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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

#81

Post by hddherman »

redtuesday wrote: post #76
hddherman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I (and many others) would take a 33% increase in core count over a 10-15% advantage in single core workloads. Even the gaming comparison is most of the time overemphasized. Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS?

I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that Intel has employed previously.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#82

Post by ksec »

redtuesday wrote: post #50

If the rumor [0] that Intel's first 10nm server chip will only release mid 2020 is true, then AMD's shares will probably skyrocket again if they truly can release their Zen 2 server CPU mid 2019 (on 7nm which is comparable to Intel's 10nm). [0] https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977

And they just announced in their conference call, Zen 2 Rome will be Fabbed with TSMC 7nm.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#83

Post by dragontamer »

endorphone wrote: post #79
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…

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.…

AMD started off with massive layoffs in 2012, and continues through 2015.

https://venturebeat.com/2014/10/16/amd-misses-earnings-targe...

https://venturebeat.com/2015/10/01/amd-to-lay-off-500-people...

2016 AMD began to stabilize, as they focused on Zen. They still were losing tons of money per quarter, but they refocused their efforts. And 2017 they finally delivered. AMD didn't actually turn a profit until late 2017.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/05/amd-turns-its-firs...

Between 2011 and mid-2017, AMD was losing money every quarter. There's a reason why the stock was below $2/share for a long time.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#84

Post by Phlarp »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #34
Phlarp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what else you expected from /r/amd_stock.

I didn't say I expected anything else. The point is it's not secret information that Jim Keller's Zen was going to change the landscape, people were shouting it from the rooftops. It was all just a matter of whether you believed them or not.

Right, but the point is that particular sub would be shouting it from the rooftops regardless of the underlying truth.

I think most would look at the situation and conclude that even broken clocks are right twice a day.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#85

Post by redtuesday »

hddherman wrote: post #81
redtuesday wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I (and many others) would take a 33% increase in core count over a 10-15% advantage in single core workloads. Even the gaming comparison is most of the time overemphasized. Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS? I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that…

> I (and many others) would take a 33% increase in core count over a 10-15% advantage in single core workloads. Even the gaming comparison is most of the time overemphasized. Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS?

Luckily it seems AMD can probably deliver both with Zen 2. For Epyc the roadmap suggest a 50% increase in core count [0] over Zen 1, and since Ryzen and Threadripper uses the same die as Epyc this will most likely trickle down to Ryzen 3xxx and Threadripper 3xxx.

Depends on your game and monitor I guess. Quite a few people seem to buy ugly 144hz gaming monitors and some games like Warhammer and Far Cry 5 can have ~20 fps difference at the same clocks at 1080p.

> I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that Intel has employed previously.

Most of the time the limiting factor is not the CPU but the GPU anyway. The good thing about AMD closing the gap or potentially even overtaking Intel in single threaded performance is that the fanboys, fangirls and corporate shills have one argument less for spreading FUD and suggesting Intel over AMD.

[0] there are even (unlikely) rumors floating around about a 64 core Epyc, but I don't see that happening before 7nm+ on EUV.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#86

Post by aoeusnth1 »

chemmail wrote: post #60
morrbo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

"Invest in Jim" might be the real winning strategy here.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#87

Post by cameldrv »

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…

What difference does monolithic vs. modular really make? If Intel has a core on their 28 core die that is defective, they just disable it and sell a 27 core chip. Perhaps it's easier for AMD to find 4 8 core chips with no defects than for Intel to find a 28 core chip with no defects, but Intel can just make a 34 core die sold as a 32 core chip with better yields than AMD's 8 core dies.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#88

Post by radium3d »

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 agree, and have bought and sold their stock multiple times as we went between product releases, the current product set does feel like one of their best though after Intel sat on their hands for so long.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#89

Post by zaarn »

cameldrv wrote: post #87
zaarn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What difference does monolithic vs. modular really make? If Intel has a core on their 28 core die that is defective, they just disable it and sell a 27 core chip. Perhaps it's easier for AMD to find 4 8 core chips with no defects than for Intel to find a 28 core chip with no defects, but Intel can just make a 34 core die sold as a 32 core chip with better yields than AMD's 8 core dies.

There is a huge difference.

The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die area then you get double as many defective chips.

Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would be even more expensive to produce.

Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that aren't black, ie defective silicon.

AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their performance (chips can have wildly different performance).

Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that) that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the die.

For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a 32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run fast.

The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is 98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those sockets.

Re: AMD stock rises after best earnings in 7 years

#90

Post by koffiezet »

hddherman wrote: post #81
redtuesday wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I (and many others) would take a 33% increase in core count over a 10-15% advantage in single core workloads. Even the gaming comparison is most of the time overemphasized. Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS? I feel that most of these attacks at AMD and their CPU-s tend to bend the truth a lot, and that isn't surprising, given the shady tactics that…

> Does it really matter if you are getting 88FPS or 80FPS if your monitor refresh rate is capped at 60FPS?

It does when you want "the best of the best" for gaming on an expensive 144Hz display, and also spend a ton of money on a GPU to handle that. You don't want your single-threaded CPU performance be the bottleneck in your games then - so for a top-of-the-line gaming PC, Intel is still the best choice.

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