AMD stock up 52%
nasdaq.com
nasdaq.com
- problems with scalable 10nm, 14nm might be the next 28nm for a while and all manufacturers will catch up, obliterating Intel's major advantage
- Zen might be sufficiently competitive with older Core chips on performance, power and price, better on GPU side (hopefully not another Barcelona)
- all major consoles run on AMD
- Polaris vs Pascal
- they might survive until 2017 and have cash to produce new chips
Interestingly 2011 was also the year SSD were available in not so luxury price. It was the when 64GB dropped to around $100. Anandtech has been calling this as the largest performance upgrade in history. And I would agree you should trade SSD for ANY CPU performance. That is assuming you are not using some more then a decade old CPU or you already have 16+ GB memory.
If the rumours are true then it is a combination of things making this a perfect storm ( not sure if that is the right way of putting it). Intel no longer has a significant lead in Fab node processing. The money from Mobile processor has help pure play foundry to catch up big time. Zen would offer significant performance increase that pass what most consider as enough ( for now ), and Intel hasn't had much performance gain with Skylake. Running along is the perfect match of new GPU coming from AMD. Which should be first the time ever AMD has a APU competitive with Intel in performance and run circles around Intel in GPU performance.
This sounds all good good for AMD, that is until Intel provides more detail on Goldmont, their next gen Atom. Goldmont, and its Apollo Lake platform, provides all the essential features one would expect for the most common PC user for a very cheap price. Cherry Tail, based on Airmont was already doing well in Surface 3, if Goldmont as rumours suggest provides much higher IPC ( think Core2 Duo like performance rather then SandyBridge ) and comes with Skylake Gen9 GPU along with much cheaper price, this could be a tough battle.
Can wait for both to reveal more details, 2016 will be an interesting year for PC.
- Native USB 3.1 support
- 200 Series chipset (Union Point)
- Thermal design power (TDP) up to 95 W (LGA 1151)
- Support for both DDR3L SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM in mainstream variants, using custom UniDIMM SO-DIMM form factor
- Support for 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from CPU, 24 PCI Express 3.0 lanes from PCH (LGA 1151)
- Support for Thunderbolt 3
- 64 to 128 MB L4 eDRAM cache on certain SKUs
- Up to four cores as the default mainstream configuration
- Support for Intel Optane Technology
- Full fixed function HEVC Main10/10-bit decoding acceleration & VP9 10-bit decoding acceleration.
Biggest point for me is native USB 3.1 (Type-C) support. USB Type-C is is projected to be the most abundant socket in the history of humanity.
So if you don't need much performance, Goldmont, at least on paper now seems to offer the same as Kabylake.
Beyond Moore's Law I wonder if we'll just see a massive drop in the cost of computing power to the point where something near parity with a 48 core Xeon is like $10. Then it would become very cheap to put tons of them in a box and build little desktop supercomputers.
I also think die sizes will grow, including the possibility of "3D" wafers, but that will bring its own manufacturing and design challenges as well.
Anyway I think the end of classic Moore's Law scaling is still far enough away on the horizon that nobody can really predict what will happen, but if it does indeed happen as soon as the 2020s we will be in for a treat no matter what happens I think.
It's not true. Their 3DXpoint memory offers 10x GB/$ of dram, at a speed relatively close to dram.Leaving aside the huge impact on the storage market - Intel even did an exeriment[1] , taking a 8GB Dram computer and comparing it to a 256Mbte Dram(as cache) + 3DXpoint sitting on the main bus - and they performed equally.
If that's true(and 3DXpoint has the reliability for such usecase) - this means Intel could possible own the mobile market - and own the full stack of computing.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc&feature=youtu.be...
And then the IBM PC happened, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I went back and got some hard figures. I had to average yearly high/low stock price to compute historical market cap. All values in $millions:
1980 1985 1990 ttm / yesterday
---- ---- ---- ----
AMD sales 309 576 1059 3990
mkt cap 446 1672 617 3170
INTC sales 855 1365 3921 55360
mkt cap 1667 3091 7990 149260
Currently Intel sales are 13.8x AMD and market cap is 47x.
