AMD, Which Lost Over $2.8 Billion In 5 Years, Takes a Hit After New Report (arstechnica.com) 91
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, AMD's stock price plunged nearly 9 percent after a report by Morgan Stanley, a major investment bank, which found that "microprocessor momentum" has slowed. According to CNBC, a new report by analyst Joseph Moore found that "cryptocurrency mining driven sales for AMD's graphics chips will decline by 50 percent next year or a $250 million decline in revenue. He also forecasts video game console demand will decline by 5.5 percent in 2018." As per AMD's own SEC filings, the company lost over $2.8 billion from 2012 through 2016. However, new releases from AMD suggest that it may be on something of a resurgent track. As Ars reported last month, AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper processors re-established AMD's chips as competitive with Intel's.
Undervalued (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm terrible at picking stocks. But I'd say buy now.
AMD had a fantastic Q3 and predicted a slower Q4 (as expected), and the stock has fallen a ton in the past few days. It really makes no sense.
AMD also has fantastic products out now with more to come.
Re:Undervalued (Score:4, Insightful)
the stock market is mostly driven by lemming mentality, emotion and knee jerk reactions
Re:Undervalued (Score:4, Insightful)
the stock market is mostly driven by lemming mentality, emotion and knee jerk reactions
Actually, not really. Where this is true for the "retail" market and individual investors who think they can trade stocks on hunches like they play poker and don't know what they are actually doing, the majority of stock trading is driven by program trading.
The people who trade on emotion, get slaughtered by the big program traders who can do all sorts of clever tricks by looking at data your average retail investor cannot afford to get. Even if you *could* afford to get the data, the big program traders would beat you to the trade because they pay big bucks to be physically closer and being milliseconds behind will cost you.
Imagine being able to see all the queued up orders for a stock and having enough money to manipulate the stock price in the short term... Then you can sell short, trigger a stack of stop loss limit orders which are near the current price turning them into market orders and collect some cheap shares to cover your short and make a tidy profit with nearly zero risk. Doesn't happen all the time, but you just turn the computers on and let them watch for it while you play golf and rack in the cash when it happens. Of course, there are other ways to make money doing stuff like this...
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Yes, they're worthless and are the reason you will have about 10% less stuff in retirement.
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Their whole point will eventually be the pike their head is mounted on.
Fuck speculators. I'm not a Communist, but it is hard not to cheer when you learn that the Communists in the early USSR implemented capital punishment for speculators.
Right. I know. It's all about freedumb. Freedumb to shift beans around on a gameboard while skimming wealth from the poor fucks who actually produce something in their daily work.
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No, they take a few cake crumbs every day, but retirement is a long game. The crumbs add up and mean you have a smaller slice when you retire.
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the stock market is mostly driven by lemming mentality, emotion and knee jerk reactions
Actually, not really.
AMD's stock price dropped simply because some bank suddenly has a certain opinion. That's a pretty good example of a knee jerk reaction.
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Stop-limit orders, as their name suggests, insert limit orders when triggered, not market orders.
Stop orders, which do insert market orders, are a different order type, and are more common since they're supported by more exchanges.
Otherwise market manipulation is illegal. I'm no compliance specialist, but that sounds like phishing.
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Every major US corporation that exports loses money, well at least on the books. There are some really, really profitable companies in tax havens, with names that sound like the US corporations, practically no employees but they make trillions combined. Tax cheating corporations with their hands stuffing the pockets of politicians, all fucking lose money, yep uh huh, sure, fucking liars.
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Millisecond advantage isn't so much for informational advantage as exploiting arbitrage.
Re:Undervalued (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah the stock market is full of rampant speculation, but I think Wall Street is probably has it right. I know I will be modded down for pointing this out but Coffee Lake [reddit.com] is [amazon.com] sold [newegg.com] out [frys.com] everywhere [bhphotovideo.com], Ryzen [newegg.com] is [amazon.com] not [frys.com]. Although Ryzen has made AMD competitive, most PC builders are still buying Intel.
