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"In 2006 AMD (struggling) bought ATI for $5.4B. Intel just didn’t even notice. It was super weird." I think this is the best line in the whole thing. Intel did

"In 2006 AMD (struggling) bought ATI for $5.4B. Intel just didn’t even notice. It was super weird." I think this is the best line in the whole thing. Intel didn't notice, and it was super weird, and it was the best thing they ever did. Fun fact: the first thing the engineers did with their new toy was bolt then-new R700 pipes to a hypertransport bus, so it used hypertransport to fulfill memory requests instead of a native Radeon GDDR controller. The purchase of AMD and the Christmas morning giddiness of unwrapping that gift and turning it into what eventually became the prototype of the APU was the most brilliant thing ever. To put it in perspective, lets count all x86 sales: all the desktops, all the laptops, all the servers, all the weird little things like x86 chinese tablets, all of it. Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales (both massive APUs, essentially) dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; it dwarfs it in per chip and per thread. Intel only claims more sales in dollars than AMD (incl. MS and Sony deals) because of Intel tax, no legitimate reason. Similarly, lets do the same with Radeon sales vs Nvidia GPUs... take all of the Nvidia GPUs (desktop, laptop, ARM SoCs like the Shield and the Nintendo Switch, server compute, etc), and all the AMD GPUs that aren't XBOne and PS4... console sales dwarf everything else that both companies make. AMD won both races and no one even paid attention: AMD makes more x86 CPUs (both per chip and per thread), and more GPUs. Optimizing performance software (ie, games) has far more focus on both of AMD's platforms than anything else. Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races. This happened silently, and the cheer-leading for Team Blue and Team Green drowned out reality for a bit.