Here are the recent financial articles about AMD:
http://www.markets.co/analysts-bullish-on-top-technology-pic...
http://thefly.com/landingPageNews.php?id=2360810&headline=AM...
And all the bloggers :
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/22/buy-advance...
http://amigobulls.com/articles/shorts-are-running-away-from-...
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/14/3-tech-stoc...
https://valuestocks.whotrades.com/blog/43296425516
Here are all the insiders buying about 3 weeks ago:
https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/harry-wolin https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/forrest-eugene-norrod https://www.tipranks.com/insiders/devinder-kumar
I took this from https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/amd
I also followed AMD in Google News but honestly couldn't find anything too interesting there.
This is pretty common, for example I've found a site that uses the same reports I read to trade with a strategy http://www.smarteranalyst.com/daily-insider , I know a guy who works there and he eats his own dogfood (invests with the strategy) and so far he's claiming good profits.
Personally I don't really buy into it yet but we'll see.
That being said, I think Zen is entering in a much better position to succeed than Bulldozer was - They're entering with a leading-edge 14nm process from Glofo, which has been producing for a year at this point, at good performance and yields by all accounts. Glofo's 32nm process that Bulldozer is on was less than stellar and never really achieved good power consumption. What we do know about Zen's architecture also seems much more conventional and "fat and wide" than Bulldozer, a design which Intel and AMD previous to Bulldozer were pulling off successfully for years. Bulldozer's module design might have been good in theory, but single-threaded performance suffered too much compared to the fat and wide design.
If they can match Intel performance at even slightly lower price points, which seems likely given the above, I think they will easily survive the near to medium term, and if they are somehow able to do even better than that, we might be in another 2003-2007 era for Intel where they struggle to play catch up for the next few years. Seems unlikely, but you never know.
I have to say that you hit very close to base - makes me wonder if you've also read the report or are the said analyst :) They speculate that Zen is actually a lot further ahead than AMD are willing to admit publicly.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-ne...
It is cheap enough now to buy a few dozen shares and get an easy return if it rises, without hurting too much if it falls again. And it's not like AMD is going out of business anytime soon. Certainly the value of their IP and assets would justify a floor in the stock price.
Just one of the many ways Intel seems to be dropping the ball lately.
I've been at home, on AC power, starting around 9-10% battery, where it tells me 12+ hours until full charge. This laptop is 4 months old, and that scenario was only iTerm and Chrome open... :'(
The issue at hand affects only mobile Skylakes. Skylakes targeting desktop use are not affected.
The caveat Intel published re: Skylakes is the same caveat it has published for the previous two generation of CPU's.
What we seem to be lacking is actual evidence -- numbers -- that Linux users running on those units have seen more failures than users not running Linux.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-ne...
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/amd-promises-three-new...
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/22/why-advance...
So they werent undervalued too much, but they are now, and so I think you are probably correct about more radical upwards corrections.
I am especially excited to see their server cpus with zen. My favorite machine I have ever built is actually an AMD machine, and I built it fairly recently because there are some models in which they excel. (Its a quad opteron 6380 system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz, and I did it for less than 5k$ Something I theorycrafted while in bioinformatics, though I didnt get to buld it until I was no longer in that industry.)
Also, I'll say that I have been looking at building a new system for my gamedev purposes, and I have concluded that I am going to wait for Zen. If they miss the q4 2016 release though they may lose the mindshare momentum they are bulding up.
That sounds good. Unfortunately, in my experience, the real-world performance of the low-end chips in cheap laptops has been absolutely dire for about a decade. And those low-end chips are the ones most of us experience....
As a little side note, I think it's fantastic that AMD is replacing its E-series APUs that used Atom-like CPU cores in low-end notebooks, at a time when Intel is doing the exact opposite by replacing the Core micro-architecture in Celerons and Pentiums with Atom, so it can sell what are essentially $30-$40 chips for $107-$160.
http://fudzilla.com/images/stories/2015/April/amd-desktop.jp...
