AMD Now Almost Worth A Quarter of What it Paid for ATI

[Sempron Guy]

Marketing plays a role in this also. I remember back when AMD was kicking Intel with their Athlon line-up and even with that I couldn't find a single Athlon being sold like in a thousand mile radius. Even this past few years, if not for their APUs which clicks to the masses and coin operated PCs w/c is quite common here, you have to dig for AMD CPUs or purchase it online.

 

[AsRock]

Damn... Well, the less they cost, the sooner someone realy might buy them.

That has a estimated ( my guess ) 95% chance that Intel be over the moon with 0% competition.

The period after the Lehman Brothers collapse, AMD's valuation was under a billion if I remember correctly. They are still alive.

They have enough money to survive the next year until Zen arrives and they will also probably see an increase in their income from GPUs in the next one or two quarters. The fact that TSMC is lowering the prices of 28nm by 10% will help them to make a little extra profit. Intel is also slowing down, so the only question mark is Zen's IPC performance and efficiency. If they come out with something at least as good as Intel Haswell(too optimistic, probably Ivy Bridge would have been closer to reality), their share price and valuation will go much higher, because their products will become much more competitive than they are today.

TSMC lowering 10% helps nothing really as the chances are nVidia will lower their price there fore AMD will have to, peanuts anyone ?.

And wtf is with these anti fanboy posts i keep seeing, AMD goes down this shit hits everyone regardless if a fanboy from either side or not even one at all.

 

[Rauelius]

AMD needs to make products people want to buy....

And processors that can perform well and are priced well....

The Athlon 64 was released over 10 years ago It was a Pentium 4 killer...

AMD needs another Athlon 64.... Or they could go the way of mips and SGI

They already do, the problem is the prices are insane. Imagine if in 2008/2009 AMD priced the Radeon 4870 at the same $450 price as the GTX260, they'd be out of business already. Instead they launched the 4870 at $300, got a TON of good press, saw brisk sales, and embarrassed nvidia bad enough that nVidia had to send refund checks to people who bought the GTX280/GTX260 AND lowered their prices. This AMD victory was due to using an older die process in combination with a brand new up and coming type of RAM that provided insane memory bandwidth at the time. The 4870 was in reality just a cleaned up 3870 with GDDR5, but the improvements made were HUGE.

The Fury-X would have been the perfect 2015 parallel to the 2008 Radeon 4870, were it a $550 graphics card. Fiji is a cleaned up and improved Hawaii using an older die process, much like the 4870 did. The Fury-X uses a new type of ram, much like the 4870. The Fury-X for the most part matches the performance of nVidia's #2 graphics card, again much like the 4870 matched the GTX260.

Where AMD screwed up is pricing. Had the Fury-X launched at $550 it would have made both the 980Ti and Vanilla-980 pointless. Figure for $50 more than a 980 you get much more performance, and for $100 less than the 980-Ti you get close enough performance.

I don't think that a $550 Fury-X and $450 Fury would have helped in the short-term, but positive press would generate greater interest and sales. Like I said, had AMD looked for the same $450 that nVidia was asking for the GTX260, and offering the same performance, I know most would have gotten nVidia. Because it was much less expensive and was either equal or faster than the GTX260 AMD had a great few years because of one wise decision to price the 4870 at $300. I wish AMD still had a shred of common sense left.

 

[profoundWHALE]

AMD is seriously suffering in the 'other OS' department right now. If you take two GPUs that are on equal footing, like say the 290 and the 970, and play a game on Linux, the 970 will beat it easily. We only just got OpenCL 2.0 with the Official AMD drivers.

 

[ShurikN]

Where AMD screwed up is pricing. Had the Fury-X launched at $550 it would have made both the 980Ti and Vanilla-980 pointless. Figure for $50 more than a 980 you get much more performance, and for $100 less than the 980-Ti you get close enough performance.