Given that it took Intel 8 months to add Coffee Lake in between Kaby Lake and Cannon Lake and it took AMD 5 years to develop Ryzen... the situation that happened between 2003-2006 when AMD was the technically superior choice is unlikely to ever happen again. The good news is that Ryzen has made AMD just slightly profitable again, so at least they are no longer in danger of imminent bankruptcy.
Re:Undervalued (Score:4, Informative)
More data to back that up:
Steam Hardware and Software Survey: http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
Currently showing data between April 2016 and September 2017. Includes the launch dates of AMD's latest major CPU and GPU products. AMD's GPU% dropped from 25.4% to 17.1% during the period. In the CPU Graph, AMD dropped from 23.3% to 16.53%.
GPU detailed data here: http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
CPU detailed data here: http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
Reasons for this:
- Vega was a total flop.
- Ryzen was hit by the a rare Linux compile bug (some source here: https://hothardware.com/news/a... [hothardware.com]).
- Ryzen OC potential is modest.
- Threadripper is awesome but very, very niche and not recommended for gaming due to lower IPC and frequency compared to its Intel counterpart.
- And most importantly, AMD was the underdog for way too long. It's like getting back up in the boxing ring after most spectators have left for home.
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- Ryzen OC potential is modest.
I will have to disagree there. R7-1700 here, 900mhz overclock. Stable. at 1.3v(lower than stock voltage) mind you this isnt the first ryzen cpu i have overclocked... they overclock quite well actually... and they smoke anything intel has even close to the price point. and go head to head with the $1000+ cpu's. So tell me again how intel pays you?
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R7 1700 (which I own) has 3.0 GHz base frequency, 3.7 GHz boost frequency and max 3.75 GHz boost frequency with XFR.
i7 6800K (which I also own) has 3.4 GHz base frequency, 3.6 GHz boost frequency and max 3.8 GHz boost frequency with TBM 3.0.
My R7 1700 reached 3.9 GHz stable after much tinkering (900 MHz above base), I get no boot at any frequency above that.
My 6800K reached 4.625 GHz stable after about 30 minutes of UEFI configuration, and at 4.75 GHz it crashes in synthetic tests but works in daily use, in
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Yea you can do that with a bunch of extra voltage. If I wanted to go above 1.35v on my could get it above 4ghz no problem. Stable with synthetic and prime. My goal was overclock with lower voltage to preserve cpu life. The way I sit it should be able to OC at this speed for a good 10 years before any degratiion. Plus ryzen is still new, will do nothing but get better. But either way, to each their own. I prefer amd for price to performance plus things like ecc ram and OC ability on all chips. Some people do
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My goal was overclock with lower voltage to preserve cpu life. The way I sit it should be able to OC at this speed for a good 10 years before any degratiion.
Wait, what?
There is no such thing ("CPU life, degradation") since mid-2000s. There are overclocked I5 2500K and 2600K CPUs in my house (the file server and my wife's PC) going strong for the last 6 years.
Agreed on the price/performance ratio, though, AMD has been a budget-CPU company for quite some time, and I am glad they are starting to compete with Intel with Ryzen and Threadripper.
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Higher voltages sure does cause degration, if you overclock and dont go above recommended voltage, then you get normal expected life. If you add a bunch of over volting you start to degrade the gates over prolonged use.
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The discussion is academic. High-to-extreme overclocking would indeed reduce the projected CPU life from 10+ years to something like 4-5 years. Do you need to worry about it? Not unless you only upgrade once a decade.
And it's not "the gates" degrading, that's ridiculous. In theory, the CPU oscillator would degrade over long periods of time (all oscillators do), but as I mentioned before, the reduction in life is calculated in percentages, not absolute values. 20% faster degradation translates to a CPU life
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So apparently I had the theory in the way it degrades incorrect. From all of the reading I have done on the subject, it seems that voltage is still a major factor in that equation. And to answer your question j do upgrade rather frequently but I still keep the old systems for other uses and normally leave the overclocks as high as I can safely get them. I have never burnt a cpu up, I have killed motherboards in the process though. I thank you for the bit of knowledge you gave me and would like to know if yo
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No worries, I have gained knowledge on these things because I have been doing hardware reviews and I had to learn these things.
