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AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

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Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#51

Post by morrbo »

njarboe wrote: post #41
radium3d wrote: post #27

AMD has been my best investment so far. I've always loved them as they've been the rebellious underdog and have brought competitively powerful CPUs into the affordable range for historically low income computer nerds such as myself multiple times. Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best-- if only I hadn't had my bitcoins stolen from an early mining pool... oh well.

AMD has historically not been a very good stock to invest in long term. For speculation it can be great as it has had many periods of high volatility (tried to this without much luck in the dotcom era). Check out its price history[1]. It was also worth $16 in 1980, and has not paid out dividends in decades. You should determine a time or price to sell (at least some shares) as it is likely to head back down to $2 eve…

I feel this time it really is different. Firstly, there were the anti-competitive practices by Intel (which saw them fined). There are a few other factors as well. The fact that these CPUs really are something special. As they manage to reach the same base clock speeds as Intel - or near enough - you're going to be getting up to 64 cores/128 threads (compared with 24/48 if you used Intel stuff) in a server for about half, or even less, of what the equivalent Intel CPUs would cost.

Another big thing, i feel, these days is people are able to A. communicate this better, and B. call Intel on their bullshit. I've seen a LOT more hype, understanding, and word of mouth via forums etc. than around the 2000s when the stock was last high. Granted there is a bit of a hype at the moment around crypto currency, I genuinely can't see why anyone will be picking Intel over AMD in the future... and that's the crux of why I don't think the stocks going to crash.

Now, Intel's CEO got fired, they also poached one of the top AMD engineers. But these guys move slowly. So i guess we will see.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#52

Post by redtuesday »

spockz wrote: post #29
striking wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've made a CUDA competitor ( https://rocm.github.io/ ) and it works well enough to port Tensorflow to ( https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow ). Not super impressive, but we'll see what happens I guess.

Is running TensorFlow on GPUs still relevant now that google has their TPUs? Other dedicated hardware is also coming.

I don't really follow the ML space, but when you have a good GPU in your PC (which I assume quite a few people here have) you can learn/use Tensorflow by running things locally instead of paying for Google Cloud etc. Why pay extra money if you already have a good GPU in your computer (unless you really need to decrease the time it takes to run the computation etc.)

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#53

Post by slivym »

mcny wrote: post #44
zaarn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Intel does want to put out the 28 core i9 eventually. Hopefully with a free industrial chiller.

This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices? From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?

There's lots of reasons why cutting margins is a bad idea. Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value - and reduced margins have a dramatic bad effect on share price, because it's very easy to lose margin but very difficult to regain.

Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that they'll canabalize future sales- if they sell you a 2 core 2GHz processor today, they can sell you a 4 core 2GHz processor in a year. Which is exactly what they've done with Apple, they're basically slowly releasing performance at a given price to ensure a certain refresh cycle. If they give you a 48 core 4GHz processor today they're not going to have anything else to sell you until 2050.

Thirdly, if they start competing on Price they have to work against their entire brand as being leaders in the market. You can't say "We produce the top performance chips" and also "Buy this because it's cheaper than the other options". Again, once you have the reputation as the low cost solution, it's very hard to regain the performance lead reputation.

Fourthly, a lot of the markets they're in aren't growing so they aren't going to increase total sales much by decreasing the margins, they're just going to make less money on what they do sell. So those lower margins don't really stimulate demand.

Finally, Intel has a very strong company brand, but a weak product line brand. Everyone knows Intel - so Intel has to define itself by it's name. It can't say "This is the performance product line", "This is the value product line" because all anyone sees is "This is the Intel product".

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#55

Post by ahartmetz »

slivym wrote: post #53
mcny wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices? From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?

