UPDATE: LAUNCHED OFFICIALLY, REVIEWS ARE OUT. The RX5xx lineup has leaked in its entirety, launching April 18th (Polaris Refresh)

[Valentyn]

10 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

9% out of how much overall?

9% of all desktop GPU sales. 

 

They were sitting at 29.5% in end of 2016, compared to 18% the year prior in Q2 2015.

 

AMD started going down after the 290X launched; despite it being a fantastic card. The reasons? More rebrands of the mid and low end. 

 

It didn't help more rebrands of Hawaii, Tonga and Tahiti cards before Fiji came out either.

 

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10613/discrete-desktop-gpu-market-trends-q2-2016-amd-grabs-market-share-but-nvidia-remains-on-top

AMD cannot afford to have the negative view of yet another round of low - mid end rebrands, with just a new high-end.

Hence me being darn annoyed that; despite them having the tech to launch a better Prolaris GPU, they've opted to simply "refresh" the 480 to 580, keeping it the same bar a small clock bump.

 

Vega is sorely missed and needed yes; but how can they get rid of that negative average consumer view if they're simply rebranding, and then having a big jump in performance to their new line up.



 

[Misanthrope]

So they managed that not only with Polaris but with the release of Direct X 12 that was supposed to give them a significant advantage.

 

Not. Fucking. Impressed.

 

With the amount of hype Polaris + DX12 had they should have done a hell of a lot better it was the best case scenario for them and it got them like a step or two closer at best.

[Valentyn]

21 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

So they managed that not only with Polaris but with the release of Direct X 12 that was supposed to give them a significant advantage.

 

Not. Fucking. Impressed.

 

With the amount of hype Polaris + DX12 had they should have done a hell of a lot better it was the best case scenario for them and it got them like a step or two closer at best.

It's not impressive, it's a damn Miracle.

AMD was essentially dead. Share price 2$ from their old peaks of 40 in 2006.

Market share at 18%, lower than the 90's; and massive debt eat at them.

 

Now they're sitting at 29.5% market share with simply low-end and mid range GPUs, having reached a share price of over $12 at December 2016.

It's amazing what they managed to do considering they were considered dead by investors; especially after FX, and the years of Tahiti rebrands,with flawed high-end GPU releases.

They're close to being debt free, have some investor confidence again, finally launched a successful CPU line. Now they just need Vega to really deliver, as the new of Polaris rebrands are already hurting them.

[Misanthrope]

6 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

It's not impressive, it's a damn Miracle.

AMD was essentially dead. Share price 2$ from their old peaks of 40 in 2006.

Market share at 18%, lower than the 90's; and massive debt eat at them.

 

Now they're sitting at 29.5% market share with simply low-end and mid range GPUs, having reached a share price of over $12 at December 2016.

It's amazing what they managed to do considering they were considered dead by investors; especially after FX, and the years of Tahiti rebrands,with flawed high-end GPU releases.

They're close to being debt free, have some investor confidence again, finally launched a successful CPU line. Now they just need Vega to really deliver, as the new of Polaris rebrands are already hurting them.

And it's precisely because you expect so damn little from AMD they'll have a though time getting better. Instead of demanding they actually turn shit around you settle for mediocrity. 

[Valentyn]

15 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

And it's precisely because you expect so damn little from AMD they'll have a though time getting better. Instead of demanding they actually turn shit around you settle for mediocrity. 

If you consider that mediocre, you're either ignorant of business or a true dreamer. The latter hopefully.
Did you seriously expect them to gain what? 20-30% Market Share?

11.5% over a year from the brink of death is wonderful, and what many would have considered wishful dreaming at best.
Being objective and realistic is important, and what AMD have accomplished is marvelous considering their prior position and leadership.

Their previous management considered desktop graphics and gaming to be "dead". Hence their strong focus on consoles.
That alone put them far behind on R&D, never mind the severe debt they were in.

 

Restructuring and creating RTG with Raja at the head was vital in saving them in the GPU space.

Dr.Su becoming CEO also greatly helped also, as instead of a normal business man they had an actual R&D researcher heading it all.

 

Their back in the long haul now, and we need them do well everywhere.

 

I have confidence in AMD, enough to have invested in them when they were nearly a Penny stock; hence my disappointment in them rebranding the 400 series, despite having more capable Polaris technology available. 

[Misanthrope]

All that means is that they're still one slip, one crappy product from sliding back down. They did not seem to correct any of the terrible practices that got them in that bind to begin with, one of their own creation by the way so before praising them for their amazing recovery maybe you should be more critical of their astonishing failure that got them to almost penny stock levels to begin with?