Now, it's pretty difficult to provide a holistic type of information on how these things work, but generally the CPU clock speed is generated by a crystal oscillator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator) which feeds a PLL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop) to achieve required frequencies.
Now, the oscillator resides on the motherboard and the PLL usually
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Coffee Lake is sold out because it's a paper launch. Ryzen isn't because they're getting 80%+ chips full up with over 99% of chips usable for the lower tier skus. Not to mention that Zen+ at 12nm hits around February.
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AMD has terrible margins though; Intel and Nvidia are at 60% while AMD is in the 30%s. Not good for investors.
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That depends; if that is already priced into the stock, then they're effectively exactly the same on that metric.
The problem for investors would be if they were expecting 60% and only got 30%.
AMD isn't the big fish, but everybody knew that already.
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I'm terrible at picking stocks. But I'd say buy now.
It really makes no sense.
The famous Economist John Maynard Keynes was once asked if he thought that the stock market would rise or fall. His answer was something like:
"It doesn't matter what I think, if the stock market will rise or fall . . . what is important, is what I think, what other people think about whether the stock market will rise or fall."
Whether a company has a functioning business model, or even the remotest notion of ever even having a functioning business model it a moot point these days.
All you need is the ca
Re:Undervalued (Score:4, Interesting)
AMD had a fantastic Q3 and predicted a slower Q4 (as expected), and the stock has fallen a ton in the past few days. It really makes no sense.
Well, the stock has gone from $2 to almost $15 and then slumped back to $11 so it's not like the market has really lost faith but the expectations for AMDs recovery were maybe exaggerated. Right now AMD is probably billing a lot of semi-custom revenue for SoC that go into the launch of Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro was last year, next year will be a slow year. Also Q3 is generally when Microsoft/Sony buy chips for their Christmas sales. Ryzen and TR is doing well in some markets, but Intel has pretty aggressively slashed prices to close the launch gap and enterprise customers take a long time to trust AMD EPYC servers.
Vega is an okay response to Pascal as a GPU but it's better as a crypto-mining card, the question is how quickly does the Ethereum market move to FGPA/ASIC custom chips like Bitcoin has, will the ICO bubble pop and so there's a lot of risk there. And don't forget that AMD has sold off and licensed a ton of assets and got a pretty high debt burden. And the PC market is in a general slump, nothing their fault but it doesn't help. With Zen they've put enough product on the table that they seem to be out of immediate danger and breaking even, but I still think they have a long way to go towards stable growth and profit.
Re:Undervalued (Score:4, Interesting)
The Jump from $2 to $15 priced in all the growth you're talking about. In fact it priced in more growth assumptions. If AMD doesn't hit all the targets that got priced in (look to the consensus earning estimates made last quarter that covers the next year) the price is going to fall.
EPYC is still on full allocation to cloud providers and OEMs only. It's impossible to buy on the individual market. This makes it apparent that it's popular but how popular we won't know until AMD tells us how many they sold, it could be simply that their production runs have not been large enough to tackle demand and that's a scary though considering we a more than a full quarter away from when production started. I'm not encouraged by the fact that Supermicro hasn't bothered finalizing their single core motherboard designs. I'm willing to bet they are having production issues and they haven't sold anywhere near what everyone thought they would. For example if the 0.08cent per share earnings that was the consensus for 4Q (I'm going off memory here not verifying, my intent is the scale not the exact figure) ends up being half that you'll see the price fall to $7.
Personally I believe AMD is missing a critical envelope here in the individual server market where I think they would do relatively decent on the linux server market. They trying to ensure Cloud computing and OEM's get first pick. I understand why they did this, they wanted the companies that will absolutely love their high core counts and expanded PCIe bus to get first shot and it helps the cloud providers are happy to buy thousands of these at a time and can fully utilize them right out of the door because their clouds run Linux (ie they won't be waiting on Microsoft to update the windows kernel). But if Google, Facebook and Rackspace get all the production for the next 6 months there never will be an individual market for these chips where they could build some lasting execution. The cloud companies are happy to jump around and buy from anyone who can provide the most compute per dollar per watt. You don't get long term purchases in that market, where in the individual market you'll build brand awareness and are far more likely to get return purchases. The PCIe advantage in particular I believe could draw off a significant number of Intel sales in the individual server market and benefit AMD for years to come.
