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AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

arstechnica.com

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Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#51

Post by guitarbill »

make3 wrote: post #46
Derbasti wrote: post #44

Regardless of how AMD CPUs compare against Intel CPUs, we need AMD to provide competition. Personally, I greatly enjoy my 1950X, as it provides just about double the performance per dollar compared to Intel's offerings. But I can see how that assessment would not be true for others, especially gamers and servers. But just look what the last year brought us in terms of performance and price from both AMD and Intel, af…

wouldn't one of the real answer to this x86 emulation on ARM? is the reason why it's not happening because of patents only?

Emulation always involves a hefty performance hit. Many emulators make huge trade-offs in accuracy vs performance, or are only possible because of orders of magnitudes difference in performance. But you don't really want to trade accuracy for most x86 business cases. That's why (backwards) compatible tech is so alluring (x86-64, x86, Eclipse MV/8000, S/360, etc), whereas breaking changes aren't (Itanium et al).

So you need either dynamic binary translation, or a processor that can support both x86-64 and whichever ARM instruction sets. Maybe it's possible, but there are two hurdles. Doing that for a gigantic instruction set (x86-64) on a processor with a modest instruction set is going to be challenging. For dynamic binary translation, it's correctness and speed. For supporting two ISAs (somehow), it'd be crazy hard to get the micro-codes right for everything.

And most applications aren't multi-threaded, so you're limited by single-core performance. And that has been x86's bread and butter for decades (also POWER/SPARC I guess), whereas ARM has been power efficiency, multiple cores, specialised cores/silicon. (Edit: This also explains why neither Intel nor ARM has any incentive in making a chip that supports both ISAs, even if it took the dreaded mode-bit)

But if it could be done, then yes, probably patents. IBM brought Transitive Corp, who's tech Apple had licensed for Rosetta (dynamic binary translation PowerPC -> x86, although even that didn't support PowerPC 970). Of course, IBM then did fuck-all with the tech and people of that acquisition, but they still have that IP.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#52

Post by totalZero »

I used to talk with Joe Moore, who wrote the report, every once in a while in a past job. In my experience he tries to be very attuned to the development of technology in the semiconductor industry, but often (1) misses some of the more technical facts and (2) misjudges how players in the market will react. When the iPhone 6s was released, he totally failed to identify one of the NAND suppliers. Nice guy, but I don't think he is any better than an educated layperson at predicting the future of cryptocurrency mining or video games. Joe tends to be good at tracking big ticket things (stages of 7nm development, deal dynamics, catalyst dates, potential M&A targets), but he's a Wall Street veteran, not a young hacker. And he has been wrong on AMD before.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#53

Post by indubitable »

dbatten wrote: post #41
sliverstorm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That report is so negatively biased it's suspicious. There are ten-year high levels of shorts on AMD, so there's speculation about how much of the bursts of negative press you see is basically market manipulation to unload a position. It's one of the more volatile stocks today, which would seem to make it a possible candidate for that sort of thing.

Serious question: Is this even actually a thing that happens? I mean, obviously, it stands to reason that the right actor with the right investment portfolio and control of the right media outlets could pull something like this off, but it seems that there are very, very few people/companies in that position. In fact, the Jeff Bezos / WaPo / Amazon nexus is perhaps the only example I can think of where this sort of t…

The higher level you go, the less incentive there is. Take things down to a much lower level. For instance consider the ImClone insider trading case. Martha Stewart was a well known (among certain demographics) television personality, was on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange, and more. She risked, and lost, all that and ended up going to prison for acting on inside information. Her total gain was $45,673...

I think it's easiest to logically consider everything in reverse. Let's assume you're correct, that this sort of thing never happens. So that entails two possibilities. The first:

- No reporters, or individuals with the ability to influence what is written, have vested interests.

I think the above can be pretty easily dismissed as false. But if it's false we can assume at least some people have vested interests. Which leads to the next possibility:

- Those with vested interests choose to never actively utilize their position to further their interests

And again, I think we can pretty safely declare that's false. So it's not a matter of does it happen, but to what scale it happens. And that is going to be pure speculation. Although it would logically follow that the more people that a vested interest in event x, the more common the occurrence of biased media in favor of provoking x would be expected to be seen.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#54

Post by zeveb »

digi_owl wrote: post #35
DarronWyke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I'm not shocked that Ars picked it up. Their journalistic quality has majorly slipped over the last few years. AMD is punching way above their weight class lately. It's causing competitors (or really competitor since Intel is their main one) to have to scramble to counter them.