Intel did this because it thought AMD is no real competition technically, but more importantly from a brand point of view (Intel thought people will keep buying its chips at the same price points even if it replaces them with a much weaker core with many fewer hardware features). With Zen in general (thank you Jim Keller! [1]), but also with Zen in the low-end of the market, AMD just called Intel's bluff - and I think it will win this one while Intel is stuck with Atom in Celerons and Pentiums for the next few years.
The dual-core Zen CPUs in the E-series should absolutely trash the Atom-based Celerons and Pentiums, and likely the scammy $280 Core M chip as well. APUs like the A4 and A6 were already destroying Atom-based Celerons in terms of price/performance.
Looking forward to the quad-core/8 thread Zen APUs that will compete against the dual-core/4-thread Core i3 and Core i5 as well, and may even beat them on single-thread performance, if the price is equalized. From some calculations I've seen Zen may come within 10% of Intel's IPC at the same clock speed, even for Kaby Lake. But you may be able to get say an AMD chip that has the same performance as Core i3 in single-thread, almost twice the performance in multi-thread, and still cost 10% less.
As another side note, I really hope Qualcomm ends up buying AMD, though it probably should've done it last year, and it may have done it, too, if it wasn't for their own Snapdragon 810 blunder, which almost got its board to sell the chip division (a huge mistake, which I'm glad they eventually rejected).
Now the price is going to increase by 2x or more. Hopefully AMD's shareholders won't get greedy and sell for cheap, because AMD needs an infusion of cash as well, so it can adopt the latest process nodes as quickly as they are available, and so it can develop and launch multiple lines of products at the same time. That's how it can become much more competitive.
I think Qualcomm would be a good steward of AMD (it already bought the mobile GPU division from AMD a decade ago, and has taken full advantage of it). It has the commitment and incentive to want to beat Intel and go after its profits in the PC and server markets, while operating on much lower cost structures (Innovator's Dilemma and all that). But it can't do that with ARM chips alone, in part because Windows' universal apps are still a no-show for now, and in part because ARM's entrance into the server market is going to be a very slow and long process. Qualcomm's entrance into those markets would be much accelerated through an AMD acquisition (as long as it's not bank-breaking one that starves Qualcomm out of resources to invest).
Another decent buyer would be Samsung, but I only hope they do it if they are truly committed to being a chip powerhouse and to compete against Intel toe-to-toe, no matter how much it costs them to do it, otherwise it's better to stay out of it.
As you say it is not released yet, let's hope they really achieve a 2016 rollout.
Is there really any money in the lowend notebook market for CPU vendors?
I think what Intel realizes is that no one really wants a fan in a notebook. Not consumers (noise), not manufacturers (less parts, cheaper). For some the performance is worth the noise, but that is only at the high end, and will Zen be able to compete there?
Who will buy Zen? What is the market? Lowend is mobile + RPi3 etc. Mid doesn't exist anymore, and highend they will still not be able to compete?
Zen will be competitive at all levels in terms of performance, price and power, not just the low-end. Now, if Intel makes the highest-end Core i7 Extreme Ultra Edition chip for say $800, and AMD only makes a highest end chip one that costs $600, then yes, I would imagine Intel would still be the "winner" in "peak performance" in the PC market. But that's an out of context comparison.
The price metric should always be included in the context. What I want to know is if I have to spend $200 on a chip and for a TDP of 15W, which one has the best CPU at that price point? AMD or Intel? What about at the $300 price point and a 30W TDP? If it's AMD, then I don't care that Intel can make a 5% faster one for $350.
I only said the Zen-based E-series, which will go into things such as $200-$300 Chromebooks, will destroy Intel. And I'm not sure what you mean by "there's no mid-range". The average price for a notebook is around $500.
This is just for if you want to isolate your bet on the Zen from the jump in stock that it's just made (assuming that was not Zen related). Not a prediction that it will actually go down. (If you bought now, and it would go up the coming few days you might feel like you made a good decision, but it was actually due to effects that were outside your expectations, so basically luck which is something I feel should be as small as a factor in your investments as possible)
Isn't this sort of a make or break situation? Single thread perf is still all that matters for most personal software.
