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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

#71

Post by holtalanm »

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.

Ive got an RX-580 in my gaming desktop. Couldn't be happier.

And the integrated Vega graphics in their Ryzen mobile processors are nothing to sneeze at. Getting performance comparable to some of the low-end nVidia cards.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#72

Post by skgoa »

pantalaimon wrote: post #66
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Core 2 Quad processors were dual-die, and they got a lot of negativity for being a fake quad core... Funny how things change.

My memory is cloudy on this one, but did they not use the Front Side Bus to communicate with each other and thus take a performance penalty?

That seems correct AFAIR.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#73

Post by rdlecler1 »

dragontamer wrote: post #23
endorphone wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extraordinary how much AMD is faltering for deep learning, with most projects being built for only nvidia. Their ROCM/HCC thing is neat, but at this stage I would expect AMD to have large scale involvement with all major deep learning projects, ensuring that they fully leverage AMD GPU hardware. Instead it's just a couple of half-baked, half-ready sort of ports.

How is it extraordinary at all? AMD was literally going bankrupt like 2 years ago. They fired 30% of their staff and then reverse-mortgaged their headquarters. They bet their entire company on "Zen" and... luckily, it paid off. https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/12/3496006/amd-layoffs-10-p... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/amd-s... AMD finally has money to actually invest into long-term projects…

I think the question is how many truly great engineers would it take to build some of the necessary APIs. Why spend hundreds of millions in hardware R&D and then underinvest in software that makes the hardware valuable. While the CEO has been doing a stellar job Turing around the company it still feels like they underinvested in software.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#75

Post by washadjeffmad »

hddherman wrote: post #68
pantalaimon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel still has better single core performance which is what is desired by the majority of users. There is not much software yet to take advantage of 24 or 32 cores and single core performance will always be a direct benefit.

This argument is getting very old. Any sources for that first claim? The multithreaded workloads part is correct, but the argument falls apart when you remember that an average user has hundreds of different processes running in the background, or in other words a workload that can handily take advantage of those cores.

PCMR on Reddit, Intel marketing, and everyone who paid Intel's extreme processor mark-ups because it was "the best money could buy" when they were the biggest game in town and doesn't want to feel like a fool now that they're half the price.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#76

Post by redtuesday »

hddherman wrote: post #68
pantalaimon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel still has better single core performance which is what is desired by the majority of users. There is not much software yet to take advantage of 24 or 32 cores and single core performance will always be a direct benefit.

This argument is getting very old. Any sources for that first claim? The multithreaded workloads part is correct, but the argument falls apart when you remember that an average user has hundreds of different processes running in the background, or in other words a workload that can handily take advantage of those cores.

Do you mean the single threaded part or that OP claims that it's what most users desire? If it's about the single threaded performance then OPs claim is true.

default clocks: https://i.imgur.com/dU3aI35.png

normalized clocks: https://i.imgur.com/wg3SQUd.png (sadly they have not normalized memory clocks)

In single threaded games this can be even more apparent. But Intel is mainly faster because of a significant clock advantage. Clock for clock the advantage is small.

I'm looking forward to Zen 2 which could allow AMD to close the IPC gap or even get a bit ahead of Intel. Combined with the 7nm process which should allow better clocks it's looking good for AMD.

Question is if AMD uses the high performance process which is touted to allow up to 5 ghz [0] at the cost of increased power usage, or if they use the low power process (which is also more affordable). Since Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc use the same die probably the latter since power consumption is so important in the data center.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12438/the-future-of-silicon-a...

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#77

Post by dragontamer »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #73
dragontamer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it extraordinary at all? AMD was literally going bankrupt like 2 years ago. They fired 30% of their staff and then reverse-mortgaged their headquarters. They bet their entire company on "Zen" and... luckily, it paid off. https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/12/3496006/amd-layoffs-10-p... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/amd-s... AMD finally has money to actually invest into long-term projects…

I think the question is how many truly great engineers would it take to build some of the necessary APIs. Why spend hundreds of millions in hardware R&D and then underinvest in software that makes the hardware valuable. While the CEO has been doing a stellar job Turing around the company it still feels like they underinvested in software.

I'm not sure if you really understand the peril or how deeply AMD cut back on their R&D Efforts.

Small Cat (Puma cores) were cancelled and that entire department was laid off. This is the core that won AMD the Xbox One and PS4. Small Cat was also their low-power architecture designed for tablets (notice that AMD literally gave up on the growing Tablet market?)

AMD cut DEEP to stay out of bankruptcy. They were cutting known, successful projects and were still losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.

Lets be frank here: if AMD were today, in a position where they had better ROCm or OpenCL or Tensorflow support but say... no "Zen" or "EPYC" ?? They'd be worse off. The CEO made the right bet to focus on Zen as their comeback strategy.

Zen is successful because it demonstratively does something better than Intel. It also doesn't need much software support or tooling, and was designed to be relatively cheap to make. I don't think AMD would have done the same with the NVidia GPGPU compute world, especially since CUDA is a proprietary technology. Even if AMD were to make something better than NVidia, they wouldn't reap any rewards because CUDA is a big moat.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#78

Post by radium3d »

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.

I personally have been running a RX480 8GB since the day they were released and I haven't hit a game that can't run at an excellent framerate even for my 144hz monitor, so I don't have a concern yet :) It was a amazing deal for just $263.98 at release. From the looks of the benchmarks the Vega 64 is leaps and bounds faster as well.

As far as VR goes, I think they're in the early stages still -- they need to improve the lenses, resolution and refresh rate before I will be buying in so I don't yet need the VR frame rates. At the current level I'm sure the Vegas would handle VR fine though since it seems to outperform nvidia slightly.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#79

Post by endorphone »

dragontamer wrote: post #23
endorphone wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extraordinary how much AMD is faltering for deep learning, with most projects being built for only nvidia. Their ROCM/HCC thing is neat, but at this stage I would expect AMD to have large scale involvement with all major deep learning projects, ensuring that they fully leverage AMD GPU hardware. Instead it's just a couple of half-baked, half-ready sort of ports.

How is it extraordinary at all? AMD was literally going bankrupt like 2 years ago. They fired 30% of their staff and then reverse-mortgaged their headquarters. They bet their entire company on "Zen" and... luckily, it paid off. https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/12/3496006/amd-layoffs-10-p... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/amd-s... AMD finally has money to actually invest into long-term projects…

Businesses "reverse mortgage" their real estate all the time, including extraordinarily profitable businesses. I also don't see what some links from 2012 have to do with "like 2 years ago", though we all know that AMD went through some down times -- the CPU side did, though the GPU side never did and kept paying the bills.

A segment of their business was promising, and they could see a hugely emergent demand growing. Instead of getting in on the projects that matter, they just ignored it turning it into an entirely nvidia market. Yes, that is irrational and self-defeating. If they were so self-sabotaging in the GPU market they should have sold that business (and it makes one wonder why they ever bought it in the first place).

Of course CUDA is a moat. AMD sat doing nothing allowing it to get dug further and deeper, becoming completely synonymous with deep learning. A small scale, inexpensive software project to keep official, supported branches of major projects wholly functional on AMD hardware (e.g. Tensorflow) would have done great things. Instead they made some completely irrational solutions that tried to move the market somewhere completely different.

This has nothing to do with how they bet on "Zen". It isn't either or.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#80

Post by bigmanwalter »

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…

I don’t buy your reasoning. Intel has had their Celeron line for decades and it is widely understood to be their value line.
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