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AMD Reports Q1 2021 Earnings
- MengerSponge 6y agoI've been trying (unsuccessfully) to give AMD my money for a 5900 (in the US), so maybe I'll be lucky enough to contribute to their upcoming record Q2 sales
- acidburnNSA 6y agoMe too. Every day I'm like, can I buy a 5950X yet? No? Dang. Please take my money. No not you, scalpers!
- mjevans 6y agoI've seen the 5950X more frequently on NewEgg's shuffles... It doesn't quite hit my sweet spot for single core peek during multicore (you know, Minecraft and other old single player games) system use. The 5900X looks like a good mix of single, multi-core, and value budget. Which is also the same reason I want a 6800 XT GPU to go with it, 16 GB of videoram to throw at games or just way too damned many tabs being open.
- biinui 6y agoGenuinely curious, do GPUs help with multiple browser tabs? I was assuming it's the RAM's job.
- colinmhayes 6y agoMaybe if all those tabs have videos playing?
- zibzab 6y agoNot even then, unless you are using a browser from 2015. Newer one are very good at puttning background tabs to sleep
- capableweb 6y agoThat's a bit like asking if GPUs help with running multiple applications or how long a rope it, it really depends on what in those tabs. WebGL, some graphical rendering, Canvas API and more is powered by the GPU in a modern browser, but websites like HN won't have any need for the GPU.
- cornstalks 6y agoI was in the same boat and finally caved and bought one from antonline.com. They have them in stock but they're bundled with a $300 monitor (total price of $1,178.98, which includes tax and shipping). I resold the monitor for $275, so my losses weren't too bad. Anyway, if anyone's been waiting for a 5950X for 6 months like me and doesn't want to pay a scalper, this might be something to consider. Bundling sucks and I hate that so many retailers are basically forcing you to buy random stuff you don't need. Almost as bad as the scalpers. Almost.
- zrm 6y agoCan somebody explain why scalpers are a thing here? Why aren't the original vendors just raising prices to what the scalpers are charging, i.e. the market clearing price? If it's what's going to happen regardless then better that they get the money than some crummy middle man.
- jhanschoo 6y agoThe companies expect some memory from the community, and want to continue selling to them in the future. Gamers are very price sensitive, and will resent them for that.
- zibzab 6y agoI think the current batches are mostly reserved for pre-builts at big vendors (dell, hp, lenovo). Had no problem ordering machines with fairly new CPU from HP with 4-5 days delivery. GPU is a whole different story...
- _JamesA_ 6y agoI managed to score a PS5 but still can't get a 5950X.
- InvaderFizz 6y agoI wanted a 5900x but settled for a 5950x bundled with a useless one year of Microsoft 365 for a $100 premium over MSRP.
- TameAntelope 6y agoDip your toe into the dark side and try out Distill Web Monitor, and you should be able to find one in a week or so.
- cheeze 6y agoAnd since you're on hn, you can probably figure out streetmerchant
- capableweb 6y agoAs someone who've used neither, why is streetmerchant better than Distill Web Monitor?
- whbrown 6y agoIt's free and open-source.
- cracker_jacks 6y ago> Meanwhile AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segment has seen an explosion of growth of its own over the past year, thanks to the launch of AMD’s third-gen EPYC (Milan) processors, as well as the 9th generation consoles. Surprised to see enterprise switching over this quickly from Intel to AMD. How much infrastructure needs to get swapped out when making this switch?
- justapassenger 6y agoBig companies usually refresh all their hw on 3-5 year cycle, as older hw is too expensive to maintain (too much power use for the performance + increased repair costs). So in cases like this, it’s usually not swapping “good” hw, just ordering replacements from different vendor, when batch of hw reached their planned EOL.
- jeffbee 6y ago"Enterprises" do indeed dump hardware after 3-5 years, but not because it stopped being TCO-positive. It's just because they aren't sophisticated enough to own a computer without a warranty. Organizations who buy their computers by the megaton know that these machines are TCO-positive for 10+ years. There's a reason you can still get a Sandy Bridge in GCP or a Haswell in EC2.
