News AMD Q3 Earnings Results

[Hitman928]

EPS is $0.75, beat by $0.14
Revenue is $4.31B, beat by $200M
Q4 revenue projection is $4.5B, above $4.25B estimates.
Q4 GM projection is 49.5%

For the full year 2021, AMD now expects revenue to grow approximately 65 percent driven by growth across all businesses, up from prior guidance of 60 percent growth. AMD expects non-GAAP gross margin to be approximately 48 percent for the full year 2021.

Advanced Micro Devices EPS beats by $0.07, beats on revenue

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): Q3 Non-GAAP EPS of $0.73 beats by $0.07; GAAP EPS of $0.75 beats by $0.14.Revenue of $4.31B (+53.9% Y/Y) beats by $200M.Press ReleaseQ3 non-GAAP gross...

seekingalpha.com

More to come.

 

[lobz]

Well sane people also said that gamestop stocks will never rise and that they are going out of business...
The stock market often doesn't make any sense at all.
Intel stock was around $30-40 at that time and intel is an established company for being very stable, it doesn't make any sense for an incredibly more financially unstable company having higher stock prices...unless it's because of people gambling, it's the same reason that crypto currency has a high price, everybody hopes that it will go higher but it's an incredibly dangerous bet to make.

And the same (kind of) people have been daydreaming about intel going bankrupt in the past 3 years.

 

[Hitman928]

What architecture would they switch? From x86 to x86 or from dx to dx (whatever graphics API sony uses)
The consoles are running an OS since several gens now, it's all about the APIs.

x86 is an ISA, not an architecture. DirectX is an API, not an architecture. The console APIs are customized for the architecture of the console to get maximum performance out of the hardware. Changing architectures mid life cycle would be a huge undertaking on the software side, including already released games. A lot of the optimizations for Zen 2 don't apply or are counterproductive for an architecture like Rocket Lake and vice versa. Same applies on the graphics side.

i would need to see numbers for that and so would sony and ms, consoles don't run cinebench or avx512, I have no idea how well rocket lake would perform in games at that power envelope, do you?

Right off the bat, Intel doesn't have any 14nm SOC that even comes close to what is in the consoles performance wise, at any power envelope, so they'd have to come up with an all new SOC design. In terms of efficiency, Zen 3 is massively more efficient than anything Intel on 14 nm. TSMC 7 nm is a much better process than Intel 14 nm so I don't know what you would expect Intel to be able to do to compete.

 

[maddie]

Well sane people also said that gamestop stocks will never rise and that they are going out of business...
The stock market often doesn't make any sense at all.
Intel stock was around $30-40 at that time and intel is an established company for being very stable, it doesn't make any sense for an incredibly more financially unstable company having higher stock prices...unless it's because of people gambling, it's the same reason that crypto currency has a high price, everybody hopes that it will go higher but it's an incredibly dangerous bet to make.

An incredible mix of reality and fantasy. Eagerly awaiting further chapters.

 

[Hitman928]

Well sane people also said that gamestop stocks will never rise and that they are going out of business...
The stock market often doesn't make any sense at all.
Intel stock was around $30-40 at that time and intel is an established company for being very stable, it doesn't make any sense for an incredibly more financially unstable company having higher stock prices...unless it's because of people gambling, it's the same reason that crypto currency has a high price, everybody hopes that it will go higher but it's an incredibly dangerous bet to make.

Stock price doesn't mean a ton by itself in this type of comparison, you need to look at how many shares of the company there are as well. For instance, if I had a business with a share price of $1,000 but only 10 shares, that would mean my company is not really worth anything. Whereas a company with $100 but 1 million shares is worth quite a bit. If you look at what the companies are valued at, Intel is valued at ~$200 billion whereas Gamestop is valued at ~$17 billion. Gamestop is still overpriced, in my opinion, but it is not valued any where near what Intel is valued at on the market.

 

[Doug S]

Stock price doesn't mean a ton by itself in this type of comparison, you need to look at how many shares of the company there are as well. For instance, if I had a business with a share price of $1,000 but only 10 shares, that would mean my company is not really worth anything. Whereas a company with $100 but 1 million shares is worth quite a bit. If you look at what the companies are valued at, Intel is valued at ~$200 billion whereas Gamestop is valued at ~$17 billion. Gamestop is still overpriced, in my opinion, but it is not valued any where near what Intel is valued at on the market.

