742 8y agoThey’re getting there with MIOpen etc. It’ll take some more time, but I’m sure they can pull it off. In terms of raw perf their GPUs are comparable.
- singhrac 8y agoThis benchmark is worth looking at as well: blog.gpueater.com/en/2018/04/23/00011_tech_cifar10_bench_on_tf13/
- ksec 8y agoWhy hasn't EPYC picked up stream? It's been a year since release, some say they were already selling as many as they can. GF capacity problems again?
- dragontamer 8y agoIt wasn't until recently that Dell and HP were offering fully tested EPYC servers in their server lines. Many IT professionals were complaining that EPYC was simply unavailable from their suppliers last year. The typical server-farm waits for OEMs to make well-tested complete machines. So it won't be till this year that EPYC even has a chance to make it to your typical serverroom setup.
- theevilsharpie 8y agoI tried to get single socket EPYC-based servers for a virtualization host refresh that we were doing last year, and the processors simply weren't available anywhere. _Everyone_ was out of stock indefinitely. As far as I can tell, unless you were a hyperscaler, EPYC's release was essentially a paper launch up until Q1 2018.
- anon1253 8y agoI got in at ~$12 two years ago, was down 26% for most of that (I'm long, and don't care much for intra-day volatility). I hope it will crawl back up, but I'm increasingly bearish on this one. Without investors pouring money in it, the R&D will stall and that's not something they can sustain. One of the few reasons they haven't been bought yet is because that will invalidate their license sharing with Intel. So I guess the other strategy is to simply bleed them dry. I mean just think about it. They build GPUs, just like NVidia. They build CPUs, just like Intel. They have their own fabrication process, logistics, research, the whole thing. Their chips don't perform much worse, even better in the mid-range tier. Yet AMD is valued at 9, instead of like 5x or even 10x as much. The people with the money are holding a grudge or something, and I can't see them keeping it up for much longer.
- noitsnot 8y agoI'm not sure how you can value it at 5 or 10 times when earnings have been in the red since at least 2014. Also, Intel made $10 billion profit each of those years.
- azinman2 8y agoBut hasn’t it been that way for many, many years now?
- anon1253 8y agoYes, but I was being naive and thought the Vega/Epyc/ThreadRipper stuff with the Intel Specter/Meltdown and crypto craze would help them more. I know my next machine will be an AMD one, if only just for wishful thinking
- vel0city 8y agoAMD does not have its own fabrication process. They spun off their fabrication business as GlobalFoundries in 2009.
- rasz 8y agoinvalidation of license sharing with Intel would mean no more 64bit x86 Intel processors - not going to happen
- lowbloodsugar 8y agoI went to buy a Ryzen 7/Vega 10 laptop from Dell last Thursday. By Friday, it was gone, and only Ryzen 5/Vega 8 laptops are available, even for the 17" Inspiron. Not "Out of stock" gone, but "This product doesn't exist" gone. Lenovo makes one with only 12Gb of RAM, Asustek's effort is 8Gb, a single channel. AMD makes the best integrated CPU/GPU for laptops but you cannot buy it anywhere. Commentary elsewhere is that Intel is leaning hard on builders not to use the Ryzen 7/Vega 10, or if they use it, to put it in an otherwise shitty spec box that cripples it.
- Canadauni 8y agoThat last sentence sounds a lot like anti competitive behavior by Intel. On the bright side it bodes well for AMD that their chipsets are causing this type of response from Intel but it sucks that this may be driving the lack of AMD laptops available to consumers.
- KSS42 8y agoThere are many in the pipeline. HP is going to launch a bunch in June. AMD said they expect 25 Ryzen laptops to launch in Q2 and 60 by year end
- hajile 8y agoI just hope there's one or two high-end models. Also, AMD chipsets seem to use more power than Intel. I'd love to see more work in that direction.
- throwaway84742 8y agoFWIW my next “office” PC is based on an AMD Ryzen APU. Price/perf of that can’t currently be beat by anything.