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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Last time I checked AMD was losing something like $200MM a quarter with around $750MM cash on hand. So they could be out of money in a year.

NVIDIA isn't exactly losing this race ... why not just lock yourself in to GameWorks?

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Assuming AMD runs out of money tomorrow, we'd still have an installed base of 50 or 60 million XBox Ones, PlayStation 4s and Wii Us that make use of AMD GPUs, together with a 25% market share on computers.

> why not just lock yourself in to GameWorks?

Because only Nvidia users benefit of it, which manages barely 55% of the PC market share – everything else is dominated by AMD or Intel (or, in the case of handhelds, various other companies).

And in the long run if Nvidia dominates the market even Nvidia users won't benefit (or won't benefit as much as they could have).

Well, there's the case for other platforms than PC.

Also, maybe if you are a major studio who will with certainty release your game within 18 months, perhaps you should. But if you invest heavily and lock yourself to a specific SDK of a single vendor, you better hope the SDK survives and remains relevant.

>NVIDIA isn't exactly losing this race

Because AMD has been putting out great cards the past few months, completely revamped their their driver software. Meanwhile NVIDIA has been doing not much of anything. The latest reports have shown AMD regaining market share in discrete CPU's and this trend will most likely continue. AMD has ZEN coming out next year, and they will probably be profitable again by the end of 2016. AMD isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

reskin not revamp

So it is time to buy new CPU and GPU?

AMD's finances have been miserable for ten years, and they always managed to find new investors.

It's kinda weird, actually. I mean, AMD often has really interesting ideas that may be easy to sell, but execution is always bad and the brand is damaged.

AMD's execution being bad has been provably Intel's fault at times; Intel has been proven to use anti-competetive contracts in the past with their customers (HP, Dell, etc), i.e. limit good CPU prices/discounts unless customers limit their use of AMD.

That was ten years ago. Ever since, AMD had a free playing field… not that it helped.

AMD is playing a fair field, but they aren't innovating. Their top of the line processors haven't received changes in 2 years.

Well they are trying to innovate: hbm, apus, vr.

The 22nm process node they wanted to use was cancelled, and now they're basically working to push it their 14nm products instead. Kind of such (edit:sux) for them to be fabless.

They'll have it. Zen will be 14nm process. I'm excited for Zen, AMD does good things when the wipe the board clean and start over.

Also they brought on the guy responsible for some of the earlier iPhone processors, which had great single-threaded performance (AMD's weakest point right now).

Jim Keller, their previous lead architect, has left again.

The Zen design would have been complete or nearly so by the time he left, but it looks like they're already slipping on their original time frame.

I'm looking forward to what they do, but it's not without some bumps in the road yet.

Like they did with Bulldozer…?

> Kind of such for then to be fabless.

Shouldn't have sold their fabs, then.

True. But you know how people say things like "people have been predicted AMD bankruptcy for 10 years, and they're still going". Well the reason they're still alive is because they flogged all the silver. And they hocked their teeth. And the company is deeply in debt. The company is worth negative equity, which the market still values at 2B.

There was a little while when AMD had the advantage, wasn't there? Putting out 64-bit and dual-cores while Intel was struggling with the Pentium 4 architecture.

That is what lead to Intel's behaviour; in doing so they limited AMD free cash flow, and in turn limited AMD ability to fund newer die shrinks. And Intel's main advantage over AMD at the moment is the fact that it is one die shrink generation ahead.

The Intel antitrust lawsuit was on Intel's behaviour in the 90s – it just took until 2005 to finally reach US courts (it was filed with the EC in 2000). By the time AMD had competitive CPUs, Intel had already stopped their practices to avoid further scrutiny.

AMD just stopped being competitive too quickly to gain a proper foothold.

It's in Intel's best interest that they can find investors; whether they have influenced this is an open question.

http://hackaday.com/2015/12/09/echo-of-the-bunnymen-how-amd-... for reference

Do you think your CPU and GPU will stop working if they go out of business?

Well, the GPU at least would quickly become useless without driver updates. Every time a new AAA title is released, Nvidia and AMD scramble to work around game bugs inside their drivers because the developers don't care.

They care, but drivers contain bugs too. Your attitude seems overly negative without much argumentation. Are you sure your negativity is warranted?

>> drivers because the developers don't care

Yeah because developers have unlimited access to all sorts of GPU/CPU combos that the customers have...

I meant, I need to buy new AMD CPU and GPU.

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