AMD's revenue rises 18%, but margin forecast disappoints
reuters.com
reuters.com
Of course that's on consumer chips with higher clocks for gaming - the math might be different when we get it down closer to 2 GHz.
Anecdote time: my 5820K (4.13 GHz all-core at stock voltage) pulls 92W during a Handbrake encode. It pulls ~140W during a Prime95 run. I think that's roughly comparable to what 6C Ryzen is pulling at equivalent clocks - if not less.
I just built a Xeon E5-2650v3 ES (10C at 2.3 GHz all-core) system last week for video encoding ($60 mobo from MicroCenter, $150 processor off eBay, threw the rest together from parts). It pulls 60W doing the same encodes, and hits roughly the same framerates. Single-thread performance is pretty bad though.
Do you have a source for this?
[1] Prime95 SmallFFT, 1800X = 220W, 6900K = 187W
(anecdotal evidence: the ~140W package TDP I observe with Prime95 on a 6-core (analogous to the 6850K) is just about right for 178W total system power at 80% efficiency, so their numbers ring true here. I just ran another Prime95 SmallFFT test and I came up with 133W package TDP on HwMonitor64.)
[1.1] Prime95 SmallFFT: 1800X @ 4 GHz = 253W, 6900K @ 4.2GHz = 255W
Basically AMD is low-balling their TDP here (they rated the TDP for like 1-2 core loads with maybe a mild load on the other cores, is the official word IIRC) and Intel is high-balling their TDP, something like mixed-allcore with a decent amount of AVX thrown in.
In practice: both 8-core processors at default clocks are around 125W at a full normal (non-AVX) workload. Both 8-core processors are around 200W with an aggressive overclock. The 6900K tends to win modestly in most cases in either scenario (CineBench is like AMD's best-case). The general take was that the 1800X was a win on price vs the 6900X, not an overall win on performance or efficiency.
To sum up, the processors are within 10% power consumption on any given workload which is pretty much neck and neck as far as I'm concerned (normal variability). It's a good result for AMD given their Bulldozer track record but it's not an obvious win in efficiency. Again, of course the picture for server chips at 2.5 GHz might look very different than the picture at 4 GHz but that's speculation.
Sources:
[0] https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
[1] https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2017/03/02/amd-ryzen-1800x...
[1.1] ibid
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49...
Looking at package-TDP only gives you a totally different picture. Not invalid necessarily - but different. It's easier to tease out the system under test but it's more difficult to get a holistic picture.
(As such, it is much much easier to cook the books when all you have to do is lie through a sensor readout than when you have to lie to a meter at the power plug. This is usually a game that gets played with GPUs, i.e. how the RX 480's "GPU-only" TDP excludes power consumption from memory, losses to VRMs, etc)
Also - servers are pretty much never at 0% load. Any system that has CPUs at 0% load consistently was over-allocated in the first place. Ryzen does idle a little bit better than Broadwell-E - although factoring out the PSU inefficiencies near the zero bound it's probably more like 25W for Broadwell vs 15W for Ryzen.
Right now HwMonitor64 says my 5820K is idling at the desktop at 25W FYI - "as reported by the CPU".
The alternative measure is to put a clamp meter on the EPS12V line, but this is unlikely to be accurate either.
Although in a lot of ways it does appear to be more stable than Ryzen given its memory problems. Especially regarding ECC. I trust a relatively mature platform like Haswell-E much more than something like Ryzen where even basic memory functionality is touchy and ECC is entirely unvalidated. Given a budget build I know which I'd trust.
I was more aiming at TDP figures there. Although I realize anecdotes are not super reliable data, I put the Xeon box together over the weekend and I was literally just looking at the power data last night to see how it was doing.
I was worried about cooling at first, before I knew the TDP numbers it would hit. It's on a Hyper T4 and it didn't break 40C during an overnight x264 encode so I'm pretty happy with that.
1. A lot of Intel consumer platforms (which Ryzen is) had early issues with DDR4 on Z170; there's lots of forum posts about that.
2. AMD said it was not going to be validating ECC for consumer processors.
3. Haswell-E you're referencing officially only supports up to DDR4 2133Mhz memory. Depending on your configuration Ryzen officially supports more (2666, 4000)
4. You're comparing a $1200 chip to $500 chip at retail.
5. You're comparing the TDP on processor running at 1 to 1.5GHz more.
6. ES samples tend to run at lower clock speed then official final processors with hopefully lower temperature as well.
This just isn't remotely an apples to apples comparison. I'm curious what the comparison will look like once there's HPED AM4 chips.
