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AMD Q3 Result

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ultimatebob said:
Would you really want to do that, without knowing that AMD is still going to be in business and providing driver updates 2 years from now?
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When people on this forum make comments like that it really shows just how ignorant you are to how a business operates.
 
Seems to me AMD is just padding their cash reserve so their credit rating doesn't get worse than it already is. Being a completely fabless company puts them in a really terrible position against a competitor like Intel that controls it's entire supply chain. If Zen is dependent on TSMC for quantity, AMD may not even have the money to negotiate for low enough prices to produce the kind of volume OEMs demand. If I were a corporation, I wouldn't even want to do business with a fabless CPU company because I know they have zero control over their production line.

Also, by 2017 we'll see a Skylake refresh, Canonlake, Skylake-E, how is Zen going to compete against all that? Does anyone here really think a processor farmed out to TSMC will be able to compete in perf/watt vs Intel? No chance in hell. And if Intel wants, they can adjust prices freely thanks to a flush bank account + full supply chain control and not even take a dent in profitability where it would completely bankrupt AMD.

On the GPU side it's not much better, even if they improve perf/watt by 2x with their 16nm GPUs, that doesn't really give them much vs current Maxwell let alone Pascal on HBM 2. They also don't have the money to compete against NVIDIA so if NV drops prices, that will put pressure on AMD and they'd have to slash prices to compete and looking at their abysmal margins, that's a sure way into the grave for them.

There is no upside to any of this for anyone except for AMD's BoD and executives who will come out winners with golden parachutes and that's probably the sole reason they keep selling off bits of AMD + cutting workers, so they can get a big pay day before the boat sinks. As a consumer, I wouldn't touch AMD GPUs or APUs with a ten foot pole knowing what a precarious position they are in right now because driver support can cease anytime between now and 2019 when the company folds.
 
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ShintaiDK said:
They said the exact same thing about GloFo and the WSA.
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THIS.


AMD is not in a good position to negotiate with anybody. I don't have confidence in their middle management, but i hope their engineers will pull something near or equal to Intel offerings in 2017
 
tential said:
When people on this forum make comments like that it really shows just how ignorant you are to how a business operates.
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You don't think that's something to consider at this point? I wouldn't want to spend $600 on a high end Radeon card at this point knowing that it might become the next 3dfx Voodoo 5.
 
ultimatebob said:
You don't think that's something to consider at this point? I wouldn't want to spend $600 on a high end Radeon card at this point knowing that it might become the next 3dfx Voodoo 5.
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He didn't say $600 though. He said to spend $37 on a top of the line APU. It's a little different value proposition. A $37 A10 APU and a $40 MB would be a pretty cost effective upgrade for a lot of existing systems.
 
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5150Joker said:
On the GPU side it's not much better, even if they improve perf/watt by 2x with their 16nm GPUs, that doesn't really give them much vs current Maxwell let alone Pascal on HBM 2. They also don't have the money to compete against NVIDIA so if NV drops prices, that will put pressure on AMD and they'd have to slash prices to compete and looking at their abysmal margins, that's a sure way into the grave for them.
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That's a little dramatic, don't you think? Even at the Fury X launch the 980 Ti was only 19% better in perf/watt @ 4k according to TPU. Doubling perf/watt would put Arctic Islands massively ahead of Maxwell 2. If both companies get similar gains with the new node and a new uarch you'd expect Pascal to continue nVidia's lead in perf/watt, but it's way too early to make any predictions on those gains.
 
5150Joker said:
Seems to me AMD is just padding their cash reserve so their credit rating doesn't get worse than it already is. Being a completely fabless company puts them in a really terrible position against a competitor like Intel that controls it's entire supply chain. If Zen is dependent on TSMC for quantity, AMD may not even have the money to negotiate for low enough prices to produce the kind of volume OEMs demand. If I were a corporation, I wouldn't even want to do business with a fabless CPU company because I know they have zero control over their production line.
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Being a fabless company isn't the problem. It works fine for both Nvidia and Apple. The problem is that AMD has all the disadvantages of being a fabless company with none of the advantages, because of the terrible WSA.
 
Ajay said:
I disagree. They need a better CPU, if AMD is targeting servers, then Zen needs to beat an equivalently priced Xeon.
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Yes, it needs to beat an equivalently priced Xeon. It doesn't have to beat the absolute best chips Intel has at the high end if they cost ten times as much.