The death kneel for me regarding Ars was that they shut down their Open Source section while their Apple section kept spilling over into their other sections. More and more i felt the place could be rechristened Apple Technica.

I feel like it went from being a news site for Linux-loving geeks to being a news site for centre-left Apple fans.

I still love their article on setting up one's own mail server. That was probably the high-water point for their quality.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#55

Post by dforrestwilson »

totalZero wrote: post #52

I used to talk with Joe Moore, who wrote the report, every once in a while in a past job. In my experience he tries to be very attuned to the development of technology in the semiconductor industry, but often (1) misses some of the more technical facts and (2) misjudges how players in the market will react. When the iPhone 6s was released, he totally failed to identify one of the NAND suppliers. Nice guy, but I don't…

All valid points about the sell-side in general. I used to work there. That being said, a downgrade is usually the last resort for an analyst, because they don't want to risk angering the management teams they interact with. To your point, according to Tipranks, Joe has a decent record overall and a bad one covering AMD in particular: https://www.tipranks.com/analysts/joseph-moore If you click on the ticker you can see the timing on his Buy/Sell recommendations for AMD.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#56

Post by anon11012017 »

DarronWyke wrote: post #49
away2017throw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last thing to do is adding a bunch of pro-SJW topics and you got another Verge/Vox/Polygon.

They already did that when they went anti-GG and started taking cues from people like Brianna Wu. That was the start of the decline for them.

Anti-GG is a good thing in my book.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#57

Post by tanderson92 »

indubitable wrote: post #53
dbatten wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Is this even actually a thing that happens? I mean, obviously, it stands to reason that the right actor with the right investment portfolio and control of the right media outlets could pull something like this off, but it seems that there are very, very few people/companies in that position. In fact, the Jeff Bezos / WaPo / Amazon nexus is perhaps the only example I can think of where this sort of t…

The higher level you go, the less incentive there is. Take things down to a much lower level. For instance consider the ImClone insider trading case. Martha Stewart was a well known (among certain demographics) television personality, was on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange, and more. She risked, and lost, all that and ended up going to prison for acting on inside information. Her total gain was…

> She risked, and lost, all that and ended up going to prison for acting on inside information

That is not why she went to prison.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#58

Post by ionised »

digi_owl wrote: post #31
Numberwang wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have alternative sources you would recommend instead of Ars? I quite like ars but if there are better publications out there I'd love to know.

anandtech.com may be worth a look.

That has been going downhill since Anand left.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#59

Post by jimminy »

dbatten wrote: post #41
sliverstorm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That report is so negatively biased it's suspicious. There are ten-year high levels of shorts on AMD, so there's speculation about how much of the bursts of negative press you see is basically market manipulation to unload a position. It's one of the more volatile stocks today, which would seem to make it a possible candidate for that sort of thing.

Serious question: Is this even actually a thing that happens? I mean, obviously, it stands to reason that the right actor with the right investment portfolio and control of the right media outlets could pull something like this off, but it seems that there are very, very few people/companies in that position. In fact, the Jeff Bezos / WaPo / Amazon nexus is perhaps the only example I can think of where this sort of t…

It happened just a few weeks ago with Shopify and the Citron Report.

The Citron Report's author often finds stocks that have gone up, places shorts, and then promotes the idea that these companies are scams with no fundamental value. He's made a considerable amount of money doing this.

Re: AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

#60

Post by bdpete »

DarronWyke wrote: post #4
agumonkey wrote: post #3

That report is so negatively biased it's suspicious. AMD finances were known to be dire for the last decade. They didn't established as just an intel competitor again, they won hard technical and market praises. The console and mining markets are not what to look at, what about the rest of the whole personal computer one ?

Of course I'm not shocked that Ars picked it up. Their journalistic quality has majorly slipped over the last few years. AMD is punching way above their weight class lately. It's causing competitors (or really competitor since Intel is their main one) to have to scramble to counter them.

It's too bad about Ars. It's the same problem, except exacerbated, with Wired-- nowadays there's just the odd good long-form article. Over the last few years almost half of the print magazine has been devoted to progressive issues from a tech angle rather than tech- and the rest revolves around fan-geekery, if that's a word.

Both are owned by Conde Nast...

MIT Technology Review remains superb, however: www.technologyreview.com

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