It scares me how many people trade stocks who don't understand much about how the stock market works. Not saying the guy you are responding to is necessarily one of those, but you see them all the time when people have misunderstandings about the basics of the market. Apps like Robinhood make it super easy for anyone to trade, and when we're in a period where all assets are going up in price they don't learn the hard lessons people who have been investing longer or started during more perilous times have learned.

You saw the same thing in the late 90s when everything was going up and "day traders" were everywhere, one of the managers of a bar a friend owned was daytrading all day and then working nights. He ended up losing everything, though luckily he was young and unmarried so it didn't ruin his life just taught him a hard lesson. You saw the same thing again during the housing bubble when so many people became "flippers" and many of them lost everything. With bubbles in the stock market, bond market and housing market at the same time, plus new speculative markets for things that have no intrinsic value like cryptocurrency and NFTs, it is going to be a very hard landing when the music finally stops this time.

If only I knew whether it will happen in 3 months or 3 years, I could make a fortune!

 

[DrMrLordX]

Wasn't it kind of yes and no? IIRC the plan was for the Cell to do the early part of the pipeline, and then have a really simple yet beefy "GPU" that just did the rasterization and pixel shading? This way, the part of the pipeline that required high-precision compute would be in the Cell, and then the gpu part would just do fixed-function and short integer pixel shader math. This would let it be both super cheap and super fast. And the way it failed was that they found that while, yes, a Cell could in principle do vertex shading and the necessary setup steps, there was no way in hell they could move that data out of the cell and into the GPU fast enough to be competitive with GPUs that did the whole shebang.

That seems correct, yes.

 

[TheELF]

x86 is an ISA, not an architecture. DirectX is an API, not an architecture. The console APIs are customized for the architecture of the console to get maximum performance out of the hardware. Changing architectures mid life cycle would be a huge undertaking on the software side, including already released games. A lot of the optimizations for Zen 2 don't apply or are counterproductive for an architecture like Rocket Lake and vice versa. Same applies on the graphics side.

No they aren't, nobody does low level coding anymore for consoles.
They use a game engine running on a huge PC system to design anything and then scale it down to the performance level of the console.
There is no architecture specific thing other than use cores xy for running the os and run z amount of threads because that's howmany are left.

Right off the bat, Intel doesn't have any 14nm SOC that even comes close to what is in the consoles performance wise, at any power envelope, so they'd have to come up with an all new SOC design. In terms of efficiency, Zen 3 is massively more efficient than anything Intel on 14 nm. TSMC 7 nm is a much better process than Intel 14 nm so I don't know what you would expect Intel to be able to do to compete.

View attachment 52269

Off or on the bat these are productivity numbers and have nothing to do with gaming.
I know that intel doesn't have any soc right now, that wasn't the point, the point was that they could make one.

Also 10th gen isn't rocket, and if you run 11th gen the way it's meant to be run, meaning following intel TDP it does match ryzen in performance and power draw is just slightly above.
Looking at 11700k power limits enforced which is intel specs and the 5800x even though the consoles have the previous gen of zen.

Spoiler

Intel Core i7-11700K Review: The Chip of Last Resort

High power consumption meets high pricing, again.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[NTMBK]

No they aren't, nobody does low level coding anymore for consoles.
They use a game engine running on a huge PC system to design anything and then scale it down to the performance level of the console.
There is no architecture specific thing other than use cores xy for running the os and run z amount of threads because that's howmany are left.

On the graphics side they absolutely do optimize for the hardware on console. Sizing buffers and data structures to best fit the caches and local memory of the graphics architecture, tuning the shaders to make the best use of GPU instruction set and register counts, etc. Not every game does it- but the highest performing AAA games do, and in particular the console exclusives will.

And remember that console games ship with compiled GPU code. On Windows, a game comes with a hardware agnostic bytecode- that bytecode then needs to be compiled at install time or runtime into the specific instructions for your GPU. But on console they skip that step and ship the hardware specific instructions. So if Intel wanted to be able to run current gen games on their GPU architecture, they would need to build tools that can take AMD GPU instructions and transpile them to Intel GPU instructions- a huge task, and one that could lead to all sorts of compatibility and performance weirdness.