Intel's profit margins are high enough that there is plenty of room for AMD to nibble away at the low to mid end of the server range (Xeon E3/E5) without having to beat Intel outright.
 
JDG1980 said:
Yes, it needs to beat an equivalently priced with equivalent TCO Xeon. It doesn't have to beat the absolute best chips Intel has at the high end if they cost ten times as much.
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FTFY. You can't price a server the same way you price a gaming desktop.
 
Ajay said:
In reality, the only way Zen 'saves' AMD is for it to have the same effect as the K8 did (good sales, though bound by manufacturing output, and high ASP == high margins). It's just nearly impossible to see how AMD beats Intel in a similar fashion today - given the maturity of x86 processors and the tremendous cost of development.
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very simple. target the growing gaming market and ditch the iGPU crap thing that eats 50% of your silicon die space. Then you have enough transistor budget to beat intel (moar cores, bigger cache) or to provide better value for money (as your cost will be lower). Gamers are buying GPU anyway, so the loss of iGPU is not a dealbreaker.

In professional CAD/CAM/Visualization market + HPC, same strategy. Rely on pure performance without iGPU crap.

Finally, in the server market, with a bare minimum iGPU, use the transistor budget for inter-fabric and better multi-thread performance per node.

Am I good enough for an armchair internet CEO title ? :colbert:
 
mrmt said:
FTFY. You can't price a server the same way you price a gaming desktop.
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I assumed that "beat an equivalently priced Xeon" meant competitive perf/watt. Obviously if their perf/watt is too far behind Intel then they won't get much uptake. I think they'll be able to come reasonably close with a FinFET process and a new ground-up architecture.
 
So now we have gone from "fusion is the future" to "getting rid of that igpu crap". For your information, Intel does have servers without the "igpu crap" either.

As far as the consumer market, no igpu is a *huge* disadvantage for all except a very small and ever decreasing market that uses a discrete card and of course pretty much rules out mobile entirely. Intel also has the HEDT platform for consumers without the "igpu crap" as well, although it irritates me no end that they do not make a mainstream cpu with more than 4 cores.
 
frozentundra123456 said:
So now we have gone from "fusion is the future" to "getting rid of that igpu crap". For your information, Intel does have servers without the "igpu crap" either.

As far as the consumer market, no igpu is a *huge* disadvantage for all except a very small and ever decreasing market that uses a discrete card and of course pretty much rules out mobile entirely. Intel also has the HEDT platform for consumers without the "igpu crap" as well, although it irritates me no end that they do not make a mainstream cpu with more than 4 cores.
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For the size of their cpu/apu revenue, even 10% of x86 server is a huge thing for them, ~400M a quarter.

AMD did realize HSA is still really far away. AMD also realized they cannot relying on OEM. So apu is no longer their high priority. And also now ogpu's performance is really limited by dram speed.

HEDT is also interesting. Intel sort of forced everybody to pay 50% of the die for the igpu, while most of pc gamers have a discrete gpu. This segment could be a big opportunity of AMD's 4 core ZEN.
 
I wonder if intel would be interested in acquiring the Radeon gpu business from amd? That would give them discreet graphics and they have the global channels to move the product.
 
Puffnstuff said:
I wonder if intel would be interested in acquiring the Radeon gpu business from amd? That would give them discreet graphics and they have the global channels to move the product.
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I believe AMD would rather donate Radeon to NVIDIA than give it to Intel 😛
 
Puffnstuff said:
I wonder if intel would be interested in acquiring the Radeon gpu business from amd? That would give them discreet graphics and they have the global channels to move the product.
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I dont think Intel would want it. The question is if there is even anyone that would want it.
 
5150Joker said:
Seems to me AMD is just padding their cash reserve so their credit rating doesn't get worse than it already is. Being a completely fabless company puts them in a really terrible position against a competitor like Intel that controls it's entire supply chain. If Zen is dependent on TSMC for quantity, AMD may not even have the money to negotiate for low enough prices to produce the kind of volume OEMs demand. If I were a corporation, I wouldn't even want to do business with a fabless CPU company because I know they have zero control over their production line.
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Maybe Apple's move to Intel will help AMD?
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2451572
 
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