In the end all that's going to matter is can AMD remain competitive with Intel and avoid missteps while continuing to execute. They've had bad management IMO the last couple decades, pursuing fads with no long term vision and significantly overpaying their executives. Only by cleaning out the MBA's and stocking management with engineering experience and a desire to compete do they stand a chance here. They need to start executing and planning to remain competitive with Intel. Ultimately this will decide if Bankruptcy eventually takes them as that $2 stock price portended but Ryzen barely avoided.
where are the ThreadRipper ipmi boards? (Score:2)
where are the ThreadRipper ipmi boards?
1p EPYC may be a bit to much much less 2P EPYC (unless you want only 1-2 nodes) and less cores but higher clock ThreadRipper are would work good + 128 pci-e is to much unless you want a big PCI-e storage node and even then where are the 1P Epyc boards???
For stuff like CEPH you want muilt nodes so you can update and reboot without down time for the cluster. For hosting VM's you need the room to unload a server update and reboot it with out downing VM's.
Re: where are the ThreadRipper ipmi boards? (Score:2)
Re: Undervalued (Score:1)
According to the ethereum roadmap, this change should happen within the next year or two, although if they run behind schedule 2020 isn't out of the question. Once PoS is rolled out, the crypto mining market for graphics cards is likely to drop dramatically.
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I'm terrible at picking stocks. But I'd say buy now.
AMD had a fantastic Q3 and predicted a slower Q4 (as expected), and the stock has fallen a ton in the past few days. It really makes no sense. AMD also has fantastic products out now with more to come.
Sadly, reality doesn't have a lot to do with the stock market. It's not current, but you might remember how investors propped up SCO for years when the only thing they had going for them was a slim chance that they might win their lawsuit against IBM and come into a fortune from IBM and other companies having to pay licensing fees. William Poundstone wrote a book a few years ago called _Fortune's Formula_ and if you read it, it will change your thinking about the stock market forever in a negative way.
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It really makes no sense.
Not if you don't factor in the effect of people not really knowing how the general consumer market works (in this case people don't realize that most of the Christmas sales are made in Q3 so Q4 will always see a drop-off in revenue) and short sellers, of which there are a lot of and some very big players, who always try to cause stock prices to come down when there's no reason for them to do so.
Seriously, the less you talk/think about stock prices and their fluctuations the better you're going to feel ab
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I'm terrible at picking stocks. But I'd say buy now.
If that wasn't a suggestion to short then I don't know what is.
That researcher's name ... (Score:2)
Is this the new Moore's Law?
Dropped the ball on mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
Both AMD and Intel dropped the ball on getting x86 onto smartphones, despite the benefits in compatibility between desktops and phones it could have provided. It certainly would have been possible.
Desktops and laptops are still going to remain the top end of the market, and the choice for doing real work, also gaming, since the form factor allows for expansion and ventilation to support more powerful systems. We are still far away from being able to have the CPU power for real, lifelike gaming, such as real time ray tracing. So there is plenty to drive the need for faster CPUs. Desktop systems should still be for people who want a lot of expansion including a larger case, this is the niche it can fill. The idea that by offering compact desktop cases sort of runs against why someone would want a desktop system and weakens what differentiates it from a laptop. Why buy a compact desktop system when it offers no expansion advantage over a laptop? I see many manufacturers offering compact desktop systems, when really I doubt it will help.
Mobile and desktop systems really fill two different market niches so its a mistaken idea that the mobile can replace a desktop system. Working on a spreadsheet or taxes on a 3" screen? No thanks.
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I can build a smartphone with ARM, so why would I want to shoehorn a desktop CPU in? It is just more complication with no benefit. Why would any engineer prefer that to what they have? On the hardware side, it is a nice ecosystem for the product designer!