I don't think that a $550 Fury-X and $450 Fury would have helped in the short-term, but positive press would generate greater interest and sales. Like I said, had AMD looked for the same $450 that nVidia was asking for the GTX260, and offering the same performance, I know most would have gotten nVidia. Because it was much less expensive and was either equal or faster than the GTX260 AMD had a great few years because of one wise decision to price the 4870 at $300. I wish AMD still had a shred of common sense left.

$600 for Fury X is reasonable imo, considering that it's faster at 4K than 980Ti in majority of games, plus a couple of driver updates would boost it slightly.
And since the regular Fury is not that far behind, I would guess a $535-550 would suffice for the non X.

AMD is seriously suffering in the 'other OS' department right now. If you take two GPUs that are on equal footing, like say the 290 and the 970, and play a game on Linux, the 970 will beat it easily. We only just got OpenCL 2.0 with the Official AMD drivers.

Number of peple who buy high end cards to game on Linux is negligible.

 

[Basard]

Not really. I mean, it's a 3rd party chip (Etron EJ168). They do have their in-house USB 3.0 controller (goes with every single chipset they have for 2015, present in both ULV and mainstream category devices), but they have yet to start equipping their performance segment products with it.

Oh... i see.... figured it was something like that....

 

[Iceni]

I love that everyone is ranting about high end product. It's not high end stuff that makes any of the companies money. It's the low end consumer stuff.

Amd had been hit hard by the tablet/phone market making a huge dent on low end laptop sales, and driving down laptop costs. They never had a big market share in the corporate business machine market that has always been dominated by Intel. AMD is trying to make ends meet with the APU laptops but with everything else that goes into them, and in an attempt to keep prices as low as possible they suffer in profits. There also struggling against Intel's very strong i series branding. And while the APU's offer more in a lot of cases the cheap red and black logo against the more mature Intel logo is a no brainier to those that buy without knowledge.

What AMD need is a break into the business machine market. And a product that businesses want to use. They already have it with the APU but it needs to be brought into a format that offers more than what Intel are offering. And currently both companies are offering the same deal, Powerful base chip with excellent power saving features. AMD really need re-badging for the business sector with a mature image. The current red and black doesn't have that mature business feeling to it.

 

[Aquinus]

What AMD need is a break into the business machine market. And a product that businesses want to use. They already have it with the APU but it needs to be brought into a format that offers more than what Intel are offering. And currently both companies are offering the same deal, Powerful base chip with excellent power saving features. AMD really need re-badging for the business sector with a mature image. The current red and black doesn't have that mature business feeling to it.

This couldn't be any more of a true statement. The business market is where a lot of money in the industry is made and Intel has a chokehold over it. That's workstations, laptops, and servers alike.

 

[SonicZap]

The Fury-X would have been the perfect 2015 parallel to the 2008 Radeon 4870, were it a $550 graphics card. Fiji is a cleaned up and improved Hawaii using an older die process, much like the 4870 did. The Fury-X uses a new type of ram, much like the 4870. The Fury-X for the most part matches the performance of nVidia's #2 graphics card, again much like the 4870 matched the GTX260.

The problem with comparing Fury (X) and HD 4870 is that the 4870 had a small, energy-efficient GPU that was easy and inexpensive to manufacture. Because of that AMD was able price the 4870 at $300 and still make significant profit on it. However, Fiji is a big chip (much bigger than GM204), and with the complicated manufacturing process that involves HBM and the interposer, AMD would likely get little profit if they sold full Fiji at $550 and the cut-down version at something like $450. Plus, if the price was lower than it is right now, demand would be much higher, and AMD is already completely unable to meet the demand for their Furies (they're all out of stock everywhere). In other words, a lower price right now would just get a bit of good publicity for AMD at the cost of getting less profit. And as evidenced by these Q2 results, AMD needs more revenue badly.

I personally believe that AMD is going to die. It's sad, but I see very little chance of them getting out of this alive, AMD has nothing to challenge Intel with and Nvidia knows that AMD is weak and will continue the bloody price war that they started with the GTX 970, with the final objective of forcing AMD out of the discrete GPU space.

