News [SA] Advanced Micro Devices EPS beats by $0.01, beats on revenue

Hitman928

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Edit: initial article had the wrong EPS number and it ended up being a beat by 1 cent on EPS and beat on revenue by $50M.

They also gave lower than expected revenue guidance for Q1 but higher full year 2020 guidance. I am at meetings all day but will try to update with more info later today if others don't do it before then.
 
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krumme

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While apple revenue is aprox 4000% as high. Crazy.
And yeaa consoles must have falling of a cliff midway in 2018, because q4 19 is 50% over q4 18.
 

exquisitechar

Senior member
Apr 18, 2017
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Console sales must really have been bad.
And even when you adjust for that, Epyc isn’t selling well enough, it is clear it’s doing pretty damn badly. Rome only seems to be successful in HPC. Everywhere else, it’s all Xeon Xeon Xeon. Shows what challenges AMD has to overcome when they can’t sell such vastly superior CPUs.
 

Markfw

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May 16, 2002
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And even when you adjust for that, Epyc isn’t selling well enough, it is clear it’s doing pretty damn badly. Rome only seems to be successful in HPC. Everywhere else, it’s all Xeon Xeon Xeon. Shows what challenges AMD has to overcome when they can’t sell such vastly superior CPUs.
Yes, I have an EPYC 7742 coming tomorrow. I anticipate some killer benchmarks based on the world records we have seen. How they are not selling every one, I don;t know. The dual 7601's are kicking butt in DC world, and those are cheap !
 
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Markfw

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So SA got the EPS number wrong and AMD beat EPS by one cent, not a miss. Will update with more details when I have more time.
When you have time, can you translate these into "How well is the datacenter (EPYC) doing ? " and "How well is workstation doing and how is desktop doing" etc.....

Console sales being up or down and may impact the numbers, but Lisa Su has spent all this time advertizing Rome and Matisse etc...

Is THAT working.
 

Hitman928

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When you have time, can you translate these into "How well is the datacenter (EPYC) doing ? " and "How well is workstation doing and how is desktop doing" etc.....

Console sales being up or down and may impact the numbers, but Lisa Su has spent all this time advertizing Rome and Matisse etc...

Is THAT working.

I'll try to give more of a breakdown later but Ryzen is doing really well, Epyc is slow but steady growth. Radeon actually seems to be doing better than expected also. Console sales seem to be basically non-existent at this point and will stay that way until Q2 or Q3.

AMD is projecting upwards of 30% revenue growth this year which, if they can achieve this, is even more significant given that they just had their highest revenue year ever in 2019.
 

Markfw

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I'll try to give more of a breakdown later but Ryzen is doing really well, Epyc is slow but steady growth. Radeon actually seems to be doing better than expected also. Console sales seem to be basically non-existent at this point and will stay that way until Q2 or Q3.

AMD is projecting upwards of 30% revenue growth this year which, if they can achieve this, is even more significant given that they just had their highest revenue year ever in 2019.
I guess slow but steady is all they get, with the buying morons at companies buying into Intels advertizing dept. Who cares about performance....
 

Gideon

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Nov 27, 2007
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Yes, they paid down over 1/2 billion dollars in 4Q alone but I'm not sure if their plan is to pay off all their debt that quickly.
Not only did they pay debt, they also increased cache-reservers by $300M.

Cheshire Merc Cat (seems to be inactive here now unfortunately) does bring out 2 very valid concerns though:
1. R&D went down a litte (Considering the amount that went into dept payback it shouldn't really do that)
2. Most of the 30% revenue growth should come from consoles alone:

I think the 30% figure is cautious, because AMD expects server revenue to increase only slightlly (which is a huge dissapointment, AMD has absurd advantages right now) and client revenue to be flat or down a litte at some points (e.g. Nvidia's new GPUs, Intel turning more attention back to selling Desktop CPUs etc).