claytonjy 8y ago
> Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races For Nvidia specifically I think that's only true of the gaming market (maybe crypto as well?), but my understanding is their massive increase in value over the last half-decade or so is predominantly from the deep learning market, where they continue to dominate by no small margin due to CUDA being a hard dependency of the major DL frameworks. I don't have any hard numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the CUDA-tax is more than the Intel-tax ever was.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  The CUDA tax is serious, however in this case it is mostly the fault of competing vendors that there is no CUDA or almost-CUDA implementation, since it is fairly high-level, unlike an ISA and the accompanying treadmill of patented features which move the expiry date of the "platform" 20 years into the future every couple years.
  - claytonjy 8y ago
    > it is mostly the fault of competing vendors that there is no CUDA or almost-CUDA implementation I very much agree, but I also don't have the skills or knowledge to say what kind of effort it takes to build such a language/toolchain. It seems like such an obvious opportunity for AMD, and has for so long, could it be less incompetence and more engineering difficulty and/or adoption struggles? I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff.
    - microcolonel 8y ago
      > I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff. From the market perspective, it seems to me that a "CUDA killer" would not actually help. I think we need a free CUDA toolchain.
      - claytonjy 8y ago
        I think that's roughly what I meant; I'd like to see AMD dump resources into making a fully open, compatible-with-all-modern-GPUs toolchain to directly compete with and replace the CUDA one. For all I know, they already are? Heck even a non-open, AMD-specific toolchain would probably be great for consumers, but an open, cross-compatible toolchain would be even better for us, and might be better for AMD as well by allowing non-AMD-employed experts to contribute.
        8y ago
tasty_freeze 8y ago
> AMD won both races What do you mean by "win"? Total number of chips sold? Then why not declare Qualcomm the winner because they have shipped billions of ARM cores with integrated graphics processors?
- deaddodo 8y ago
  And the irony of this is that the integrated GPUs running in those Qualcomm chips are old ATi GPUs [1]. The IP was sold off directly due to the debt AMD leveraged in their purchase of ATi. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno
ajross 8y ago
> AMD won both races AMD's revenue is half of NVIDIA's and about 9% of Intel's. There's something missing from your analysis...
- crazypyro 8y ago
  AMD runs way tighter margins as well. https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/profit_margin
  - ajross 8y ago
    Exactly. I picked revenue precisely because it's the metric that would be comparable if AMD was winning in the "more and cheaper" style of Amazon or whatnot. They're not. Honestly they're mostly noise still, though their recent products have been a lot more competetive.
- TylerE 8y ago
  Feels like Apple vs, say, Samsung. Margin vs Volume
forrestthewoods 8y ago
> Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; Margins on console chips are garbage. AMD was the only chip maker desperate enough to take the deal. Intel has 12x gross revenue and 90x operating income as AMD. AMD is doing good work. But they’ve got a long, long ways to go.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
> Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races. I guess you and I have different definitions of what an 'underdog' means. Intel ships more CPUs (and GPUs) overall than AMD, and Nvidia does more discrete GPUs (at least in PCs): https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey I'm not sure how valuable and relevant console sales are, since manufacturers make pennies on each unit. It makes sense that AMD, being the more "discount" brand, would be in more consoles than Intel. Except the first Xbox, has Intel ever been in a console? AMD has turned around with Ryzen, and by some accounts is selling better lately, but Intel has had bigger numbers for a decade.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > I'm not sure how valuable and relevant console sales are, since manufacturers make pennies on each unit. Semiconductors are a scale business. The one with most scale wins. The margins are of less relevance. Intel has always been the unbeaten one, with most chips out there by an order of magnitude. Now that they lost this lead, everything (including P&D and margins) is expected to suffer.
hugh4life 8y ago
"To put it in perspective, lets count all x86 sales: all the desktops, all the laptops, all the servers, all the weird little things like x86 chinese tablets, all of it. Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales (both massive APUs, essentially) dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; it dwarfs it in per chip and per thread." Ummmm, no... "PC vendors shipped a total of 263 million computers last year, down from 270 million in 2016." https://www.statista.com/chart/12578/global-pc-shipments/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12578/global-pc-shipments/ And that's not counting chips sold to those building their own computers nor does it count servers. The PS4 has sold about 80 million console while the XBox One has sold about 40 million over around 4 years.
- ksec 8y ago
  Only ~40% [1] of those PC have discrete graphics. ( Updated to 40%, turns out there are 140% GPU shipment compared to PC shipment, 39% of them has dGPU ) But even so the APU used in consoles are very little in numbers compared what Nvidia sold in Cars, CUDA, dGPU, Crypto Mining etc. The AMD numbers already includes APU. Even on an conservative estimate of 300M GPU unit sales and AMD 10% market share, that is 30M unit per year. So the OP was so wrong I am not even sure where to start. ( And to make thing worst HN are upvoting him, talk about fake news problem. ) [1] https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increased-year-to-year-by-3.4/ https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increase...
geezerjay 8y ago
Do yoh have any source to back any of those assertions? Up until now I've heard nothing similar to anything you've mentioned. In fact, IIRC AMD has been hemorrhaging cash until very recently due to the introduction of the Ryzen product line, and still they barely break even. That appears to be entirely incompatible with the rosy scenario you've described.
EpicEng 8y ago
I need to see numbers on console sales dwarfing x86 sales because it strains credulity. I don't buy it, not even close.
deaddodo 8y ago
I would argue it was the worst decision they could have made. There was a ton of talk in the press that they overvalued ATi at 2-3x it's actual valuation ($5.4b), forcing them to take on a hefty debt. It also directly led to the sale of Spansion (which is now part of Cypress Semiconductor and valued at 4.5x it's sale value) and Imageon (after they purchased ATi, which became Qualcomm's Adreno) literally right before both of those markets skyrocketed. On top of that, Nvidia was valued at much less than ATi at the time and was willing to sell to AMD, given the requirement that Jensen Huang be the CEO of the new combined company. A competent CEO was exactly what AMD needed at that time, given their turnover of three inadequate CEO's previous to Lisa Su. And Huang has proven to be quite competent [1]. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda
- hajile 8y ago
  AMD's biggest mistake by an order of magnitude was betting everything on CMT only to find out it was a bust, but they were stuck pumping out variants for the next 7 years.
  - robotbikes 8y ago
    For anyone wondering what CMT stands for, it is Clustered Multi Threading which was used before Zen. Evidently it wasn't as effective as SMT. I wasn't aware but this link has a brief explanation. (https://www.quora.com/How-are-physical-cores-in-AMD-better-than-Intels-hyperthreading-for-gaming https://www.quora.com/How-are-physical-cores-in-AMD-better-t...)
  - deaddodo 8y ago
    Which can be directly attributed to Dirk Meyer’s personal and technical team leadership. I highly doubt Jensen would have pursued the same course. I’m not an Nvidia evangelist or anything, but one has proven results and the other only has failure after failure under their belt.
shmerl 8y ago
Incumbent consoles practically don't make any money for AMD. MS and Sony sell them for less what they really cost.