After that, (high-end) PC gaming will get more expensive as Nvidia will continue slowly increasing the price of graphics cards. GTX 780 Ti, 980 and now 980 Ti have all gone for $650, beginning with Volta (or Pascal if AMD dies before it) I'm expecting Nvidia to start slowly increasing the price of their most powerful non-Titan graphics card closer to $1000, just because they can.

 

[Agentbb007]

Hahaha, did you know shareholders are responsible for debt? You have a few spare billion?

WRONG - Simply owning the stock in a corporation does not make the individuals liable for the corporation's debt.

 

[john_]

TSMC lowering 10% helps nothing really as the chances are nVidia will lower their price there fore AMD will have to, peanuts anyone ?.

Considering that Nvidia was already thinking of lowering prices at the hi end, this is exactly what AMD needed. I don't expect Nvidia to do a huge price cut after these news. They will do the price cuts they where thinking and stop there. Also the prices affect all the cards not just the hi end and at the low/mid range AMD is more than competitive. Also the price redaction affects console processors.

Interface options are irrelevant: if if was profitable enough, they have BUILT a completely new interface for the consoles, as Nvidia has for the Summit and Sierra supercomputers (NVLink).

Nvidia would have offered to make console chips even with zero margins. The reason is simple. All console games would be using PhysX and GameWorks by now. AMD gpus would have been considered faulty at best today with many bugs all over the place and poor performance. I think Nvidia tried, but both Sony and Microsoft where having cheap x86 consoles in their minds that would start bringing profits from day one.

And what exactly is the link you show me? I don't find it relevant with consoles or x86 and even if it is, this article is from 11/2014. PS4 and Xbox One where introduced at the end of 2013. So the question is what did Nvidia had to offer at 2012? Looking at wiki, Tegra 3 and that's not an x86 SOC. x86 on all platforms (Xbox One, PS4, PC) makes game development cheaper and faster. The latest rumors say than Nintendo NX will also use AMD's chips, which makes sense because the biggest problem for the Nintendo consoles today is the lack of third party games.

ermmm how exactly, if AMD is the only one they can turn to as you state, is AMD not in a position of negotiate? that seems to me to be the most perfect position to negotiate.....

I think Sony and Microsoft know how to negotiate a deal. Also AMD was with its back on the wall. And both those companies knew it. So I am pretty sure they explained to AMD that they had many alternative options for their next gen consoles, and all those options where bad for AMD. So AMD would have to offer them a great deal from the beginning, to guaranteed that Sony and/or Microsoft would not turn to Nvidia and/or Intel for the main parts. I don't think AMD was willing to gamble it's future just so it can secure a better deal.

 

[n-ster]

omg, green and red fanbois must be really ecstatic now! this is all they want, with AMD gone will have world peace, no more abortions, Kim will move to US, etc, keep it up fanbois!

Ummm... You seem to be complaining about fanboys, yet you are the one coming out with this kind of comment. Even Intel fanboys would hate it if AMD goes out, they aren't idiot enough to forget Intel is a business that could control market price and tech advancement if that happened

 

[Aquinus]

Intel is a business that could control market price and tech advancement if that happened

Intel already does this with the x86 market. It's better for Intel if AMD doesn't go under and remains in a crippled state than for it to go under. For legal reasons, it's good for Intel for AMD to not go under but be incapable of competing well.

 

[buildzoid]

Or you could spend the big bucks and get a high-core-count Xeon and see what Intel has really been up to.

Or I could buy 2 12 core Opterons for the price of a single 10 core Xeon overclock the 2 opterons (praise be to AMD's ancient FSB) to 4Ghz and get almost the same single threaded performance as the Xeon and 2x the multithreaded performance. Too bad there aren't any proper overclocking boards for Opterons.

