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Comment by radium3d | Hacker News Reader

AMD has been my best investment so far. I've always loved them as they've been the rebellious underdog and have brought competitively powerful CPUs into the affordable range for historically low income computer nerds such as myself multiple times.

Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best-- if only I hadn't had my bitcoins stolen from an early mining pool... oh well.

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AMD has historically not been a very good stock to invest in long term. For speculation it can be great as it has had many periods of high volatility (tried to this without much luck in the dotcom era). Check out its price history[1]. It was also worth $16 in 1980, and has not paid out dividends in decades. You should determine a time or price to sell (at least some shares) as it is likely to head back down to $2 eventually. Maybe this time will be different?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD?p=AMD&.tsrc=fin-srch-v1

I feel this time it really is different. Firstly, there were the anti-competitive practices by Intel (which saw them fined). There are a few other factors as well. The fact that these CPUs really are something special. As they manage to reach the same base clock speeds as Intel - or near enough - you're going to be getting up to 64 cores/128 threads (compared with 24/48 if you used Intel stuff) in a server for about half, or even less, of what the equivalent Intel CPUs would cost.

Another big thing, i feel, these days is people are able to A. communicate this better, and B. call Intel on their bullshit. I've seen a LOT more hype, understanding, and word of mouth via forums etc. than around the 2000s when the stock was last high. Granted there is a bit of a hype at the moment around crypto currency, I genuinely can't see why anyone will be picking Intel over AMD in the future... and that's the crux of why I don't think the stocks going to crash.

Now, Intel's CEO got fired, they also poached one of the top AMD engineers. But these guys move slowly. So i guess we will see.

We may see history repeat itself. Back in 2006, stock prices were really high, like in the 40s. The Opteron was getting heavy adoption in the server market. But the stocks just kept sinking. Purchasing ATI for a huge sum did not help. Intel would need to crawl out from the Pentium 4 architecture, which just did not scale well and was simply not as efficient. Of coarse this did not stop Intel from pressuring all the big PC makers by doing shady deals to have their chips featured rather than AMDs.When Nehalim came out in late 2008, Intel would retain performance crown for the whole decade, which was not so good for the consumer.

AMD finally got Jim Keller back in 2012 to help develop Zen. This would prove to give them a fighting chance. He lead development of the Infinity Fabric, successor to his Hypertransport, which would allow the Zen to be so modular in adding more and more cores so easily. He was previously head of K8 architecture which lead to the successful Athlon 64 and Opterons. We also have to thank him for transitioning us to 64bit. He later departed and working on the A4/A5 CPUs at apple in the iphone 4/4s and ipad 1/2 respectively. These chips also helped Apple dominate for nearly a decade in CPU performance. Jim and Raja Koduri made a great team at Apple at that time. Jim would head to Tesla next, and Raja would head back to AMD to help create Vega. And now Intel has the duo. Will they be able to give us another decade of dominance from Intel? Exciting times coming!

"Invest in Jim" might be the real winning strategy here.

I agree, and have bought and sold their stock multiple times as we went between product releases, the current product set does feel like one of their best though after Intel sat on their hands for so long.

> Bitcoin/crypto would have been my next best

You probably would have sold the bitcoins before it went crazy up.

If you had any sense, you would have, ironically

Are you concerned about the state of AMD GPUs?

They couldn't compete in terms of high end performance for a long time. But nowadays they even lose the price-performance ratio of entry->mid level GPUs.

Not really. Entry->Mid level is RX 560, RX 570 and RX 580. RX 560 is a mixed bag, but both RX 570 and RX 580 are competitive and a bit superior to the Nvidia alternatives - as long as they are not overpriced, which they were till early this month. So the market just has to reach the regular prices AMD aimed for initially for those series to work fine.

But one can be concerned about the utter failure of high end Vega.

Luckily crypto saved the Vega. You can't really buy them for MSRP.

Ive got an RX-580 in my gaming desktop. Couldn't be happier.

And the integrated Vega graphics in their Ryzen mobile processors are nothing to sneeze at. Getting performance comparable to some of the low-end nVidia cards.

I personally have been running a RX480 8GB since the day they were released and I haven't hit a game that can't run at an excellent framerate even for my 144hz monitor, so I don't have a concern yet :) It was a amazing deal for just $263.98 at release. From the looks of the benchmarks the Vega 64 is leaps and bounds faster as well.

As far as VR goes, I think they're in the early stages still -- they need to improve the lenses, resolution and refresh rate before I will be buying in so I don't yet need the VR frame rates. At the current level I'm sure the Vegas would handle VR fine though since it seems to outperform nvidia slightly.

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