Still it pretty much means that they AMD doesn't expect to make any major inroads to either OEM Enterprice Desktops/Laptops or Servers
 

DrMrLordX

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Apr 27, 2000
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Hmm. Intel must be dumping Xeons at huge discounts to prevent Rome sales. Disappointing, but it'll burn Intel sooner than later. AMD has to keep up the pressure.
 

SK10H

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Jun 18, 2015
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AMD is lucky that the repo funny money is ongoing from stock price perspective. Rev at 2.1B is a disappointment for Q4 (highest anal-ist est was 2.5B for rev 3 months ago; having seen blowout Intel Quarter) and following the seasonal pattern for next Q est at 1.8B and only a 5% drop after hours show how BS wall street really is. These kind of disappointing results should have been an instant 10-15% after hour like a year ago since it rises from $28 to $50 for the last 3 months... The same thing can be said about Apple only beating EPS by 25% ($5 vs $4) last year when their crappy stock price double. :smirk:
When NV was having its parabolic rise years ago, the Rev/EPS increase quarter over quarter at crazy growth rate without stock buyback polluting actual EPS growth.

No AMD/NV/INTC bull/bear holding, just saying. :grinning:
 

Hitman928

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Highlights:

  • Ryzen and Radeon (grouped together) revenue was up 69% Y/Y
  • Mobile Ryzen and Radeon had "strong double-digit" Y/Y growth
  • "In Graphics, fourth quarter unit shipments grew by a strong double-digit percentage year-over-year driven by sales of our Radeon RX 5000 series GPUs"
  • "Our Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment, revenue of $465 million increased 7% year-over-year as EPYC processor revenue growth offset declines in semi-custom revenue. "
  • "We expect first quarter semi-custom revenue to be negligible and the ramp of next generation semi-custom products to start in the second quarter with revenue to be heavily weighted towards the second half of the year."
  • "In server, revenue grew by a strong double-digit percentage as unit shipments and ASPs increased sequentially driven by demand for our second-gen EPYC processors. Our second-gen EPYC processors are ramping significantly faster than the first generation"
  • "On track to achieve our goal of double-digit percentage unit share [in servers] by midyear"
  • "Gross margin was 45%, up 360 basis points from a year ago driven primarily by sales of our leadership 7-nanometer products."
  • "Excluding semi-custom, revenue was up more than 20% year-over-year."
More to come later.
 

Hitman928

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Not only did they pay debt, they also increased cache-reservers by $300M.

Cheshire Merc Cat (seems to be inactive here now unfortunately) does bring out 2 very valid concerns though:
1. R&D went down a litte (Considering the amount that went into dept payback it shouldn't really do that)
2. Most of the 30% revenue growth should come from consoles alone:

I think the 30% figure is cautious, because AMD expects server revenue to increase only slightlly (which is a huge dissapointment, AMD has absurd advantages right now) and client revenue to be flat or down a litte at some points (e.g. Nvidia's new GPUs, Intel turning more attention back to selling Desktop CPUs etc).

Still it pretty much means that they AMD doesn't expect to make any major inroads to either OEM Enterprice Desktops/Laptops or Servers

I disagree. R&D went down Q/Q by 2.7% but went up 6.5% Y/Y. AMD works in a cyclical industry, it's usually better to compare Y/Y rather than Q/Q.

30% revenue growth is for the full year but console revenue won't start in earnest until the 2nd half of the year. Yes, semi-custom will be a large part of that 30%, but AMD is forecasting 45% gross margin for the year, that is an increase from 43% for 2019. If console revenue was the overwhelming main driver of that 30% revenue growth, you would expect gross margin to go down, or at least stay flat given that console revenue is notoriously low margin. We'll have to see how the numbers play out, but both servers and consumer products are predicted to have significant growth in 2020.
 

trivik12

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Jan 26, 2006
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I think real action will start in H2 with huge console launhes but AMD still has huge mountain to climb to really take big marketshare from Intel. I hope they pair up with Micron to add support to 3D Xpoint to their servers as well.