- justapassenger 6y agoIt depends how hot you run them. If you idle them 99% of the time, then yeah, warranty is main issue. But if you burn your cpu all day, power usage becomes significant expense. I guess you can get SB/HW from cloud vendors for few reasons: 1. Intel server CPU are usually generation behind customer ones, so they are little younger than one may think 2. They are used for workloads that require little of CPU power overall 3. They may have important customers that certified their software for those specific CPU, so they need to keep them in stock I don’t work at Google/Amazon, so I’m just speculating.
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- teruakohatu 6y agoI can't think if there has been a worse time to be a PC enthusiast. Everything is so hard to come by, and if you can find parts, prices are insane.
- 0xy 6y agoYou can buy a pre-built gaming PC with a Nvidia 3080 today and have it delivered by the end of the week. The shortage exists exclusively on the retail side, OEMs are awash with both graphics cards and CPUs.
- ds 6y agoThis is not true. Every major prebuilt company has significant delays on 3080s and 3090s. I just checked. ibuypower: 6 weeks nzxt: 4 weeks originpc: 4 weeks maingear: 12 weeks alienware: 5 weeks
- wmf 6y agoI think you forgot to check the actual majors Dell, HP/Omen, and Lenovo/Legion but maybe they're just as bad.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eganist 6y agoAlienware = dell for the top end stuff like 3090s. And to that end: https://i.imgur.com/oXgofp7.png https://i.imgur.com/oXgofp7.png
- bm1362 6y agoI just went this route to build a ML workstation. I was able to get a prebuilt with a 3090 for ~30% of a comparable build on https://lambdalabs.com/ https://lambdalabs.com/. Now I just need to wait until next year to get the second 3090. I considered waiting for the new A4000s to launch to see if they'd have better inventory but figured 3090s have additional value as a gaming gpu. I'd be curious how professional ML folks are fairing and what they're using -- it's not too late to cancel my build.
- nl 6y agoInteresting that despite the shortages AMD isn't really pushing up their margin. It only increased by 1% over 1 year ago, and was flat against the previous quarter. > notebook revenue is up once again, setting a sixth consecutive record for AMD Great to see notebook manufactures finally shipping large numbers of AMD machines.
- codelord 6y agoAfter refreshing Amazon's Ryzen page for a month to get a 5950x, I finally bit the bullet and paid 200$ extra to buy it from a scalper. Even though I paid more than the list price I think the value of this CPU is insane compared to the competition. IMO AMD massively under-priced their product.
- leadingthenet 6y agoA clear sign of market failure. There’s a reason scalpers can charge the prices they do.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoI agree the value is higher than expected, but I do think that AMD is doing a surprisingly good job of balancing current sales against past and future inertia. Obviously, per the article, they're doing great in terms of sales, but should they be doing better? The standard, for more than a decade, has been to buy Intel. If AMD is 2x the performance of Intel, and consumers were perfectly rational, they could list their products at 1.99x the price and everyone would buy only AMD. Consumers are not rational. If instead they list it at an insane value, like 1.5x the price with 2x the performance, people will change the default choice to AMD. Currently, recommending Intel means you're an out of touch dinosaur, using obsolete knowledge... Haven't you read the benchmarks? What will you recommend next, 15k RPM SAS spinning rust for storage and the icc compiler? (Or maybe you're making a pragmatic decision based on stock levels, but that's a bit nuanced). Cultural and emotional ideas like that are likely to last even after Intel catches up. It's honestly probably a good thing for AMD's cultural forecast that there's scarcity and scalping. That will have a more lasting memory; people wouldn't remember getting an AMD 2x processor in the 2020s at only 1.99x the price of Intel, but they'll remember buying processors from shady scalpers at $200 over list because it's just that good.