They're going to have a hard time competing with Texas Instruments when it comes to designing an easy to use chip around the licensed arm core, and the compiler toolchain is exactly the same as it would be with intel or amd. The only thing you could possibl
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Mobile and desktop systems really fill two different market niches so its a mistaken idea that the mobile can replace a desktop system. Working on a spreadsheet or taxes on a 3" screen? No thanks.
But it's also a mistake to think that you need a 100W CPU and 250W GPU to do everyday spreadsheets. Look at some of the micro PCs [zotac.com] out there and compare them to a high-end smartphone. Why can't you make a "PC" like that with mobile guts? Mostly it's that it doesn't run normal Windows, not any technical reason. Take the Sony Xperia XZ Premium for example, 3840x2160 display, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage + SDXC, 8 core (4 high performance) CPU @ 2.45 GHz... does it matter if that 4K display is 5.46" or if it's a 32" m
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dont forget with a simple hub most phones happily accept keyboard and mouse input along with AV output making it a very appealing option if all one wants to do is balance the home budget and write a letter to mom
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We'll be looking at this more in future as the potential to move to a single mobile device with a dock at work and home could save significa
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Re: Dropped the ball on mobile (Score:2)
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In the case of AMD (unlike intel), they simply were not able to undertake the R&D Spending of producing an ultra-low-power X-86 chip for mobile applications (on top of R&Ding and producing their desktop and server bread and butter).
But ATi in the early to mid '00s had a very promising mobile graphics R&D group and products. This was sold to Qualcomm by Hector Ruiz, and became the basis of the Adreno Graphics unit in all Qualcomm chips... This stuff goes toe to toe with Mali, Imagination and Viva
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I thought the entire problem was x86 (or the current chipsets) aren't well suited for phones? Maybe I'm just misremembering a poor discussion.
But Intel did make "mobile" processors. The Atom. And they (from experience) sucked absolute ass. For the first-gen models they chopped out the entire out-of-order scheduling (granted, it's a a LARGE chunk of die area) to lower the thermal/price/power usage. But it was slow as piss.
Then again, when I see benchmarks compare my Samsung Galaxy S5 to my ... old chromebook
Re: Dropped the ball on mobile (Score:2)
how much did intel.. (Score:1)
... (who's own stocks are surging up, and at 52-week-high)
slide under the table for this bad-for-the-competition "report"?
I do not agree with said report, except.... (Score:2)
The market for AMD GPUs for mining may perhaps dry out, because, just as so many cryptocurrencies since BitCoin, the arms race make it move from CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASICs ...
Also, in some other cryptocurrencies, were the dominant factor is memory size, at some point you need to go from unisocket home rigs to multisocket server rigs, to thaurus interconnects...
That means that, for any new cryptocurrency, once it explodes, it moves from small time miners to Industrial/Profesional setups.
What is expected
AMD & nVidia have both said they don't expect (Score:2)
Isn't this not just AMD (Score:2)
Seems like.. (Score:3)
Someone want to catch the Raven ridge train, so it's knocking down AMD a few notches to buy stock.
Mobile (Score:2)
Intel stuff is a bunch of crap when it comes to slim laptops/tablet/phones. If AMD can come up with something capable of playing an average modern game or straming a 4K video, that would be very cool.
As usual, stock analysts are idiots! (Score:2)
What these people don't understand is that the PC/laptop market dropped due to a lack of innovation by Intel in the years where AMD was not competitive. How many people with a second generation i7 saw no reason to upgrade until this year? AMD Ryzen came out in March, and for the first time in a VERY long time, AMD was fully competitive again, to the point where Intel started to flail around and try to figure out how to respond. The results are that people are responding to the shift in the industry a
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Fundamentals (Score:2)
1. AMD has returned to profit and is reinvesting to continue momentum.
2. AMD currently has the edge in multi-threaded workloads which is the future.
3. AMD have release their ZEN/Vega APU that performs well compared to intel but at much lower TDP
4. The crypto market IS JUST STARTING if you look at how we are edging closer to bitcoin ETF and market regulation allowing major international players to enter the market this will be obvious.
5. AMD lost BILLIONS due to Intel's anti-competitive practices bac