AMD Q317 Results CEO Prepared Remarks

This proves once and fr all that semi-custom will never make AMD the money that having a competitive CPU in the market will. They don't get nearly the same margin on those things.

It's only there to be revenue when they completely fuck a release like Bulldozer.

Glad to see that fleshing-out their offerings bumped them into profitability. It's really telling how freaked-out Intel is that they dropped the cost quad cores by almost half!

Also incredibly smart of AMD pushing consumer first, so they can fix their largest silicon bugs before a single server part ships. It helps to build everything off a single 8-core processor, even if that comes with many downsides.
 
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So on the one hand they are making money, on the other hand it only looks impressive vs last Q3 but not that great vs more recent quarters. My look at this is that EPYC is supposedly Q4 still (we will see), and Raven Ridge looks late as premium notebooks will be for Q1 and miss the holiday season.

I've also been seeing a LOT of AMD price cuts on Ryzen and Threadripper in the face of the new Intel chips which is not great for them. Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.

Lastly, I suppose we won't hear any new product announcements until Q218 or later and that is a longgg time from now with Nvidia AND Intel releasing new products in those timeframes.
 
Intel is more competitive in the Threadripper arena, but even with those price cuts AMD is probably making bank on those systems. It's not like they cut prices in half or anything. It's $130 off the original MSRP.

And AMD still owns the mainstream gaming market, with Coffee Lake completely out-of-stock at MSRP (typically $100 over).
 
What a minute, this cant be right. From everything I read from users on here is that AMD is doomed and Intel and Nvidia are the only way to go!

who is buying AMD????? I call lies!! /sarcasm off

This is great news!!!! With this news, and Intel doing a paper launch......Yea Ryzen is a hit with consumers.
 
Intel fucked up the same way they did with the Athlon 64. The original plan for Coffee Lake was LATE next year, so AMD is making some serious inroads in midrange and high-end gaming. They can't hit volume for a product that wasn't ready to launch yet, and they haven't made any official price cuts on Kaby Lake to cover those missing parts.

Intel will recover more quickly then they did with the Pentium 4 disaster, but their correction this time around will just be keeping slightly ahead of AMD. They don't have the fab or engineering advantage they once enjoyed, and their leaders are so set-in-stone that they can't understand the words "price cut," let aloe react in real time to AMD.

Graphics is still a mess, but they can only fight one war at a time.
 
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darrpara said:
So on the one hand they are making money, on the other hand it only looks impressive vs last Q3 but not that great vs more recent quarters. My look at this is that EPYC is supposedly Q4 still (we will see), and Raven Ridge looks late as premium notebooks will be for Q1 and miss the holiday season.

I've also been seeing a LOT of AMD price cuts on Ryzen and Threadripper in the face of the new Intel chips which is not great for them. Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.

Lastly, I suppose we won't hear any new product announcements until Q218 or later and that is a longgg time from now with Nvidia AND Intel releasing new products in those timeframes.
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The only problem I have with your statement is that if you were to listen to many of the critics, AMD wasn't even supposed to have a profitable quarter this quarter.

I think it is safe to assume that most people who talk about whether or not price Cuts or other things are going to hurt AMD, are speaking completely out of their own asses and we just won't know until the fourth quarter results are released in a similar statement to the Third.
 
darrpara said:
So on the one hand they are making money, on the other hand it only looks impressive vs last Q3 but not that great vs more recent quarters. My look at this is that EPYC is supposedly Q4 still (we will see), and Raven Ridge looks late as premium notebooks will be for Q1 and miss the holiday season.

I've also been seeing a LOT of AMD price cuts on Ryzen and Threadripper in the face of the new Intel chips which is not great for them. Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.

Lastly, I suppose we won't hear any new product announcements until Q218 or later and that is a longgg time from now with Nvidia AND Intel releasing new products in those timeframes.
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A disaster how? They're over msrp because demand is ridiculously high in mining. That certainly doesn't hurt them financially. Even Nvidia prices are inflated due to it. AMD is selling all stock at 100-200 over msrp, so I don't see how that's a disaster. Quite the opposite.