[Valentyn]

17 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

All that means is that they're still one slip, one crappy product from sliding back down. They did not seem to correct any of the terrible practices that got them in that bind to begin with, one of their own creation by the way so before praising them for their amazing recovery maybe you should be more critical of their astonishing failure that got them to almost penny stock levels to begin with?

 

One slip? Explain that please.

 

The old management that nearly killed them is long gone, Rory Read, K.Y. Ho, Dave Orton, and Hector Ruiz are gone. They have proper management for once; and finally have two distinct departments to focus R&D on for GPU and CPU development.

Along with finally garnering investor support, and are about to be debt free.

They're competitive in consumer processors, and have a compelling enterprise solution on the way. That success alone can allow them to stomach another Fiji style disaster in GPUs for AMD.

 

One thing I would see as a massive mistake was buying ATI, and that's all on Hector Ruiz.

 

Or are you referring to their own terrible practices in the early 2000's where they "allowed" Intel to manipulate the market via Anti-Consumer practices by preventing AMD products from being sold by major desktop manufacturers? Which killed their revenue streams, despite having a superior product, hence severely reducing their R&D budget.

 

[Misanthrope]

Which goes back full circle to my initial comment: Now that they have a competitor in CPUs they'll probably let their GPUs suffer.

 

That's a glaring, massive mistake they made years ago and it's still not corrected: Buying ATI and thinking they could handle both a competitive CPU and GPU business.

[Valentyn]

4 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Which goes back full circle to my initial comment: Now that they have a competitor in CPUs they'll probably let their GPUs suffer.

 

That's a glaring, massive mistake they made years ago and it's still not corrected: Buying ATI and thinking they could handle both a competitive CPU and GPU business.

 

What makes you think they'll let their GPU's suffer? Simply based on the decisions of prior management?
That's possible, but I don't believe they will, it's far too lucrative a market; and they'll need Professional GPUs and Virtualisation technology for enterprise as well. to complement Naples.

We'll have to see what Vega offers before that can be seen.

 

The main issue with Vega is that it needs to fill several roles. Enterprise/Workstation, Consumer High-end, and Upper Midrange.

That's not an easy feat, not with the resources AMD has had available until last year.

[Trixanity]

5 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Which goes back full circle to my initial comment: Now that they have a competitor in CPUs they'll probably let their GPUs suffer.

 

That's a glaring, massive mistake they made years ago and it's still not corrected: Buying ATI and thinking they could handle both a competitive CPU and GPU business.

They don't have the R&D budget to fully fund both CPU and GPU. That's why the GPU division suffers a bit. They don't even have enough to fund the CPU division but they've funneled a lot toward it to get Zen out the door. Once things settle down the situation should be more even but what they do need is money.

 

They needed GPU IP to sustain their business but they did pay too much for ATI and probably didn't have the money to begin.

 

They were supposed to merge with Nvidia and have Jensen Huang be the CEO but AMD's CEO blocked it (for obvious and selfish reasons).

[Misanthrope]

2 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

They don't have the R&D budget to fully fund both CPU and GPU. That's why the GPU division suffers a bit. They don't even have enough to fund the CPU division but they've funneled a lot toward it to get Zen out the door. Once things settle down the situation should be more even but what they do need is money.

 

They needed GPU IP to sustain their business but they did pay too much for ATI and probably didn't have the money to begin.

 

They were supposed to merge with Nvidia and have Jensen Huang be the CEO but AMD's CEO blocked it (for obvious and selfish reasons).

Intel doesn't has to do that. Nvidia doesn't has to do that.

 

What you're saying here is that your 2 main competitors will always have an inherited competitive advantage. Whatever the reasons for the ATI acquisitions  back then, they need to separate the businesses or do something to avoid this back and forth because as it stands, it will keep both sides as second place, perpetual losers, always the off brand as I was saying.

 

You can make a lot of money being the off brand don't get me wrong, but they also don't seem to have the money to have tons of volume, cheaper products, etc. But as it stand it just will not work long term.

[Dylanc1500]

27 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Which goes back full circle to my initial comment: Now that they have a competitor in CPUs they'll probably let their GPUs suffer.

 

That's a glaring, massive mistake they made years ago and it's still not corrected: Buying ATI and thinking they could handle both a competitive CPU and GPU business.

It's hard one to chew for them. I'll give AMD credit for managing to stay alive running a CPU and GPU buisness with 9,100 employees. Intel alone has roughly 106,000 employees and total assets around $113 billion itself and NVidia has 10,000 with assets at $9.8 billion. AMD is sitting at $3.3 billion in total assets and their operating income is currently around -372 million. 