 

[TheELF]

And remember that console games ship with compiled GPU code. On Windows, a game comes with a hardware agnostic bytecode- that bytecode then needs to be compiled at install time or runtime into the specific instructions for your GPU. But on console they skip that step and ship the hardware specific instructions. So if Intel wanted to be able to run current gen games on their GPU architecture, they would need to build tools that can take AMD GPU instructions and transpile them to Intel GPU instructions- a huge task, and one that could lead to all sorts of compatibility and performance weirdness.

Hm, but both ps4 and ps5 compared to their xbox counterparts had "different amounts of" GPU and then there where the pro consoles, so how does that work?!

 

[NTMBK]

Hm, but both ps4 and ps5 compared to their xbox counterparts had "different amounts of" GPU and then there where the pro consoles, so how does that work?!

That's why console games need specific patches to make the most of the upgraded consoles.

The PS4 Pro has what is known as "Boost Mode". This runs the CPU and GPU at the higher clock speeds of the Pro (911MHz GPU instead of 800MHz), but doesn't enable the extra 18CUs of the GPU. This lets older PS4 games that never got a PS4 Pro patch run a little bit more smoothly than they did on base PS4 hardware, but it still leaves half of the GPU performance unused.

 

[moinmoin]

But I'm highly suspicious of Nintendo's stance on continuing use of NV products when they deliberately stuck with a soon-to-be-EoLed SoC

I find it completely hilarious how many people who should know better with a straight face spell doom to Nintendo for a SoC being EoLed for the open market, all while it's in use in a product that sees growth from 15 mil units in FY17 to 28.8 mil in FY21 per year. Of course Nvidia is going to totally stop the production of the SoC contained in those >28 mil products per year right now, makes total sense. Not! 🤦

instead of moving on to something like Carmel immediately.

Nintendo never has been a company to move to newer parts if just reusing existing parts is sufficient. They just launched an otherwise completely unchanged OLED version of the Switch, and like so many newly launched products these days it's completely supply starved.

PS3 was never supposed to need a dGPU, but Cell proved inadequate to the task of compute AND graphics. NV was the backup plan. It's not surprising that that relationship was short-term.

Tells much about Nvidia's effort. It was only a one off and Nvidia visibly didn't spend much effort on it. Nvidia could have surprised everybody with a high quality part, but chose to do the opposite.

 

[Hitman928]

No they aren't, nobody does low level coding anymore for consoles.
They use a game engine running on a huge PC system to design anything and then scale it down to the performance level of the console.
There is no architecture specific thing other than use cores xy for running the os and run z amount of threads because that's howmany are left.

Off or on the bat these are productivity numbers and have nothing to do with gaming.
I know that intel doesn't have any soc right now, that wasn't the point, the point was that they could make one.

Also 10th gen isn't rocket, and if you run 11th gen the way it's meant to be run, meaning following intel TDP it does match ryzen in performance and power draw is just slightly above.
Looking at 11700k power limits enforced which is intel specs and the 5800x even though the consoles have the previous gen of zen.

Spoiler

Intel Core i7-11700K Review: The Chip of Last Resort

High power consumption meets high pricing, again.

www.tomshardware.com

Just addressing the efficiency issue; first, I no longer consider Tom's a reliable review site. They are constantly messing up their tables/graphs. I've already pointed this out in another review but even if we look at Tom's, for efficiency you need to look at performance and power, not just average power. Hence you need a plot such as this:

Your argument about under gaming the load is less so the difference is smaller is valid, except we are talking about a full SOC where the thing is heavily loaded during gaming (at least the big name games) all the time, so looking at a heavy multithreaded work load on the CPU is about as close as we're going to get as a point of comparison. Additionally, the TSMC 7nm process has greater efficiency advantages at mobile type frequencies where the console chips are designed to run, so TSMC 7nm will have a further advantage in a console, which is why I showed the high end mobile CPU comparison, it is much more in line with what would (and is) actually used in a console. I honestly can't believe we even have to discuss this.

For software optimizations, they absolutely are done for the given architectures. More heavily on the GPU side, but CPU as well. Developers only use high end desktops to program on while they wait for actual final dev kits from the console makers. Once they get the dev kits, they target the exact hardware that is in the console. Small, independent game devs will have more generic code but that's why independent games typically end up very light on graphics or they try for higher graphic fidelity but their games run like crap. The bigger budget teams will spend time optimizing their code to get better performance with better looking graphics.