My concern with that is that it's not sustainable and leaves a bad taste in the core gamer market that they can't get the cards at reasonable prices and might hurt them down the road, but AMD can't really do anything about it other than pump out as much as they possibly can. They just have to be careful that if/when the mining market crashes they don't end up with a glut of chips, but if they're making money hand over fist to cover the R&D and get yields up, even if prices fall to half they'll be making money on them still.
 
bobzdar said:
A disaster how? They're over msrp because demand is ridiculously high in mining. That certainly doesn't hurt them financially. Even Nvidia prices are inflated due to it. AMD is selling all stock at 100-200 over msrp, so I don't see how that's a disaster. Quite the opposite.

My concern with that is that it's not sustainable and leaves a bad taste in the core gamer market that they can't get the cards at reasonable prices and might hurt them down the road, but AMD can't really do anything about it other than pump out as much as they possibly can. They just have to be careful that if/when the mining market crashes they don't end up with a glut of chips, but if they're making money hand over fist to cover the R&D and get yields up, even if prices fall to half they'll be making money on them still.
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More like retailers selling 100-200 above mrsp, AMD and Nvidia benefited more due to higher demands for their products.
 
defaultluser said:
Intel fucked up the same way they did with the Athlon 64. The original plan for Coffee Lake was LATE next year, so AMD is making some serious inroads in midrange and high-end gaming. They can't hit volume for a product that wasn't ready to launch yet, and they haven't made any official price cuts on Kaby Lake to cover those missing parts.

Intel will recover more quickly then they did with the Pentium 4 disaster, but their correction this time around will just be keeping slightly ahead of AMD. They don't have the fab or engineering advantage they once enjoyed, and their leaders are so set-in-stone that they can't understand the words "price cut," let aloe react in real time to AMD.

Graphics is still a mess, but they can only fight one war at a time.
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I'd say Intel's sin was segmenting the lineup too hard (out of greed?). For the record, Intel "14nm" process is by and far the most dense (https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/14_nm_lithography_process), I'd count that as a pretty significant fab and engineering advantage. See: https://www.quora.com/Why-havent-CPU-clock-speeds-increased-in-the-last-5-years. Some of the information is a bit old, but the comments are excellent, also talks about why P4 was such a failure.

Also, about Intel being "slightly ahead", on what metric? AMD engineers made the tradeoffs that made most sense for mobile and servers (probably traded transistor speed for lower leakage). I hope the chips do well in those markets. People hoping for 5GHz Zen, or whatever, have no understanding of the design or its intended purpose, might as well keep buying Intel.

darrpara said:
Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.
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It's frustrating that the enthusiast community is so gaming oriented that every product gets judged by that metric. Take the Vega "mess" for example, it destroys the competition in many compute workloads (especially DP), but somehow it's a broken product. Vega might be overpriced for the gaming market, but it's a bargain for compute use.
 
darrpara said:
So on the one hand they are making money, on the other hand it only looks impressive vs last Q3 but not that great vs more recent quarters. My look at this is that EPYC is supposedly Q4 still (we will see), and Raven Ridge looks late as premium notebooks will be for Q1 and miss the holiday season.

I've also been seeing a LOT of AMD price cuts on Ryzen and Threadripper in the face of the new Intel chips which is not great for them. Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.

Lastly, I suppose we won't hear any new product announcements until Q218 or later and that is a longgg time from now with Nvidia AND Intel releasing new products in those timeframes.
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1080 died after 3 days, and it was undervolted... Still haven't got it back and I can't unlock my "free" Destiny 2 copy as it's hardware locked requiring me to have 1080 installed

Vega 64 still runs and mines no issues, both games were actually free which I gave to kiddo.

All about experiences :p

See what wolfenstein does if they are using all the Vega features, should find out in a few days.
 
Windreaper said:
Also, about Intel being "slightly ahead", on what metric? AMD engineers made the tradeoffs that made most sense for mobile and servers (probably traded transistor speed for lower leakage). I hope the chips do well in those markets. People hoping for 5GHz Zen, or whatever, have no understanding of the design or its intended purpose, might as well keep buying Intel..
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5 GHz is 25% faster than 4 GHz.

That's HALF the speedup you get going from 4c/8t to 8c/16t.

This AMD processor is $300.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113429

This Intel processor is $330.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117726

That's the reality of the AMD situation. They have designed a core with half the AVX throughput, but games and most applications don't care. So the performance is almost always 80-90% of Skylake per-clock, and they can afford to give you twice as many cores.

And unlike six years ago, there's actually more multi-threaded software available than there's efficiently-scaling AVX software. Even a large number of new games are supporting extra threads.

So for the next 3 months (until Coffee Lake ramps up), you can get 8 Ryzen cores for less than price of four Intel.