- xwdv 6y agoSince this article is about the stock, I hope I can share an update on my AMD position, though I have found HN has been very unfriendly when it comes to anything related to stocks. AMD has been one of my best investments. I remember being on HN toward the end of 2019 and being downvoted hard for touting the stock. Back then I had 1200 shares at a cost basis of about $17. Today I have 1500 shares and a position worth about $130k after hours, almost about a 474% return, in less than 2 years. This isn’t even my only position that has turned out so well, you may have heard of some others in my past posts, just look for the ones that are very gray. The moral of the story is do your due diligence and don’t be afraid to invest boldly, early and often.
- icedchai 6y agoSimilar story here. I have 1000 shares in my taxable account, average cost is just under $13. Another 400 shares in my IRA, average cost of $36. AMD has done well in terms of absolute dollar gains. Percentage wise, I have others that have done better, like MU, FB, PYPL.
- jliptzin 6y agoYou’re getting downvoted possibly because “look at my juicy unrealized gains” doesn’t contribute materially to the discussion
- ludamad 6y agoProbably HN wonders if you think we're the IRS, declaring every capital gain like that :) I would see more material if you had some insight into how to invest in AMD looking forward. Saying do DD on all companies in general and then make a bold early play isn't super relevant. What do you think about AMD's prospects going forward?
- xwdv 6y agoMy recommendation for AMD is a buy.
- encryptluks2 6y agoIf you can't find a descent AMD graphics card or 5000 series processor, I scored an descent OEM 4600g PC for $400 at Costco.
- ksec 6y agoConsumer CPU, APU, Server CPU, Semi-Custom ( Consoles ), are all doing great as expected. What is missing is the GPU big picture. I dont see evidence of AMD discrete GPU winning any market shares and seems to be dominated by Nvidia. AMD only have two more years to enjoy their advantage from Intel's multiple missteps. After that it is going to be tough. And that is excluding the threat from ARM.
- rubatuga 6y agoUnfortunately, the software tooling gap between Nvidia and AMD has widened significantly for GPGPUs. AMD has also left the enthusiast video card market in the dust with their lack of ROCM support. Nvidia has some seriously cool tech that they showcased at GTC 2021 this year, like speeding up algorithms for bioinformatics, and new CPU/GPU combinations for autonomous driving. I would guess that the immense amount of R&D spent by Nvidia is causing this gap.
- kd913 6y agoThis is the kind of thing where the whole Xilinx acquisition is gonna make a play. Bespoke accelerator FPGA solutions are the future and will probably scale a lot longer than CPU/GPU combinations.
- davrosthedalek 6y agoI really doubt that. FPGA is really power and silicon intensive. A more traditional "many 'fixed function' processor" a la GPU will beat it for any algorithm which at least semi-successfully maps to the provided operations. And most math is matrix multiplication anyway, if you squint your eyes and hold your tongue at the right angle ;) (I use "fixed function" loosely here. It's not a fixed function T&L pipleline, it's meant in the "the circuit is fixed but can execute arbitrary code" sense.)
- kd913 6y agoYou can doubt it all you want, but this is where Xilinx Alveo is coming into play. This isn't my space as I operate on low-latency networking side. > A more traditional "many 'fixed function' processor" a la GPU will beat it for any algorithm which at least semi-successfully maps to the provided operations. And most math is matrix multiplication anyway, if you squint your eyes and hold your tongue at the right angle ;) I don't think it is as simple as this. Certainly not for low-latency scenarios or for HPC efficiency where the gains are done my moving as much computation as possible onto accelerator cards and off the CPU. The cost of moving things back and forth from the CPU can be expensive (data especially). We are already seeing dedicated solutions from Google, Graphcore that beats the pants off the traditional GPU/CPU approach.
- monkeydust 6y agoMan glad I brought mine in Q4'20 I know its a real pain to get HW now. Went overboard with a 5950x and 3090 but it should last me a long time.