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So far today it's at $11.08, which puts it back where it was at on March 22. So yes, it's a 30 day high, but only just barely. I love AMD and I'm rooting for t

by mark-r 9y ago

So far today it's at $11.08, which puts it back where it was at on March 22. So yes, it's a 30 day high, but only just barely. I love AMD and I'm rooting for them, but the stock price isn't the news - it's the unexpected sales strength of the Zen architecture. Don't expect Intel to take their success lying down.

jandrese 9y ago
This is what I want to see. Intel finally waking up and working hard again and maybe trying to compete on price. Without proper competition the market just goes stagnant. The most interesting thing is that Intel used to be able to crush their opponents by being one step ahead on node size improvements, but that's hit a wall and it has given everyone else a chance to catch up.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Also meltdown is going to be a problem for them for years. Intel is vulnerable if they don't get their act together and the competition do. AMD has been on a roll since Ryzen was released and as long as time continues to go past without a meltdown level problem cropping up they might have a shot at eating some of the data center stuff. We upgraded our Xeon servers the week before meltdown hit, if we'd know we'd have held on another year and gone EPYC.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Meltdown would likely increase Intel sales not decrease them. The problem with AMD is that it stopped making server CPUs for 5 years, Epyc was their first release since December of 2012 and that is what essentially prevents any serious ramp up of Epyc currently. Not having the fastest CPU out there isn't a problem if you can price it correctly but when you don't give your customers any options to upgrade or grow you essentially give them only one option and that is switch the the competition completely. If people can't trust that AMD won't abandon them again for half a decade to sort their shit out they will never take the risk of using them again at scale. That 5 year gap also essentially killed the AMD optimized software ecosystem and toolset which now needs to be built from the grounds up again.
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      > The problem with AMD is that it stopped making server CPUs for 5 years, Epyc was their first release since December of 2012 and that is what essentially prevents any serious ramp up of Epyc currently. I don't see why that should be a concern. It's not as though the effect is any different than switching to a new socket. Existing systems can't be upgraded to the newer processors, which is mostly irrelevant anyway because by the time the processor is stale so is the rest of the system. It's not as if they're different instruction sets. It's perfectly reasonable to buy Opterons in 2009, replace them with Xeon systems in 2014 and then replace those with Epyc systems in 2019. > That 5 year gap also essentially killed the AMD optimized software ecosystem and toolset which now needs to be built from the grounds up again. The Zen microarchitecture isn't based on bulldozer. Even if they had kept iterating on bulldozer in the interim, none of that ecosystem work would have been applicable to Zen regardless.
      - dogma1138 9y ago
        Your thinking is too narrow. Let’s take simple examples Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live migrate between them. You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor. Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution. Does your management stack supports DASH? Are your IT peeps familiar with it? Doesn’t have sufficient traction and market adoption? Likely not and that is again because AMD slept for half a decade. Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs? Heck even if you aren’t going to grow what about dealing with disasters? Do you really want to compound an already huge risk with another one? And about what you said about Zen. Zen isn’t that different to bulldozer in many aspects I suggest you should read the intrinsics guides for both. And even if it was 100% different it doesn’t matter a 5 year gap kills the entire infrastructure of partners and provide tools and education. If I need to optimize software today for an Intel CPU I have a plethora of resources, AMD can’t even release their instructions latency tables for 17h.

by mark-r 9y ago

jandrese 9y ago

This is what I want to see. Intel finally waking up and working hard again and maybe trying to compete on price. Without proper competition the market just goes stagnant. The most interesting thing is that Intel used to be able to crush their opponents by being one step ahead on node size improvements, but that's hit a wall and it has given everyone else a chance to catch up.

noir_lord 9y ago
Also meltdown is going to be a problem for them for years. Intel is vulnerable if they don't get their act together and the competition do. AMD has been on a roll since Ryzen was released and as long as time continues to go past without a meltdown level problem cropping up they might have a shot at eating some of the data center stuff. We upgraded our Xeon servers the week before meltdown hit, if we'd know we'd have held on another year and gone EPYC.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Meltdown would likely increase Intel sales not decrease them. The problem with AMD is that it stopped making server CPUs for 5 years, Epyc was their first release since December of 2012 and that is what essentially prevents any serious ramp up of Epyc currently. Not having the fastest CPU out there isn't a problem if you can price it correctly but when you don't give your customers any options to upgrade or grow you essentially give them only one option and that is switch the the competition completely. If people can't trust that AMD won't abandon them again for half a decade to sort their shit out they will never take the risk of using them again at scale. That 5 year gap also essentially killed the AMD optimized software ecosystem and toolset which now needs to be built from the grounds up again.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > The problem with AMD is that it stopped making server CPUs for 5 years, Epyc was their first release since December of 2012 and that is what essentially prevents any serious ramp up of Epyc currently. I don't see why that should be a concern. It's not as though the effect is any different than switching to a new socket. Existing systems can't be upgraded to the newer processors, which is mostly irrelevant anyway because by the time the processor is stale so is the rest of the system. It's not as if they're different instruction sets. It's perfectly reasonable to buy Opterons in 2009, replace them with Xeon systems in 2014 and then replace those with Epyc systems in 2019. > That 5 year gap also essentially killed the AMD optimized software ecosystem and toolset which now needs to be built from the grounds up again. The Zen microarchitecture isn't based on bulldozer. Even if they had kept iterating on bulldozer in the interim, none of that ecosystem work would have been applicable to Zen regardless.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      Your thinking is too narrow. Let’s take simple examples Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live migrate between them. You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor. Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution. Does your management stack supports DASH? Are your IT peeps familiar with it? Doesn’t have sufficient traction and market adoption? Likely not and that is again because AMD slept for half a decade. Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs? Heck even if you aren’t going to grow what about dealing with disasters? Do you really want to compound an already huge risk with another one? And about what you said about Zen. Zen isn’t that different to bulldozer in many aspects I suggest you should read the intrinsics guides for both. And even if it was 100% different it doesn’t matter a 5 year gap kills the entire infrastructure of partners and provide tools and education. If I need to optimize software today for an Intel CPU I have a plethora of resources, AMD can’t even release their instructions latency tables for 17h.