Still great job from Lisa Su in getting financials in a great shape. That is required especially when we hit a recession that impacts all cyclical stocks big time. Next recession wont be pretty and we dont have any ammunition to quickly reverse it(QE will become useless by that time and we are already close to 0% interest)
 

Ajay

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Jan 8, 2001
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  • "In server, revenue grew by a strong double-digit percentage as unit shipments and ASPs increased sequentially driven by demand for our second-gen EPYC processors. Our second-gen EPYC processors are ramping significantly faster than the first generation"
  • "On track to achieve our goal of double-digit percentage unit share [in servers] by midyear"
I think one of the issues here is just that AMD started, basically, for zero on server installs. It's going to take time to ramp up not only their products, but also there sales and OEM support teams to really be able to provide comprehensive solutions (which is what Intel can already do).
 

zinfamous

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Jul 12, 2006
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I guess it should be no real surprise that the real difficulties in competing with Intel have nothing to do with the fundamentals, but simply "hearts and minds" (more like: stubborn caveperson brains) and the usual, well-documented history of Intel shenanigans, but I'm still surprised with the supposed slowness of Rome adoption at this point, despite all of that.

I guess what surprises me the the most is that the very real, very catastrophic security, and thus related performance, issues with Intel seems to have....had no effect on Industry. Is it lack of messaging? The main thing to me is that in a logical world, no sensible manager would tolerate the type of craven carelessness that Intel has engaged in over the last decade wrg to my company's data. It's really quite mind-boggling. Intel's behavior during all those years is truly appalling, and it's just shocking that no one seems to GAF.
 

Ajay

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Jan 8, 2001
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I guess what surprises me the the most is that the very real, very catastrophic security, and thus related performance, issues with Intel seems to have....had no effect on Industry. Is it lack of messaging? The main thing to me is that in a logical world, no sensible manager would tolerate the type of craven carelessness that Intel has engaged in over the last decade wrg to my company's data. It's really quite mind-boggling. Intel's behavior during all those years is truly appalling, and it's just shocking that no one seems to GAF.
Many data farms, etc., are actually upgrading to Cascade Lake Xeons, just to get their performance back and have better security. Seems, sometimes, like Intel can't lose. Hopefully, 2+ more years of AMD performance, price and TCO advantages will leave them to compete with whatever Intel dishes out for 7nm server CPUs.
 

BigDaveX

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Jun 12, 2014
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Hmm. Intel must be dumping Xeons at huge discounts to prevent Rome sales. Disappointing, but it'll burn Intel sooner than later. AMD has to keep up the pressure.
Wouldn't surprise me if Intel are getting up to that, but the server market is slow to move onto new CPU platforms at the best of times. It's only been in the last year or so that most of the major vendors have moved past Broadwell, so it's unsurprising (and unfortunate) that they're reluctant to move to AMD in any big way.
 
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moinmoin

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The reality may well be that with servers the CPU security is (or rather up to now hasn't been) often not even a blip on the security radar. The bigger the company the more likely the IT's flexibility amount to upgrading the servers to CL to make up for some of the performance and security losses. The smaller the company the more likely IT is already swamped with security issues they can't handle sufficiently.

I think one of the issues here is just that AMD started, basically, for zero on server installs.
Indeed. Semi-related German laptop brand Schenker mentioned that AMD didn't have any representatives in Taiwan (where their laptops are manufactured) for years so when they showed interest in offering AMD based laptops again the whole liaison had to be rebuild from zero here as well first. This is likely AMD's biggest problem considering the previous years-long slump without any competitive products in the server and mobile markets.

Put more positive, the opportunity for further growth is immense. ;)
 
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maddie

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Wouldn't surprise me if Intel are getting up to that, but the server market is slow to move onto new CPU platforms at the best of times. It's only been in the last year or so that most of the major vendors have moved past Broadwell, so it's unsurprising (and unfortunate) that they're reluctant to move to AMD in any big way.
For all we know Intel might by reminding them of the last time AMD was in a superior position and that they have a "bombshell" coming.