AMD reports best quarterly profit in 7 years thanks to new products

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, RorzNZ said:

Can't wait until they release a decent video card then if the new processors shakes things up. 

We still have yet to see if they have the resources to do both a good GPU architecture and CPU architecture at the same time. At least this good financial outcome from their CPU revamp puts them in the best possible position to get back into the GPU competition for real.

[Mira Yurizaki]

52 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

electrical fire

More like thermite.

 

[DrMacintosh]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Before anyone gets too excited: Intel makes > $4 billion in net income per quarter.  More than 3x what AMD makes as revenue.

 

AMD is going under / going to be acquired,  it's just a matter of when.

HAH

[ItsMitch]

2 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

HAH

Calm down please Dr... I know it's funny but please... 

[AnonymousGuy]

58 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

The only ones that can aquire AMD without to much trouble is Intel and VIA. But if intel aquired AMD then they would be charged with monopoly charges. Dont believe VIA has the funds to buy AMD and any other would invalidate the X86-64 cross liscencing making a patent mess of current desktop processors.

 

I dont have the details, but aquiring someone who is liscensing X86 is very difficult

I don't know the details of that, but I would guess you would buy AMD and leave them as a wholly owned subsidiary or some shit so they effectively remain a separate company but are fully controlled by a parent organization.  Like what Intel did to McAfee.  

[Deus Voltage]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Before anyone gets too excited: Intel makes > $4 billion in net income per quarter.  More than 3x what AMD makes as revenue.

 

AMD is going under / going to be acquired,  it's just a matter of when.

If I didn't read the username I would have thought that CTS Labs made an account just to post something like the above comment.

[PlayStation 2]

30 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

More like thermite.

 

 

[Drak3]

A toast to good news!

 

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

without AMD, Intel would most likely still be feeding you that 5% or whatever increase in IPC and that's it, year on year.

And TBH who can blame them? if a company doesn't have to innovate and spend billions on r&d and can instead just make some fairly minor changes and still rake in billions per quarter.

Until you realize that Intel does spend massively in R&D in innovation, just not everything pans out as people want, and x86 might not have much room for innovation.

 

2 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

I smell a flame war a-brewin'.

Quick, change the subject to one less flame war prone!

 

Like Politics!

 

Your politician/OS/religion of choice is wrong and you're an idiot for choosing it!

 

 

Kappa.

[PlayStation 2]

Just now, Drak3 said:

Quick, change the subject to one less flame war prone!

 

Like Politics!

 

Your politician/OS/religion of choice is wrong and you're an idiot for choosing it!

 

 

Kappa.

that's usually how political discussion goes on this forum, tbf

[sof006]

Congrats AMD, its great to see they're fighting again.

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

A toast to good news!

 

Until you realize that Intel does spend massively in R&D in innovation, just not everything pans out as people want, and x86 might not have much room for innovation.

 

Quick, change the subject to one less flame war prone!

 

Like Politics!

 

Your politician/OS/religion of choice is wrong and you're an idiot for choosing it!

 

 

Kappa.

They may have spent alot of money on research and development in the past but when push comes to shove competition is a much bigger motivating force. When you are basically forced to put out knew products that compete well with what your competitor brings to market you tend to see more compelling products than if you are just trying to one up yourself. 

[D13H4RD]

“But Intel makes more money!”

 

No shit, Sherlock.

 

They’re a bigger company that dominated the consumer and enterprise computing market for years until AMD’s Zen comeback, and is more diverse in product offerings.

 

The point isn’t to compare Intel and AMD’s earnings. AMD is a comparatively small company so supreme profits isn’t an expectation. Instead, we should be happy that AMD is even getting a profit at all and it’s steadily doing better.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

“But Intel makes more money!”

 

No shit, Sherlock.

 

They’re a bigger company that dominated the consumer and enterprise computing market for years until AMD’s Zen comeback, and is more diverse in product offerings.

 

The point isn’t to compare Intel and AMD’s earnings. AMD is a comparatively small company so supreme profits isn’t an expectation. Instead, we should be happy that AMD is even getting a profit at all and it’s steadily doing better.

But Apple makes more money than Intel and they make processors too. Intel will go bankrupt, just a matter of time . 