Calculating R is hard to do precisely for an amateur (such as me), but E has a nice predictable effect. E mostly consists of the uncertainty of the big investors, and the opportunism of the speculative traders.
I mostly do reactive investments based on stock that has just moved in some significant way that companies that I have a lot of fundamental knowledge in (mostly IT industry companies).
The way it works is I make a bet on whether the cause for the stock move has any fundamental effect on the future of the company. If I feel I can make that bet more accurately than guys reading the news sitting in cubicles analyzing graphs and industry summaries then I assume I can make a ~5%+ profit on a trade (with a chance of a similar loss of course).
For example: The launch of the Kindle Fire by Amazon was a complete flop. This was widely anticipated, I felt very confident in that it would flop. The AMZN stock dropped as people lost confidence (E) in the Fire and I bought when I felt it was pretty much solid that everyone agreed that the Fire had flopped. Unfortunately I was naieve, and a few weeks later Amazon released its earnings report that undeniably confirmed the flop, and E was eliminated, and R adjusted causing another drop. At this point I was in the negative, so there was a lesson for me there. Anyway, my bet was that the Fire was just some largely irrelevant side strategy for Amazon. Sure they invested too much, and their chance for rivalling Apples iPad or whatever insane plan they had was ill conceived, but it was just something they had to try. The big plan of Amazon however did not suffer from this failure. They were still on track to becoming the force of nature they want to be so the lack of confidence (negative E) of the daytraders was in my opinion unjustified. A few months later this showed, the dip of the Fire was gone, and if I sold then I would've made a cool ~10%.
I didn't sell though as I thought Amazon was a cool company to hold stock in for the long term, so the bet was just a gimmick to get some long term stock for cheap. I ended up making a lot more money on AMZN than I expected as for some reason the fact that Amazon makes a lot of money on AWS was big news to the financial world and slapped a big markup on the stock after which I sold, because I don't pretend to actually know what an Amazon stock should really be worth.
Is anyone else surprised that up 50% is $4?
Which I think is what the unfairly downvoted comment above was referring to.
Really? What are you basing that on?
Stock splits are only about convenience. Imagine if all we had are $100 bills. Buying groceries will be quite a hassle. The government then decides to do a split and let everyone exchange their $100 bills with 10 $10 bills. Everyone still has the same amount of cash but it's now easier for the average consumer to buy their groceries.
How would the existence of a $10 bill mean the economy is in trouble?
Sometimes funds have covenants on not buying stocks below $5 because they are considered penny stocks and funds want to claim they focus on quality.
Surprisingly, couldn't immediately find a good academic research paper on behavior of low-priced stocks. A priori -
- very expensive stocks might be a little cheaper than they otherwise would be, high cost makes them harder to buy for individuals and low cost funds.
(e.g. if Berkshire Hathaway stock is $200,000, an individual with a $100,000 portfolio can't buy it, and even a pretty big portfolio can't fine-tune exposure with a lot of granularity. Hence, some enterprising fellows started funds that would just own Berkshire and sell shares in smaller increments, and Buffett got annoyed at that and launched Berkshire B, which sells for $146).
- very low priced stocks might be more volatile and show interesting behavior at certain thresholds, penny stocks below $1 might be overpriced since it's a hotbed of speculation, stocks that cross $5 might experience some excess selling so they might be underpriced, on the other hand they might experience some short covering as they become unmarginable for some.
But anyway, companies usually aim for a stock price in the $10-100 order of magnitude because that's the area where even relatively small investors wouldn't have a problem fine tuning their exposure.
Price < $5 is usually an indication it's well off its high.
Perhaps the surprising thing is the $4.7B market cap on AMD?
bandwidth rumors: http://techfrag.com/2016/04/02/first-amd-zen-benchmarks-leak...
CERN rumors: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3961536-amd-zens-release-wil...
Ad-blocking-related or is this the same for everyone?
http://www.bitsandchips.it/component/content/article/52-engl...
Hard to check a posteriori indirect articles from around 1st of april. Good catch.