I don't agree. He does not have any proof to back his statement and to the contrary AMD is today surviving because of its game console chips. The businesses which are doing well are pro graphics, embedded. CPU business is the worst performing - Both CPUs and APUs combined. The GPU business was hit by Maxwell but the R9 3xx series will recover the lost market share and stabilize the GPU business. For the CPU business there is no hope till Zen/K12 launches.
Sure there is proof. Without going into in-depth financial technical analysis, it is impossible to conclude that AMD primarily survives and intends to survive off pure graphics, like NV does:
http://www.trefis.com/stock/amd/mod...09c261e1bb9b92be289e7935994576189&from=search
AMD does not derive most of its free-cash flow/EBITDA from Graphics. You are clumping semi-custom designs as graphics but that's not right. According to that logic Qualcomm is primarily a graphics firm because they manufacture millions of SOCs (APUs). When I am talking about pure graphics, it means selling graphics cards/graphics sub-systems to consumers in desktop/notebook/embedded form. The minute you talk about APU, you are already discussing CPU+GPU or SoC like Qualcomm.
By the end of 2015, 50% of AMD's business will come from non-PC sources. This change of direction does not come suddenly but it took years of re-aligning where to divert resources. If you have a limited number of engineers and R&D, you cannot allocate most of that towards graphics either. In % terms, there is no doubt that NV allocates more of its resources towards graphics than AMD does.
Think about it, AMD wouldn't even be wasting time on Zen, Carrizo, ARM CPU/SoC if it was primarily a GPU firm. That is because each of those investments is its own market. NV's business model is a lot less complex. They manufacture graphics chips and repurpose them to GeForce, Quadro, Tesla, with Tegra/Automotive a new growth arm.
In that sense AMD makes products that are a lot less inter-related. AMD is like a smaller Intel+NV combined -- a server/CPU/APU/graphics/custom design firm. Because of that, AMD cannot just throw 80% of its engineers and R&D/expenses on graphics only. That's why on paper, NV should win every single generation (and they have since HD2900XT). I never found this surprising and I am amazed some people do. That's why 390X matching or beating Titan X is an embarassment for NV. Not only does NV have more human capital, cash flow and other resources, but they cana afford to make 550-600mm2 die because they amortize those costs across so many product lines. We talked about this years ago when Fermi launched.
Look at how NV invented CUDA, their push for graphics compute, graphics in research/medicine/finance/deep learning/automotive. AMD is a lot more narrow with their graphics arm since they have way too many other investments like Zen. That is why for NV there is much more incentive to invest into graphics than there is for AMD. Even if AMD is good at graphics, that was never and still isn't the primary focus for the firm. It's certainly one of their key revenue streams, but not the most important one. For example, AMD might not even have won the Sony/XB1 business if it couldn't provide the Jaguar x86 APU. The Jaguar CPU design didn't just come from thin air; and NV has no such product. That already tells you that AMD and NV are different in terms of their strategy and how the 2 firms are structured. NV is not really an Intel competitor, but AMD is both an Intel and NV competitor. I think you forgot this because Bulldozer failed but it doesn't change the facts about who and what AMD was/is.
Let's look at it from another point of view. Imagine if the world had 10 consoles based on x86 APUs, not 2 main ones. AMD could easily become a company that makes custom embedded APUs for consoles. They wouldn't even
need to sell PC or notebook graphics. NV can't just do that. Even how NV defines itself as a firm is all about visual graphics. AMD in no way defines itself as a graphics firm. In description about who AMD is, there isn't even a word graphics:
http://www.amd.com/en-gb/who-we-are/corporate-information
Vs.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/about-nvidia.html
NV = visual computing + graphics
While AMD and NV happen to be competitors, their long term visions are not the same. Because of that, how NV allocates its finite resources is different to AMD. That's why for me the fact that AMD has even kept up with NV since Phenom failure before Bulldozer, is nothin short of remarkable.
If we still had standalone ATI, AMD and NV, I have 0 doubt in my mind ATI would have been run completely differently than how AMD is run. Why? Because like NV, ATI was primarily a visuals/graphics firm. That in a nutshell is one of the reasons AMD is struggling so much --- their don't have enough resources to compete with both Intel in CPUs/APUs/servers and at the same time compete with NV in visual computing/graphics. If both firms have 8000-10000 engineers, how in the world could AMD just throw 80% of them towards graphics? Not happening! That's why both Intel and NV are winning their respective industry segments. AMD is trying to fight a 2-front war, while smaller than EITHER of its competitors!
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