AND AFTER THEY SURPASS AMD, it still won't be decisively. You only see these kinds of improvements AMD had with Ryzen if you screwed up royally the previous generation. They will most likely BOTH continue these tiny improvements in per-core performance and clock speeds.

So people will continue to do what they've already gotten comfortable doing for the year without Intel: recommend AMD.
 
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Not trying to argue with you, but games do care, for now. 3D API overhead is a major reason high single-core speed is even necessary for consumer/gaming use (and where Intel holds any kind of major advantage). Once modern low-overhead APIs become the standard, 6-8 cores at a decent power envelope becomes the sweet spot most likely. But that could take years, especially considering how long popular online games tend to stick around. For that reason, it still makes business sense for Intel to sell "fast" CPUs, most likely. What I was trying to say was that anyone expecting AMD to catch up to Intel clock speed (as if they were trying to) should just buy Intel since that's not where the market is going in general.
 
"Additionally, as a part of our ongoing strategy to monetize our differentiated IP, we successfully closed a patent licensing transaction in the quarter."

Were they referring to licencing their graphics IP to Intel?
 
I have a silly question about where this information should be posted. I mean there is no general AMD forum even tho AMD has both GPU and CPU but the financial side of things and other promotional aspects of AMD . I have always find it weird that financial stuff can end up in the cpu forum?
 
Pieter3dnow said:
I have a silly question about where this information should be posted. I mean there is no general AMD forum even tho AMD has both GPU and CPU but the financial side of things and other promotional aspects of AMD . I have always find it weird that financial stuff can end up in the cpu forum?
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AMD is traditionally accepted as a x86 chip maker, and RTG is a separate entity owned by AMD so yeah I think AMD x86 is where the main aspects of AMD general is to be raised.
 
AMD did well - finally. It's an amazing recovery. But as others have noted, they still have their work cut out for them. Coffee Lake not available in volume yet, so AMD caught a break there - probably enough to float sales until February's process improvement. AMD needs to hit that release in volume (no paperlaunchitis), and it needs to incorporate a decent clockspeed boost. 400MHz or more would be enough to keep them in the race. If you had a 4 GHz 8 core Ryzen that could OC to 4.5 or so, that'd play nicely alongside the 8700k if the pricing was in the same ballpark.

Also, for product segmentation, the Ryzen 5 brand should only incorporate 6 core/12 thread CPUs. AMD should kick the 4 core/8 thread CPUs down to Ryzen 3 lineup and pricing and ditch the 4c/4t Ryzens altogether (or make them super cheap bargain basement CPUs). This way, Ryzen 5 vs i5, and Ryzen 3 vs i3, AMD gives you double the threads. Ryzen 7 vs i7, AMD gives you two extra cores. If the clock speed is closer to equal than it is now, that should be enough to make up the IPC difference, at least in most throughput workloads.

As for Vega, AMD will sell a boatload of them to miners anyway. That'll buy them some time to make something less sucky for gaming. Vega 56 even looked pretty good for a while compared to the 1070. So maybe that'll float them for a bit. But I've been much more impressed with AMD's CPU side than GPU side, of late.
 
shad0w4life said:
Stock tanked after this release.
Completely screwed my calls.

Going to start selling 2 days before news and buy after
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ya, AMD is a weird play on earnings, they always tank on good news. it's a good opportunity if you know it's coming but it really sticks it to guys that trade on fundamentals.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
AMD did well - finally. It's an amazing recovery. But as others have noted, they still have their work cut out for them. Coffee Lake not available in volume yet, so AMD caught a break there - probably enough to float sales until February's process improvement. AMD needs to hit that release in volume (no paperlaunchitis), and it needs to incorporate a decent clockspeed boost. 400MHz or more would be enough to keep them in the race. If you had a 4 GHz 8 core Ryzen that could OC to 4.5 or so, that'd play nicely alongside the 8700k if the pricing was in the same ballpark.

Also, for product segmentation, the Ryzen 5 brand should only incorporate 6 core/12 thread CPUs. AMD should kick the 4 core/8 thread CPUs down to Ryzen 3 lineup and pricing and ditch the 4c/4t Ryzens altogether (or make them super cheap bargain basement CPUs). This way, Ryzen 5 vs i5, and Ryzen 3 vs i3, AMD gives you double the threads. Ryzen 7 vs i7, AMD gives you two extra cores. If the clock speed is closer to equal than it is now, that should be enough to make up the IPC difference, at least in most throughput workloads.