 

Acquiring ATI was most likely a bad move for both companies. I don't know if they will ever be able to as competitive as the other two companies due to that fact. Investors see that and have a hard time putting money Into something they know is too much for one plate.

[Trixanity]

5 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Intel doesn't has to do that. Nvidia doesn't has to do that.

 

What you're saying here is that your 2 main competitors will always have an inherited competitive advantage. Whatever the reasons for the ATI acquisitions  back then, they need to separate the businesses or do something to avoid this back and forth because as it stands, it will keep both sides as second place, perpetual losers, always the off brand as I was saying.

 

You can make a lot of money being the off brand don't get me wrong, but they also don't seem to have the money to have tons of volume, cheaper products, etc. But as it stand it just will not work long term.

I'm not sure what you mean. They don't have to do what? If you mean AMD making both GPUs and CPUs, then: Intel has expanded their GPU business because they have to. Nvidia doesn't have a traditional CPU division (courtesy of no x86) but they do make ARM-based SoCs and have expanded that business into the automotive market and they are also leaning towards doing stuff with compute/machine learning in general.

 

Both Nvidia and Intel have a much larger R&D budget than AMD. They can sustain development; in fact they can jump into new product categories easily and have done it. If AMD had a budget like Nvidia and Intel, they'd easily be able to sustain their current businesses. So their disadvantage is empty coffers, not that they have to split their R&D because everyone has to; difference is the competition just have so much money that splitting it does not encumber their business at all.

 

The idea is that 2017 and 2018 will lift AMD up to a place where they can compete reasonably. If Zen pans out, they won't necessarily have a booming business but things will look good. Vega can also do a lot for them but not to the same degree as Zen. Don't get me wrong: a good Vega launch will do something for AMD's finances but Polaris has already given them a boost. On the other end of the spectrum we have AMD's CPU division which haven't really been moving any units for the past 5 years. Their semi-custom division have kept a decent bottom line but their CPUs have been draining them a lot. They have put so much money towards Zen over the past few years that a lot is riding on success here. They have to turn the CPU division from being in the red and doing nothing for them to being the core business and being a solid foundation for expanding both itself and their other businesses.

[Megah3rtz]

Open air dual fan REFERENCE?? Papa like. 

[crysilis]

23 hours ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Sapphire their new chief reference cooler designer? Looks like the nitro cooler  

who said that was a bad thing

 

[Misanthrope]

14 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

I'm not sure what you mean. They don't have to do what? If you mean AMD making both GPUs and CPUs, then: Intel has expanded their GPU business because they have to. Nvidia doesn't have a traditional CPU division (courtesy of no x86) but they do make ARM-based SoCs and have expanded that business into the automotive market and they are also leaning towards doing stuff with compute/machine learning in general.

 

Both Nvidia and Intel have a much larger R&D budget than AMD. They can sustain development; in fact they can jump into new product categories easily and have done it. If AMD had a budget like Nvidia and Intel, they'd easily be able to sustain their current businesses. So their disadvantage is empty coffers, not that they have to split their R&D because everyone has to; difference is the competition just have so much money that splitting it does not encumber their business at all.

 

The idea is that 2017 and 2018 will lift AMD up to a place where they can compete reasonably. If Zen pans out, they won't necessarily have a booming business but things will look good. Vega can also do a lot for them but not to the same degree as Zen. Don't get me wrong: a good Vega launch will do something for AMD's finances but Polaris has already given them a boost. On the other end of the spectrum we have AMD's CPU division which haven't really been moving any units for the past 5 years. Their semi-custom division have kept a decent bottom line but their CPUs have been draining them a lot. They have put so much money towards Zen over the past few years that a lot is riding on success here. They have to turn the CPU division from being in the red and doing nothing for them to being the core business and being a solid foundation for expanding both itself and their other businesses.

Companies made their money by being market leaders and then diversified with smaller steps into other areas. AMD bought ATI and immediately went full speed ahead on both products equally.

 

The difference is pretty damn clear: one takes a focused approach and reaps the rewards of it diversifying later, the other bites on more than what it can handle and dilutes both brands into nothing.

[Misanthrope]

11 minutes ago, Megah3rtz said:

Open air dual fan REFERENCE?? Papa like. 

 

3 minutes ago, crysilis said:

who said that was a bad thing

 

Actually I'm not sure Sapphire should or would give out their premium AIB cooler.

 

I'm actually thinking they'll do what Nvidia did with the 1060 and below and have no reference board (or very tiny numbers of it) and just allow all AIB solutions from day 1.