On the flip side I personally would not trust a ES chip personally. The chips are know to contain unfixed errata addressed in further versions of the silicone and a lot of motherboard do not contain microcode updates for those.
In CPU-Z I am getting something different from the seller's published CPU-Z screenshot - it's showing stepping "R2" ("retail"?) - however the name string is also still showing as "ES".
I've attached a dump from CPU-Z that shows CPUID 0x0 and 0x1 values. From the processor value (0x000306F2) and the Intel data I could dig up - it would appear that this is actually the SR1Y1 stepping. Which is apparently the M1 stepping. Possibly actually a QS rather than ES.
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
Not holding out hope overall given that it was sold as the M0 stepping but I guess you never know, maybe I got lucky. There was no pic on the eBay auction, and I would have to pull the cooler back off to check what's printed on the processor itself.
In the Anandtech forums there are some benchmarks of underclocked, undervolted Ryzen and the performance/W is frankly astonishing. Well beyond anything Intel produces, and yes that includes 10C 2.3GHz Xeons, even modern ones.
Moreover, the consumer Zen parts have the local power plane regulators fused off. Now, I don't know if this is due to design bugs or product differentiation, but if they do have them enabled for Naples that is another big efficiency bump waiting to happen.
TLDR: you can't extrapolate the performance of server parts based on desktop parts, because of different silicon profiles and server-specific power features.
Intel didn't need exclusive contracts: they simply had a much better CPU, cheaper.
Any reports on this? I work in the cloud space and that's not what I'm seeing at all, I think we're at least still a few years out from leveling off.
Got a source for that? I work in the industry and I'm not seeing this at all.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/server_market_shrin...
The problem is, what if Intel react and lower their Margin. Hence their Mobile and DC First for 10nm. Having said that, lowering Margin is easier said then done. There will be immense pressure from shareholders and investors.
It will be interesting to see how this story unfold. Of course GF is also working on 7nm ( similar to Intel 10nm ), but Intel's 10nm still has a year lead.
Those are not Core chips anymore (since post-Haswell). They are Atom chips, which Intel used to make for $30-$50, which the company is now selling for $100-$150.
Making such rip-off chips is one of the reasons why they merged the mobile business and the PC business, so they can show higher profitability "overall" for the division (especially since Intel used to subsidize the mobile chips, in order to compete).
Intel's process advantage used to be more like 3 years. It's now down to 1 year. This happened for two reasons: the other foundries reached FinFET, too (Intel was 2 years ahead just from FinFET alone before), and Moore's Law slowed down first for Intel, allowing the rest to catch-up (and it's now slowing down for them, too).
However, even with Intel's one year advantage, AMD could use Intel's chip building strategy to best it. What do I mean? I'm talking about how Intel will build server chips first on 10nm, and PC and laptop chips later.
If AMD starts building 7nm laptop APUs ASAP before Intel puts out its 10nm laptop chips, AMD could actually be seen as the "better option" overall in laptops (not just in value, in which they will be the winner anyway, but in pure performance).
Intel has also signaled in other ways (other than the 10nm strategy) that it will start fading out of the PC market to focus on "more profitable" server/machine learning markets, because there's not much for it to gain from the shrinking or at best stagnant PC market where it has 90% market share. However, AMD could grow from 10% or whatever it has now to at least 50% in the next 5-7 years, if it plays its cards right.
The only question is how interested they are in the PC market, too, because they may also chase the more profitable server/machine learning markets first. I'm not going to say with confidence that this is a mistake. They may need to focus on that at least partially to become profitable (which they haven't been for years), but I think it would be a better strategic move for AMD and for its image, if it started "conquering" the PC market first, before worrying about "what's the more profitable strategy."
If I were at AMD, I would probably worry more about Qualcomm in the PC market for the next few years (unless Windows on ARM is still a catastrophe, but I have a feeling it won't be, and that regular users in emerging markets won't notice a difference at that Celeron/Pentium level of performance). And the reason for that is that I suspect that even with AMD's sever cost-cutting over the past few years, Qualcomm's ARM chips may still be more profitable to build at a higher margin, which may mean that Qualcomm's chips could offer better value in budget laptops than either AMD or Intel. But that should be revealed to us in the next year or two at most.
A margin of 100% would mean a cost of $0 (it's all profit), and 150% is not possible. See definitions here - https://www.business-case-analysis.com/margin.html
Perhaps you meant something like "markup".