 

[newtekie1]

On a side note. It's odd but I'm slowly moving away from intel products even though the performance gap is getting steadily larger, I've come to realize that I don't play enough new games to care about single threaded performance on the other hand I do stream and edit video on occasion and that's something an FX8370 at 4.8Ghz can do better than an i5 4XXX.

Almost all my low-end office workstations I build are AMD based. There performance is more than enough and the price is better.

 

[buildzoid]

Nvidia would have offered to make console chips even with zero margins. The reason is simple. All console games would be using PhysX and GameWorks by now. AMD gpus would have been considered faulty at best today with many bugs all over the place and poor performance. I think Nvidia tried, but both Sony and Microsoft where having cheap x86 consoles in their minds that would start bringing profits from day one.

The current gen consoles have PhysX support.

 

[GhostRyder]

The current gen consoles have PhysX support.

CPU side PhysX not GPU accelerated PhysX (Unless something has changed) which we can all do.

Intel already does this with the x86 market. It's better for Intel if AMD doesn't go under and remains in a crippled state than for it to go under. For legal reasons, it's good for Intel for AMD to not go under but be incapable of competing well.

Yep, if they went under then there is the chance they would be considered a monopoly even with ARM, IBM and what not. That would be worse for them.

 

[mroofie]

With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.

I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.

Air Cooling ???

if its Liquid don't bother typing back



"With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots." - Irony

 

[HumanSmoke]

ermmm how exactly, if AMD is the only one they can turn to as you state, is AMD not in a position of negotiate? that seems to me to be the most perfect position to negotiate.....

The alternative was obviously to stay with IBM's POWER architecture. It is pretty obvious that IBM was keeping its old fab at East Fishkill (where the Cell processor is fabbed) ticking over just in case. As soon as AMD were awarded the contract, IBM began shopping its East Fishkill and Essex Junction plants - which ended up being offloaded to GloFo with a cash incentive after no one evinced interest for almost two years.

So they hint. Nothing explicit was said as I recall.

Devinder Kumar, AMD's CFO, actually mentioned last year that AMD were looking at (finally) breaking $20 per console with the APUs die shrink. Assuming AMD's oft-quoted revenue per unit is $100-110. Their actual profit after manufacturing has been in the $15-$18 range.

 

[EarthDog]

Dear AMD,

Invest less in your marketing and more into (enthusiast level) substance for your products.

- Consumers

With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.

I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.

Wow... with respect, you really have no idea.

(I'd elaborate this second, but, I'm mobile and it will take more than I want to give to hash it out on my phone.. sorry to be so terse)

 

[buildzoid]

Dear AMD,

Invest less in your marketing and more into (enthusiast level) substance for your products.

- Consumers

What marketing? Most people don't even know that AMD exists. Even IBM is more famous than AMD and IBM hasn't been in the consumer business for years now. Most consumers would be perfectly ok using an AMD APU. However they don't even know that AMD APUs exist. Unless you play video games you are very very unlikely to ever hear a thing about AMD.

 

[qubit]

AMD are a dead man walking and it's all their upper management's fault.

 

[OneMoar]

 

[MrGenius]

AMD Reportedly Making Nintendo NX Processor

AMD, without quite saying it, has practically confirmed it is making the processor for the Nintendo NX game console. Lisa Su, AMD's chief executive, has said the company is working on its third custom contract and reports claim that contract is worth $1 billion in sales. Pair that statement with previous hints that AMD is making custom chips for the gaming market and it seems AMD's processor will power the NX.

Do da...do da...

Game over is it? Time to get that stock while it's still affordable is more like it.

 

[HumanSmoke]

AMD Reportedly Making Nintendo NX Processor
Do da...do da...
Game over is it? Time to get that stock while it's still affordable is more like it.

$1bn in sales doesn't mean a great deal in relation to the net profit per unit, and the length of time the sales are spread over. AMD already has the PS4 and Xbone contracts - and while they provide a revenue stream, they are hardly causing the company to be awash with cash.