As for Vega, AMD will sell a boatload of them to miners anyway. That'll buy them some time to make something less sucky for gaming. Vega 56 even looked pretty good for a while compared to the 1070. So maybe that'll float them for a bit. But I've been much more impressed with AMD's CPU side than GPU side, of late.
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To my best knowledge, the 12nm LP process used by the Ryzen refresh is just an evolution of the licensed 14nm LPP with tighter design rules, correct me if I'm wrong. The increased density should result in some clock speed improvements, but wouldn't expect anything groundbreaking.

Vega is selling not only to miners, but also professionals/prosumers requiring good compute performance. AMD would have to pull a Kepler, and strip off the "unnecessary" compute hardware, to create a more gaming-focused chip, like NVIDIA has done. It's not impossible something like that might surface later, but it appears AMD has done the math and is happy selling Vega to the GPU compute market (crypto, simulation, deep learning, etc.) for now.
 
Did we ever get the hard line on why Vega was delayed so long? Did someone at AMD say it was availability? Performance? Tuning? I guess I figured it was a collection of those 3 things, but really never saw a direct quote pointing out the main culprit.
 
oldmanbal said:
Did we ever get the hard line on why Vega was delayed so long? Did someone at AMD say it was availability? Performance? Tuning? I guess I figured it was a collection of those 3 things, but really never saw a direct quote pointing out the main culprit.
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HBM2
 
darrpara said:
Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.
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In New Zealand of all places the Vega 64 is now at 1080 Ref-some AIB pricing levels where it should be.
 
Windreaper said:
To my best knowledge, the 12nm LP process used by the Ryzen refresh is just an evolution of the licensed 14nm LPP with tighter design rules, correct me if I'm wrong. The increased density should result in some clock speed improvements, but wouldn't expect anything groundbreaking.
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That's correct. It's only a process improvement. No IPC increase or major architectural update. But I would like to see a good clockspeed boost out of it. Like I said, if they got an extra 400 MHz out of it or so, and got themselves a 4.0 GHz base 8 core Ryzen that could OC to 4.4-4.5, that'd be solid.

But that's a total crapshoot. I've got no more information than you do about it.
 
IIRC TSMC was reported to bring AMD on to 12nm or something. Vega 11 is supposed to be improved process and they did pay a penalty for non-GloFo wafers. Digitimes article.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
That's correct. It's only a process improvement. No IPC increase or major architectural update. But I would like to see a good clockspeed boost out of it. Like I said, if they got an extra 400 MHz out of it or so, and got themselves a 4.0 GHz base 8 core Ryzen that could OC to 4.4-4.5, that'd be solid.

But that's a total crapshoot. I've got no more information than you do about it.
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Give me thread ripper at 4.5Ghz and I'd be team red faster than you could blink.
 
Not bad at all.

Remember that AMD has mostly been selling Ryzen to people building their own systems.

OEMs mostly sell systems with integrated graphics and, obviously, Raven Ridge hasn't been released yet.
 
gigaxtreme1 said:
IIRC TSMC was reported to bring AMD on to 12nm or something. Vega 11 is supposed to be improved process and they did pay a penalty for non-GloFo wafers. Digitimes article.
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Could be just payments for the console wafers. (Separate from the Digitimes article, that's different)
 
darrpara said:
So on the one hand they are making money, on the other hand it only looks impressive vs last Q3 but not that great vs more recent quarters. My look at this is that EPYC is supposedly Q4 still (we will see), and Raven Ridge looks late as premium notebooks will be for Q1 and miss the holiday season.

I've also been seeing a LOT of AMD price cuts on Ryzen and Threadripper in the face of the new Intel chips which is not great for them. Also, we all know Vega is a disaster since only NOW is SOME stock making it to stores and even then it is overpriced for the market.