As for margin, if the company is selling for $100 what they are making for $30, that is a 70% margin -- as your parent comment had stated.
If you sell something for 150$ and it cost you 30$ your gross margin is (150-30)/150=80%.
EDIT: And I just saw the comment below yours pointing out the same thing.
And that's still a huge understatement. Intel's strategy for long term viability (that is, investing a ton on fab research) depends on those huge margins.
Part of the problem is FreeBSD just not being very NUMA aware. A less obvious part of the problem is even if FreeBSD was NUMA aware, we'd still have problems with files read off storage on node 0 having to exit the system via a 100GbE NIC on node1, etc.
The processor could benefit from crowdsourcing development to some extent.
Also, in countries that aren't America (and for many entities in America) there could be huge value assigned to knowing with a higher confidence that your vendor isn't handing over a backdoor to three-letter agencies
Finally, FLOSS enthusiasts will go crazy for it, which might not be a huge boost to AMD/Intel but is at least something.
It may be an indirect way to get more talented and idealistic individuals going to AMD versus Intel.
I don't know much about the subject, so these are all my guesses as to the biggest advantages. Who knows if they outweigh the perceived disadvantages from their perspective.
AMD or Intel processors also definitely aren't good candidates for crowdsourcing. Their R&D probably spends more on coffee than the largest crowdsourced projects raised.
That includes the option for developers to improve the limitations of a platform they're building on top of instead of working around them. My thinking was that the people who would want to do that when it comes to an open processor would be kernel developers.
However your point is good about the R&D, and I bet Intel/AMD spend a LOT of money/resource on those backdoors. But the open source world has done a lot in the past. Linux is a massive open source project and arguably very successful an innovative.
But I do get your point, at this stage it's still a smaller percentage of people who care vs those who don't. But if they capture this market early, couldn't they secure their business for the next X years?
(disclaimer: I work for IBM)
I think I saw some OpenPOWER machines on IBM's website, but all the distributors have stopped selling them. Seems impossible to get hold of an OpenPOWER motherboard :( But yeah as soon as I can buy one I'm getting one to try it out.
Mind you does Linux even compile on it yet?
As of POWER8, we now support running Linux bare-metal, and we sell machines with Linux bare-metal, Linux as a guest under PowerVM (our proprietary hypervisor) and Linux as a guest under PowerKVM (which as you can probably guess, is just a distribution to ship an open source KVM/libvirt hypervisor). https://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/
No BSD support as yet ;)
Edit: Ahh okay I see. The higher end ones need you to call IBM, but I think you can just buy the 6k one.
Besides, you can put the back-door into the control of the buyer. Why do both insist on keeping complete control of it?
What server business?
Though the PSP concerns were very highly upvoted in Lisa Su's Reddit AMA, and the technical marketing employees said that they'll look into it. Hopefully they'll make it optional in their next products…
Intel isn't any better.
If AMD came out and said they'd open up the source for PSP or allow something like coreboot for those knowledgable enough to install it, every system I ever built from here on out would have Ryzen in it (I even have a system with an old Bulldozer pre PSP days). As it stands I'm just looking at older chips and non x86 chips now.
I'm sure I am in the minority, but I also have some sway in what a lot of people buy in terms of technology, all I need is reason to be AMD's fanboy, and I'll give them every bit of business I can. All I ask is they think of the little guys like me who'd rather have less attack surface in their machines.
I believe a computer should do what the owner asks, no more, no less. When we start getting to the point where manufactures feel like they have just as much control over the system I bought as I do; well I guess it's time to go shovel some shit, because this industry won't be for me anymore.
Revenue rose 18.3% and losses narrowed by 33%. Title seems pretty reasonable to me?
1: http://www.reuters.com/article/amd-results-idUSL4N1I33B2?sym...
It is a mad world in which "not enough profit" equates to failure. They made a profit, gained market share, started something new. Still, hedge fund managers and investors are selling their shares.
People want to make money for its own sake, no matter what gets exploited. Being a middle performer is no longer acceptable, but no one seems to stop and think WHY.
In just 20 years they will be spending their money on canned fresh air. There is a moral in that somewhere.
After-hours: 12.10 -11.16%
AMD has been two steps backward for every step forward for the past decade.
It's the same with GPUs. Nvidia continuously deliver the fastest GPU and once every few years AMD revamp their GPU architecture and they are able to compete for a cycle or two. After that they slowly fall behind again, until they do another redesign.