claytonjy 8y ago

> Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races For Nvidia specifically I think that's only true of the gaming market (maybe crypto as well?), but my understanding is their massive increase in value over the last half-decade or so is predominantly from the deep learning market, where they continue to dominate by no small margin due to CUDA being a hard dependency of the major DL frameworks. I don't have any hard numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the CUDA-tax is more than the Intel-tax ever was.

microcolonel 8y ago
The CUDA tax is serious, however in this case it is mostly the fault of competing vendors that there is no CUDA or almost-CUDA implementation, since it is fairly high-level, unlike an ISA and the accompanying treadmill of patented features which move the expiry date of the "platform" 20 years into the future every couple years.
- claytonjy 8y ago
  > it is mostly the fault of competing vendors that there is no CUDA or almost-CUDA implementation I very much agree, but I also don't have the skills or knowledge to say what kind of effort it takes to build such a language/toolchain. It seems like such an obvious opportunity for AMD, and has for so long, could it be less incompetence and more engineering difficulty and/or adoption struggles? I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff. From the market perspective, it seems to me that a "CUDA killer" would not actually help. I think we need a free CUDA toolchain.
    - claytonjy 8y ago
      I think that's roughly what I meant; I'd like to see AMD dump resources into making a fully open, compatible-with-all-modern-GPUs toolchain to directly compete with and replace the CUDA one. For all I know, they already are? Heck even a non-open, AMD-specific toolchain would probably be great for consumers, but an open, cross-compatible toolchain would be even better for us, and might be better for AMD as well by allowing non-AMD-employed experts to contribute.
      - 8y ago

tasty_freeze 8y ago

> AMD won both races What do you mean by "win"? Total number of chips sold? Then why not declare Qualcomm the winner because they have shipped billions of ARM cores with integrated graphics processors?

deaddodo 8y ago
And the irony of this is that the integrated GPUs running in those Qualcomm chips are old ATi GPUs [1]. The IP was sold off directly due to the debt AMD leveraged in their purchase of ATi. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno

ajross 8y ago

> AMD won both races AMD's revenue is half of NVIDIA's and about 9% of Intel's. There's something missing from your analysis...

crazypyro 8y ago
AMD runs way tighter margins as well. https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/profit_margin
- ajross 8y ago
  Exactly. I picked revenue precisely because it's the metric that would be comparable if AMD was winning in the "more and cheaper" style of Amazon or whatnot. They're not. Honestly they're mostly noise still, though their recent products have been a lot more competetive.
TylerE 8y ago
Feels like Apple vs, say, Samsung. Margin vs Volume

forrestthewoods 8y ago

> Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; Margins on console chips are garbage. AMD was the only chip maker desperate enough to take the deal. Intel has 12x gross revenue and 90x operating income as AMD. AMD is doing good work. But they’ve got a long, long ways to go.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

> Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races. I guess you and I have different definitions of what an 'underdog' means. Intel ships more CPUs (and GPUs) overall than AMD, and Nvidia does more discrete GPUs (at least in PCs): https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey I'm not sure how valuable and relevant console sales are, since manufacturers make pennies on each unit. It makes sense that AMD, being the more "discount" brand, would be in more consoles than Intel. Except the first Xbox, has Intel ever been in a console? AMD has turned around with Ryzen, and by some accounts is selling better lately, but Intel has had bigger numbers for a decade.