 

Company has steadily increasing revenue and net profit, people predict bankruptcy or buy out... that's some weird metrics to base that conclusion from. I would of thought the first reactions would be more along the lines of hoping they invest more in R&D and industry partnerships, in fact I think industry partnerships at this point is the best course of action considering that is the biggest roadblock in market penetration for AMD in CPU and GPU markets. I think it's at the point unless AMD doubles the performance of either competitor performance increases less than that will have little impact on adoption, help people use and understand their products will do more. 

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

But Apple makes more money than Intel and they make processors too. Intel will go bankrupt, just a matter of time . 

 

Company has steadily increasing revenue and net profit, people predict bankruptcy or buy out... that's some weird metrics to base that conclusion from. I would of thought the first reactions would be more along the lines of hoping they invest more in R&D and industry partnerships, in fact I think industry partnerships at this point is the best course of action considering that is the biggest roadblock in market penetration for AMD in CPU and GPU markets. In fact I think it's at the point unless AMD doubles the performance of either competitor performance increases less than that will have little impact on adoption, help people use and understand their products will do more. 

the question is, will intel stay still and let them do it or will they keep breaking the law, after all they still havent payed a cent of the 1 billion they owe to the Eu

[Stefan Payne]

8 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Before anyone gets too excited: Intel makes > $4 billion in net income per quarter.  More than 3x what AMD makes as revenue.

Yes and did they already pay the EU the 1.07 Milliard €uros they were fined for their behaviour?

Its not like their position is justified.

 

You know that Intel sued most of the competition out of the Market in the late 80s, do you??

And revoked their license agreement with the likes of UMC and Texas Instruments (for example)...

 

Oh and something like that: http://processortimeline.info/proc1990.htm

Quote

An arbitrator between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices rules that Intel breached its agreement with Advanced Micro Devices by refusing to share designs of the 386 CPU. However, the ruling also states that Advanced Micro Devices is not entitled to Intel's 386 because it did not contribute any accepted designs for it. [659.7] [735.7] [1067.28]

 

Quote

• Intel files a lawsuit in an attempt to stop Cyrix from selling its FasMath math coprocessor chips, claiming that parts manufactured for Cyrix by SGS-Thompson violate an agreement between Intel and SGS-Thompson. [704.23]
• Intel files a copyright infringement claim against Advanced Micro Devices, claiming the programmed logic array in the 386 is a program, thus protected by copyright. [659.7]
• Intel sues Chips and Technologies for patent infringement, regarding Chips and Technologies' Super386 and SuperMath chips. [735.11] [1067.28]
•  

 

Yeah, nice company.

How can an Enduser like those guys?!

 

Like to pay 500-1000€ for a somewhat standard 4 Core/8 Thread CPU??

 

8 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

AMD is going under / going to be acquired,  it's just a matter of when.

Yeah, would really be a shame if it would be by some huge company like Samsung, who would actually use them.

 

That AMD holds the most valuable patents for x86 -> AMD64 implementation that everyone has to use, is something you seem to forget.

Also that the original X86 Patents are not longer protected.

 

Oh and another Thing:

Quote

• Five years of arbitration with Intel ends, with Advanced Micro Devices being awarded full rights to produce and sell its Am386 line of processors. Advanced Micro Devices is also awarded US$15 million in damages, though it had asked for US$2.2 billion. [141] [735.7] [1067.28]

 

8 hours ago, Poofu said:

What are you talking about? They've expanded into the Chinese market by licensing their IP and their CPU division is doing great taking market share away from Intel. GPUs on the other hand that's a different story.

Just because they're smaller doesn't mean that they're going to be acquired. What this means is that Intel should legitimately be worried that AMD could cause their quarterly earnings to become negative.

Exactly.

And Zen is pretty awesome. Especially for Servers/Workstations as it has a higher energy efficiency than the Intel Stuff does right now...

You can see it very well with Skylake-X

 

7 hours ago, sazrocks said:

? AMD’s license for the x86 architechture would be invalidated if they were to be aquired; who would aquire them? RTG maybe, no way AMD as a whole.

I wouldn't be so sure because AMD has some very valuable Patents for x86 as well.

Remember, you are on AMD64 right now, not Intel64 (=Itanic)!