There's lots of reasons why cutting margins is a bad idea. Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value - and reduced margins have a dramatic bad effect on share price, because it's very easy to lose margin but very difficult to regain. Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that the…

Poor Intel, man. Having competition is such a drag.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#56

Post by onli »

J0-nas wrote: post #45
radium3d wrote: post #27

AMD has been my best investment so far. I've always loved them as they've been the rebellious underdog and have brought competitively powerful CPUs into the affordable range for historically low income computer nerds such as myself multiple times. Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best-- if only I hadn't had my bitcoins stolen from an early mining pool... oh well.

Are you concerned about the state of AMD GPUs? They couldn't compete in terms of high end performance for a long time. But nowadays they even lose the price-performance ratio of entry->mid level GPUs.

Not really. Entry->Mid level is RX 560, RX 570 and RX 580. RX 560 is a mixed bag, but both RX 570 and RX 580 are competitive and a bit superior to the Nvidia alternatives - as long as they are not overpriced, which they were till early this month. So the market just has to reach the regular prices AMD aimed for initially for those series to work fine.

But one can be concerned about the utter failure of high end Vega.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#58

Post by EliRivers »

slivym wrote: post #53
mcny wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices? From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?

There's lots of reasons why cutting margins is a bad idea. Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value - and reduced margins have a dramatic bad effect on share price, because it's very easy to lose margin but very difficult to regain. Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that the…

Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value

Their mission statement [0] doesn't even mention shareholders anymore.

[0] https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/0...

There's no law obliging companies to place "maximising shareholder value" above all else.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#59

Post by chemmail »

zaarn wrote: post #47
mcny wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices? From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?

This is speculation to some extend, but I don't think it'll be that easy. Intel does have margins on their products but at the same time, the products are still expensive. I fault their production method for that. I bet that even if they sold their CPUs at a loss, AMD could undercut them in the important market segments at minimum. AMD has struck gold with being able to, in Intel's words, glue together a bunch of des…

The Zen architecture was built to be able to be glued together with their "Infinity Fabric." That is their trump card. Intels architectures just aren't built with this in mind, so it will be back to the drawing board for them.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#60

Post by chemmail »

morrbo wrote: post #51
njarboe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has historically not been a very good stock to invest in long term. For speculation it can be great as it has had many periods of high volatility (tried to this without much luck in the dotcom era). Check out its price history[1]. It was also worth $16 in 1980, and has not paid out dividends in decades. You should determine a time or price to sell (at least some shares) as it is likely to head back down to $2 eve…

I feel this time it really is different. Firstly, there were the anti-competitive practices by Intel (which saw them fined). There are a few other factors as well. The fact that these CPUs really are something special. As they manage to reach the same base clock speeds as Intel - or near enough - you're going to be getting up to 64 cores/128 threads (compared with 24/48 if you used Intel stuff) in a server for about…

We may see history repeat itself. Back in 2006, stock prices were really high, like in the 40s. The Opteron was getting heavy adoption in the server market. But the stocks just kept sinking. Purchasing ATI for a huge sum did not help. Intel would need to crawl out from the Pentium 4 architecture, which just did not scale well and was simply not as efficient. Of coarse this did not stop Intel from pressuring all the big PC makers by doing shady deals to have their chips featured rather than AMDs.When Nehalim came out in late 2008, Intel would retain performance crown for the whole decade, which was not so good for the consumer.

AMD finally got Jim Keller back in 2012 to help develop Zen. This would prove to give them a fighting chance. He lead development of the Infinity Fabric, successor to his Hypertransport, which would allow the Zen to be so modular in adding more and more cores so easily. He was previously head of K8 architecture which lead to the successful Athlon 64 and Opterons. We also have to thank him for transitioning us to 64bit. He later departed and working on the A4/A5 CPUs at apple in the iphone 4/4s and ipad 1/2 respectively. These chips also helped Apple dominate for nearly a decade in CPU performance. Jim and Raja Koduri made a great team at Apple at that time. Jim would head to Tesla next, and Raja would head back to AMD to help create Vega. And now Intel has the duo. Will they be able to give us another decade of dominance from Intel? Exciting times coming!

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