Lastly, I suppose we won't hear any new product announcements until Q218 or later and that is a longgg time from now with Nvidia AND Intel releasing new products in those timeframes.
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AMD is really making decent on their CPUs. Ryzen and threadrippers have really fricking good yield. I think they are fine and have more then enough room for price cuts.
 
as to above comment, it would be nice (especially for us Canadian folk who bar none are forced to pay more for Ryzen/Radeon which does not help) but then again, for how long AMD was burning through load of cash borrowed or otherwise, as long as pricing is "fair" for us consumers they are best to keep cost as high as feasible for as long as possible will give them the $ they need for RnD/driver support etc

Ryzen(TR/EPYC) are amazing especially the <3ly job they have done for the sheer feature set completeness of AM4/TR4 but, they need to keep the momentum going and not sit on laurels like Intel has done and they have been forced to do in the past (a bit their own fault but also being backstabbed pricing from big blue)

If they can put a chunk of $ towards making sure Zen v2, next RX series etc and make sure they are as great as possible with (hopefully) a slightly better price, there is no reason why their stock price should not be a minimum of $25+ 2018-2019, make products awesome on time and on budget type thing...the analysts need to settle the hell down though, if AMD does poorly everyone crucifies them, and if they do awesome (like they have done 2016/2017) they still look for various excuses to demonize them.

Hope the refresh due early next year (not Zen 2 which is supposed to be 7nm) is a bit faster clocks lower power (which is actually not that bad as is) maybe a wee bit better pricing, time will tell..I do not picture the APU version being OMG! as 35w tdp is not much to feed a dedicated 4core zen with Vega as well, I can picture some heavy throttling happening no different than previous APU for both Intel and AMD in the tdp/power limits are not large enough.
 
gigaxtreme1 said:
IIRC TSMC was reported to bring AMD on to 12nm or something. Vega 11 is supposed to be improved process and they did pay a penalty for non-GloFo wafers. Digitimes article.
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I thought last year (maybe) they renegotiated their contract to allow the manufacturing of wafers else where, so no more penalties.
 
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10631/amd-amends-globalfoundries-wafer-supply-agreement-through-2020

Under this new agreement, AMD has been granted a “limited waiver” to work with other foundries “with respect to certain products in the 14nm and 7nm technology nodes.” As a result, while AMD still has to meet their overall wafer buy targets over the 5 year period, AMD also will continue working with other foundries on unspecified products where they see a need to have them manufactured at somewhere other than GlobalFoundries. It’s not clear if this really a significant departure from the status quo for AMD, but at a minimum it more rigidly defines how AMD is going to buy from both GlobalFoundries and third-party fabs.

This flexibility comes at a cost though. Not unlike past years where AMD has paid GlobalFoundries a penalty under take-or-pay, AMD will be paying the foundry for this new flexibility. GlobalFoundries will be receiving a $100M payment from AMD, spread out over the next 4 quarters. Meanwhile starting in 2017, AMD will also have to pay GlobalFoundries for wafers they buy from third-party foundries. This in particular is a notable change from past agreements, as AMD has never paid a penalty before in this fashion. Ultimately this means AMD could end up paying GlobalFoundries two different types of penalties: one for making a chip at another fab, and a second penalty if AMD doesn’t make their wafer target for the year with GlobalFoundries.
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SighTurtle said:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10631/amd-amends-globalfoundries-wafer-supply-agreement-through-2020
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That deal certainly looks prescient at this point, giving AMD the flexibility to bring other fabs on line if they have a lot of demand - and with them supplying xbox1 and ps4, good Ryzen sales and decent performance from Vega (at least Vega 56), it looks like they need it. It also gives them access to different nodes if GloFo can't get it done - they can have all of the console stuff pumped out in 14nm at Glofo and if Samsung and/or TSMC get 7nm ready for volume production first, they can start Zen2 and Vega II there.
 
defaultluser said:
Intel is more competitive in the Threadripper arena, but even with those price cuts AMD is probably making bank on those systems. It's not like they cut prices in half or anything. It's $130 off the original MSRP.

And AMD still owns the mainstream gaming market, with Coffee Lake completely out-of-stock at MSRP (typically $100 over).
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AMD makes 16 core/32 thread Threadripper CPUs out of 2 Ryzen dies. Ryzen dies have over 90% yield rate. Intel has to make their competing Skylake X chips out of large, monolithic dies, which absolutely don't have >90% yields. This yield advantage is even more extreme for Epyc, where AMD makes 32 core/64 thread Epyc chips out of 4 90%+ yield Ryzen chips. And AMD could, and probably will, make even higher core-count packages (CPUs) for select customers, out of even more Ryzen dies, and still have >90% yields. Intel's server chip margins are in serious trouble:

 
Stock may hit 12 soon, good time to get in on this if you missed it all the other times.

The big boys are driving the cost down for entry, trying to hit their calls by friday, monday should be a really fun day.
 
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