Just look at your random driver .inf file, there you can see the AMD64 tag...

 

So with those Patents, it would be a stalemate.

And it is possible anyway that a judge might force Intel to license their technologys anyways...

 

 

7 hours ago, GoldenLag said:

Nah, drop a Bulldozer in there and Fusion will occur

Bulldozer was good, just late. (and had the shitty K10 NB as well, wich crippled its performance further so that the cores were starved of data)

Just imagine Bulldozer a year or two earlier and you see what I mean.

And it had to compete with Intels 22nm Chips...

[GoldenLag]

41 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

Bulldozer was good, just late. (and had the shitty K10 NB as well, wich crippled its performance further so that the cores were starved of data)

Just imagine Bulldozer a year or two earlier and you see what I mean.

And it had to compete with Intels 22nm Chips

I was trying to make a hot Joke. Today some FX CPUs do beat their intel counterparts of the time due to the increased thread utilization

[Humbug]

9 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

AMD is going under / going to be acquired,  it's just a matter of when.

This used to be the popular opinion for many years when AMD was making hundreds of  millions in losses. At the time it was very reasonable.

 

But there is no point in repeating it now... If it was gonna happen it would have probably happened then.

[D13H4RD]

3 minutes ago, Humbug said:

This used to be the popular opinion for many years when AMD was making hundreds of  millions in losses. At the time it was very reasonable.

 

But there is no point in repeating it now... If it was gonna happen it would have probably happened then.

Plus, going under? During the Bulldozer days, yeah, but now? The company made its best profit in years. I regularly see Ryzen CPUs get selected by system builders in my local PC stores. 

 

Yes, AMD won't reach Intel levels of profitability. No shit Sherlock. Intel is a much bigger company. But that isn't the point. The point is that AMD went from a company that was nearly out of commission to being competitive again. 

 

And frankly, us tech enthusiasts should be glad. 

[Humbug]

16 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Yes, AMD won't reach Intel levels of profitability. No shit Sherlock. Intel is a much bigger company. But that isn't the point. The point is that AMD went from a company that was nearly out of commission to being competitive again. 

Regarding this what some people don't get is that we don't need AMD to be as big or profitable as Intel. Who the hell cares about that... AMD is not thinking about that either.

 

What they want is to continue to grow their own profits and be a sucesful company on a smaller scale. You can be in the same industry without being the same size, what matters is that you can make money, sustain yourself and be competitive enough at least in your target markets.

 

For example Ferrari would not worry that they are smaller than Mercedes or GM. But they would worry about making losses and putting out products that nobody wants.

[D13H4RD]

2 minutes ago, Humbug said:

What they want is to continue to grow their own profits and be a sucesful company on a smaller scale. You can be in the same industry without being the same size, what matters is that you can make money, sustain yourself and be competitive enough at least in your target markets.

Precisely that. 

 

I don't really want to see AMD dominate Intel and NVIDIA in a short span of time. That's not going to happen anytime soon. 

 

What I really want to see is them holding their ground and releasing products that prove to be great alternatives and even best the status quo at times. We need competition 

[Nicnac]

Nice but I think they are still very much in debt ^^

[Humbug]

28 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Plus, going under? During the Bulldozer days, yeah, but now? The company made its best profit in years. I regularly see Ryzen CPUs get selected by system builders in my local PC stores. 

And this is just the start. It was mostly from system builders. The profits from Zen cores are only going to get bigger and bigger year on year with diverse products and newer iterations of Zen in different markets.

 

There is going to be proper penetration into the massive laptop market with APUs and data center markets with Epyc. Obviously they will not match Intel's sales in these markets but it doesn't matter, because these markets are huge and AMD had almost zero market share in previous generations. So even if they get a few percentage points (which they easily will particularly with 7nm overtaking Intel's process advantages) it's a massive amount of money for AMD.

 

Then we can go further and talk about the next gen consoles based on Zen CPUs with Vega graphics, or the AMD tech licensed to Chinese manufacturer Hygon etc...

 

AMD in Q1 of this year poured $343 million into R&D. That's because they know that they can afford to do that now with their future secure.

