I'm not sure of cracking a new market space would be a good idea either, just like how they aren't trying to go toe to toe with Allwinner offering H3 SOCs for $1ea with a quadcore and H.265 hardware decoding, it might not make sense to get into a 3 way war with Intel, Nvidia, etc.
Retaking or getting into another market with a single vendor or none presently would likely be more profitable, just as VIA did with their point of sale motherboards with crypto accelerators and tons of serial ports.
AMD only has so much money and talent, getting into a pissing contest is not something they are looking to do. Intel can piss harder and longer than them (just look at the contra-revenue they did with the HP Stream 7 and the $50 Walmart android tablet, Intel charged the manufacturer for the chip $X and paid them $X+Y for using said chip to compete with ARM).
I highly doubt Microsoft or anyone will buy AMD, as it would not make financial sense, AMD already builds these chips cheaper than any of them could build them on their own, and any kind of merger would revoke AMD's x86 license, and Intel's x86-64 license, thus destroying the ecosystem.
On another note, a razor thin margin might not be glamorous, but you can run a business like that, though it will not be glamorous.
> and any kind of merger would revoke AMD's x86 license, and Intel's x86-64 license, thus destroying the ecosystem.
is known to be materially false.
http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clari...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...
5.2 (c) Termination Upon Change of Control. Subject to
the terms of, and as further set forth in, Sections 5.2(d)
and 5.2(e), this Agreement shall automatically terminate as
a whole upon the consummation of a Change of Control of
either Party.
(d) Effects of Termination.
(ii) In the event of any termination of this
Agreement pursuant to Section 5.2(c), and subject to the
provisions of Section 5.2(e), the rights and licenses
granted to both Parties under this Agreement, including
without limitation the rights granted under Section 3.8(d),
shall terminate as of the effective date of such
termination.I mean, even if they did manage to wreck AMD, it doesn't get them anything particularly useful if it costs them their x86_64 duopoly/monopoly.
Even if the licensing problems went away, I'm not sure it's in Intels political/legal interests to lose their only plausible competitor. AMD can't be costing them a lot of money (the real risk is slow irrelevance if ARM usage grows any more), and the risks were AMD to cease operations considerable.
That is, until some ARM-based system can at least appear competitive enough to keep justice departments (and powerful negotiating partners like apple) at bay.
I thought so too, but looking at it stock recently it seems to be doing much better (especially in last year). Not sure how to interpret that. Wonder if it was mostly investors being happy they divested from that ARM microserver company, or there is genuine upswing and increased market share.
Would states really sue Intel for anti-trust when it's not really their fault if there was no competition?
I mean you can't expect a new CPU founder company to just open and compete directly...
That's exactly what the Mill CPU folks are trying. I have hopes for a RISC-V vendor to do this too.
However, being a monopolist makes certain things illegal for you to do, and some of those things are things that are easy to suspect you of, but hard to prove you're not doing.
As such, being a monopolist constrains you, as well as invites long, expensive, frustrating probes into your business that creates costs and risk (even if you're not intentionally violating anti-trust law, doesn't mean some business unit isn't inadvertently doing so).
E.g. IBM was under an anti-trust probe from 1969 until 1982 over their mainframe business. The probe ended with the DOJ concluding the case was without merit, but it is widely considered to have had a big effect on IBMs decisionmaking for more than a decade.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329517 http://www.pcworld.com/article/2109703/amd-moves-desktop-pc-...
That being said, any market they can compete with Intel and cause them to have less than 100% marketshare in while making money is a market they are in or want to be in if they aren't already.
Intel literally has a half decade of chips that they could release right now that perform better and are ready to be released, but won't be until years down the road due to a desire to remain top dog in the event they have another Pentium 4 happen.
Perhaps that Joint Venture will go as well as Intel Israel went (brought the Core series out, replacing the failed Pentium 4) which then replaced Intel Oregon, but that is an iffy bet. The Israelis are particularly good at critical thinking, whereas that is generally not encouraged in China. I might be wrong though, but 2 to 3 years from now when we see first silicon for their modified Zen, we'll know.
One interpretation: NVIDIA has been doing a very good job of A) pursuing deep learning and B) talking that up on earnings calls. Even if they're not seeing much money from it right now, investors are excited that they might in the future.
This leads some investors and algos to think, "Hey, NVIDIA is doing well, and AMD is nominally in the same business as NVIDIA, so let's buy AMD because it's cheaper and therefore must represent a better value." This drives up the price of AMD stock, which is itself already prone to more volatility because of their lower market cap.
However, they are two fundamentally different companies. I hear a lot about founder-led vs non-founder-led businesses, and AMD vs NVIDIA is a good example of non-founder-led vs founder-led atm. Also, they've done a very poor job with their ATI acquisition. The ATI acquisition is why they even have a leg to compete with NVIDIA in the first place, but that train has basically left the station at this point.
Intel is in a weird position because their market cap is 10x NVIDIA's, so they need markets where they can make literally 10x more money than for NVIDIA to be interested. Victims of their own success, innovators dilemma, etc. Personally, I think that will hinder them because everything they want to try won't be "big enough" while NVIDIA doesn't suffer from that problem and AMD just has no idea what it's doing besides professional supply chain management.
Respect where it's due, Nvidia will win the hardware side of deep learning and fast matrix multiplication for the foreseeable future.
If they can achieve a big improvement over Nvidia , they can retain their margins.
As for the market being small - as long they can run a self sustaining , high-margin business org at it ,and there's. A big possibility of future growth , why not ? It's not like they lack those resources for another big growth opportunity they're trying to get.
That's part of my point--they can't achieve a big improvement over Nvidia. Nvidia hires from the same pool that Intel does. Intel doesn't magically get better engineers. If anything the smarter ones are at Nvidia because it's easier to double the stock price of a $13B company than a $150B company, so more upside potential on stock options, which matters to those seeking long and lucrative careers at bigcos. Salaries are about the same at both companies.
So with Nvidia's headstart and the knowledge that a bigger team does not lead to better engineering performance (as per Mythical Man Month), how does Intel magically achieve a "big improvement" over Nvidia?
> As for the market being small - as long they can run a self sustaining , high-margin business org at it ,and there's. A big possibility of future growth , why not ?
I agree logically, but I don't think Intel is quite there as an organization. Once an organization is being run by committee, it's too easy to throw cold water on an idea to kill it. Why take the risk of backing a new initiative?
Also, let's say they were on-board as an organization... See my first point: they can't run a self-sustaining high margin business because there isn't one. There isn't even an especially high margin business for Nvidia; enterprises aren't nearly as stupid or rich as everyone thinks.
If anything, Intel has made the classic big company mistake of waiting too long in the first place, then realizing they're losing, then overcompensating via acquisition. Historically, it's not a good strategy.
My whole point being: I'm glad to see competition, Nvidia (or quantum computing, etc.) will probably win this.
A couple of good AMD engineers should be able to knock out fast Winograd kernels pretty quick.
TF has openCL support in the works, AFAIK outsourced to Codeplay - https://www.codeplay.com/portal/tensorflow%E2%84%A2-for-open...
Caffe has an OpenCL branch, works on AMD but about quarter of the speed of equivalent NVidia hardware using CuDNN 4/5, mostly due to unoptimised kernels - https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/opencl
If you keep in mind that they only need to capture something like 10% to 20% of the server market to double their revenue you can see why people are willing to bet on them.
Of course if they've been fudging the Zen numbers as they've done in the past then they'll probably be done as a company, but it seems very unlikely this time around.