marcosdumay 8y ago
> I'm not sure how valuable and relevant console sales are, since manufacturers make pennies on each unit. Semiconductors are a scale business. The one with most scale wins. The margins are of less relevance. Intel has always been the unbeaten one, with most chips out there by an order of magnitude. Now that they lost this lead, everything (including P&D and margins) is expected to suffer.

hugh4life 8y ago

"To put it in perspective, lets count all x86 sales: all the desktops, all the laptops, all the servers, all the weird little things like x86 chinese tablets, all of it. Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales (both massive APUs, essentially) dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; it dwarfs it in per chip and per thread." Ummmm, no... "PC vendors shipped a total of 263 million computers last year, down from 270 million in 2016." https://www.statista.com/chart/12578/global-pc-shipments/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12578/global-pc-shipments/ And that's not counting chips sold to those building their own computers nor does it count servers. The PS4 has sold about 80 million console while the XBox One has sold about 40 million over around 4 years.

ksec 8y ago
Only ~40% [1] of those PC have discrete graphics. ( Updated to 40%, turns out there are 140% GPU shipment compared to PC shipment, 39% of them has dGPU ) But even so the APU used in consoles are very little in numbers compared what Nvidia sold in Cars, CUDA, dGPU, Crypto Mining etc. The AMD numbers already includes APU. Even on an conservative estimate of 300M GPU unit sales and AMD 10% market share, that is 30M unit per year. So the OP was so wrong I am not even sure where to start. ( And to make thing worst HN are upvoting him, talk about fake news problem. ) [1] https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increased-year-to-year-by-3.4/ https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increase...

geezerjay 8y ago

Do yoh have any source to back any of those assertions? Up until now I've heard nothing similar to anything you've mentioned. In fact, IIRC AMD has been hemorrhaging cash until very recently due to the introduction of the Ryzen product line, and still they barely break even. That appears to be entirely incompatible with the rosy scenario you've described.

EpicEng 8y ago

I need to see numbers on console sales dwarfing x86 sales because it strains credulity. I don't buy it, not even close.

deaddodo 8y ago

I would argue it was the worst decision they could have made. There was a ton of talk in the press that they overvalued ATi at 2-3x it's actual valuation ($5.4b), forcing them to take on a hefty debt. It also directly led to the sale of Spansion (which is now part of Cypress Semiconductor and valued at 4.5x it's sale value) and Imageon (after they purchased ATi, which became Qualcomm's Adreno) literally right before both of those markets skyrocketed. On top of that, Nvidia was valued at much less than ATi at the time and was willing to sell to AMD, given the requirement that Jensen Huang be the CEO of the new combined company. A competent CEO was exactly what AMD needed at that time, given their turnover of three inadequate CEO's previous to Lisa Su. And Huang has proven to be quite competent [1]. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda

hajile 8y ago
AMD's biggest mistake by an order of magnitude was betting everything on CMT only to find out it was a bust, but they were stuck pumping out variants for the next 7 years.
- robotbikes 8y ago
  For anyone wondering what CMT stands for, it is Clustered Multi Threading which was used before Zen. Evidently it wasn't as effective as SMT. I wasn't aware but this link has a brief explanation. (https://www.quora.com/How-are-physical-cores-in-AMD-better-than-Intels-hyperthreading-for-gaming https://www.quora.com/How-are-physical-cores-in-AMD-better-t...)
- deaddodo 8y ago
  Which can be directly attributed to Dirk Meyer’s personal and technical team leadership. I highly doubt Jensen would have pursued the same course. I’m not an Nvidia evangelist or anything, but one has proven results and the other only has failure after failure under their belt.

shmerl 8y ago

Incumbent consoles practically don't make any money for AMD. MS and Sony sell them for less what they really cost.