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-earnings-call-tsmc-7nm-gpu,news-58325.html

[Humbug]

9 hours ago, Sakkura said:

We still have yet to see if they have the resources to do both a good GPU architecture and CPU architecture at the same time. At least this good financial outcome from their CPU revamp puts them in the best possible position to get back into the GPU competition for real.

They will come back to the high end in GPUs. But the question is when. Will it be in the next two years, or do we have to wait for 5 year for them to come back... That would suck. This depends on how much they prioritize it compared to other markets.

 

The thing is that Lisa Su knows that the CPU market is much more important. If AMD puts out a bad generation of graphics chips then they go back and try again.. cycle repeats etc. But if Zen cores had sucked AMD would have been a goner, no coming back from that. Lisa Su knows that the CPU and custom market makes AMD more money than selling discrete GPUs to gamers.

 

According to Raja Koduri AMD (prior to RTG) made some bad calls on graphics where they predicted wrong. They thought that discrete GPUs will die, APUs would be the future etc, and since they were making losses at the time they decided no point spending money on R&D. At the time they had great high end GPUs (HD 7970 --> R9 290x etc) but behind the scenes they were not preparing for the future because they though the market will die and they had to prioritize.

 

They were dead wrong and PC gaming went from strength to strength demanding more horsepower than APUs could muster. According to Raja they fixed this mess of priorities and got focused with the formation of RTG, but who knows how long it will take for that to bear fruits in terms of shipping actual products. Most of us expected it to be Navi... but now there are all these stories that Lisa Su took Raja's engineers away from making PC GPUs and is more focused on designing future console chips rather than beating Nvidia on the high end. Apparently Raja was not happy and blamed that for how Vega turned out etc... If that's the case it could be a long wait for us as far as high end is concerned. Although they will continue to be competitive below the top end stuff (e.g. Vega56 or RX580 etc).

[cj09beira]

10 minutes ago, Humbug said:

They will come back to the high end in GPUs. But the question is when. Will it be in the next two years, or do we have to wait for 5 year for them to come back... That would suck. This depends on how much they prioritize it compared to other markets.

 

The thing is that Lisa Su knows that the CPU market is much more important. If AMD puts out a bad generation of graphics chips then they go back and try again.. cycle repeats etc. But if Zen cores had sucked AMD would have been a goner, no coming back from that. Lisa Su knows that the CPU and custom market makes AMD more money than selling discrete GPUs to gamers.

 

According to Raja Koduri AMD (prior to RTG) made some bad calls on graphics where they predicted wrong. They thought that discrete GPUs will die, APUs would be the future etc, and since they were making losses at the time they decided no point spending money on R&D. At the time they had great high end GPUs (HD 7970 --> R9 290x etc) but behind the scenes they were not preparing for the future because they though the market will die and they had to prioritize.

 

They were dead wrong and PC gaming went from strength to strength demanding more horsepower than APUs could muster. According to Raja they fixed this mess of priorities and got focused with the formation of RTG, but who knows how long it will take for that to bear fruits in terms of shipping actual products. Most of us expected it to be Navi... but now there are all these stories that Lisa Su took Raja's engineers away from making PC GPUs and is more focused on designing future console chips rather than beating Nvidia on the high end. Apparently Raja was not happy and blamed that for how Vega turned out etc... If that's the case it could be a long wait for us as far as high end is concerned. Although they will continue to be competitive below the top end stuff (e.g. Vega56 or RX580 etc).

its clear that amd will only be back to the high end with the gext gen architecture (after navi) because what is needed to be done to fix gcn would mean that the biggest and basically only gcn flaw would disappear (talking about inherent flaws here ) and moving away from gcn right after fixing it would be a waste of resources 

[Humbug]

12 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

its clear that amd will only be back to the high end with the gext gen architecture (after navi) because what is needed to be done to fix gcn would mean that the biggest and basically only gcn flaw would disappear (talking about inherent flaws here ) and moving away from gcn right after fixing it would be a waste of resources 

I agree that Navi will not challenge Nvidia's top end (1180ti or Titan) parts, because the rumours we are now hearing are that AMD still won't have MCM tech good enough to be able to make a gamer product.

 

Still 7nm Navi thanks to the new process is going to clock way higher using less power than current gen Vega. So that fact combined with the architectural improvements at least should be enough to compete in the GTX 1170 and 1180 range.