[HKZeroFive]

The RX 500 series feels unnecessary. The RX 580 is literally just a RX 480 with a small clock increase and that's basically it. The non-blower style reference design isn't exactly something to be excited about.

 

We've been "waiting for Vega" for about a year now... and it honestly feels like AMD has dropped the ball way too many times lately.

[Misanthrope]

Just now, HKZeroFive said:

The RX 500 series feels unnecessary. The RX 580 is literally just a RX 480 with a small clock increase and that's basically it. The non-blower style reference design isn't exactly something to be excited about.

 

We've been "waiting for Vega" for about a year now... and it honestly feels like AMD has dropped the ball way too many times lately.

No no, apparently they're geniuses from managing to barely not fucking die if you read my previous exchanges here. 

[Sauron]

AMD, get that rx590 out already

[HKZeroFive]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

No no, apparently they're geniuses from managing to barely not fucking die if you read my previous exchanges here. 

TBH, AMD is doing better than it was a year ago. Anyone who bought AMD stock will definitely tell you that. But it doesn't mean that they don't make incredibly stupid unwise decisions.

 

The problem is that way too many people (not only on this forum) have an AMD bias simply because they're the underdog. It'd be nice for once for more people to actually criticise the company rather than blindly praise it.

[Valentyn]

20 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

No no, apparently they're geniuses from managing to barely not fucking die if you read my previous exchanges here. 

 

10 minutes ago, HKZeroFive said:

TBH, AMD is doing better than it was a year ago. Anyone who bought AMD stock will definitely tell you that. But it doesn't mean that they don't make incredibly stupid unwise decisions.

 

The problem is that way too many people (not only on this forum) have an AMD bias simply because they're the underdog. It'd be nice for once for more people to actually criticise the company rather than blindly praise it.

 

Geniuses no? Amazing leadership yes.

The current AMD is a far cry from the one prior to 2013. Completely different management, leadership, and goals.

Dr.Su and Raja were given helm of a sinking ship, and had to rally the crew, sort out their debt, and patch the massive holes, and help pump the water out before they're all drowning.

 

If someone cannot see that, there's not much that can be done to help sadly.

One needs to look at it all objectively without bias, which is hard alright. Especially on a tech forum; hell the financial and business boards can be significantly worse.
 

At the same time, criticism is needed, but the positives also need to be pointed out.

[Soonercoop]

36 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

No no, apparently they're geniuses from managing to barely not fucking die if you read my previous exchanges here. 

I don't see how you could have expected them to just instantly come back being at basically their lowest point and with horrendous market share for years. It's amazing they managed to progress at all given how far Intel was ahead of their current lineup 3 years ago and the staunch competition from Nvidia on the graphics side. They're not geniuses per say but I think everyone should be glad they are progressing. Zen and Polaris have set the expectation that AMD can release products with the best price to performance ratio of on the market again and I personally was not expecting that 10 months ago.

[Trixanity]

51 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Companies made their money by being market leaders and then diversified with smaller steps into other areas. AMD bought ATI and immediately went full speed ahead on both products equally.

 

The difference is pretty damn clear: one takes a focused approach and reaps the rewards of it diversifying later, the other bites on more than what it can handle and dilutes both brands into nothing.

They did pay too much for ATI but I honestly don't think they could have done much else given where the industry was heading (although the better choice would have been going through with the Nvidia merger and giving the CEO position to the obviously more talented guy as was planned).

 

As I said they needed graphics IP because the market was heading towards SoC designs. You could argue they could have stayed on course with doing pure CPU products and maybe kept their underdog position below Intel. If Bulldozer still happened AMD would have been dead today though. Their semi-custom and GPU business kept them afloat. These would not have existed without the ATI purchase.

 

I honestly don't know how AMD could keep going as a pure CPU company in today's market. Sure, they might have been able to find decent ways of diversifying but that's just hindsight. Things could have gone more elegantly especially under better management. Poor management for over a decade tends to destroy companies (A recent example was Pebble and that only took a few years).

[Misanthrope]

43 minutes ago, Soonercoop21 said:

I don't see how you could have expected them to just instantly come back being at basically their lowest point and with horrendous market share for years. It's amazing they managed to progress at all given how far Intel was ahead of their current lineup 3 years ago and the staunch competition from Nvidia on the graphics side. They're not geniuses per say but I think everyone should be glad they are progressing. Zen and Polaris have set the expectation that AMD can release products with the best price to performance ratio of on the market again and I personally was not expecting that 10 months ago.

I explained that too: They don't deserve praise for a couple of middling performing products. The core strategies and issues that lead them down are still there. Hell they're even spending some of their earnings on stupid shit again: trying a "me too!" crap into VR? Unwise to say the least.