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Comment by JackMcMack | Hacker News Reader

Earnings calls never seem to have any hard questions. There was a projections miss a few quarters ago (very rare for amd), and even then the questions feel more like PR.

Semi-Custom is indeed PS5 and Xbox. This increase was expected of course. It's lower margins than other segments though.

Epyc adoption is indeed slower than I would've liked. But so far it has matched or beat short and long term projections from AMD.

Enterprise is weird. AMD has better price and performance? Let's buy Intel. Meltdown lowers performance? Let's compensate by buying more Intel. Intel is supply constrained? Let's complain, and still buy Intel.

My guess is Intel is still pressuring OEMs to favor Intel. Cloud providers are increasing adoption though, and there have been a few nice HPC wins.

And lets not forget that AMD is selling every chip they can, TSMC production is fully booked.

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Earnings calls do have hard questions in them, but you might miss them because they're asked with a big dose of circumlocution.

If you look at the incentives a bit, management gets to decide which analysts can ask questions, so analysts need to stay on management's good side.

Analysts know the company's figures inside and out (often have a 10-tab spreadsheet with an extensive operational model of the company), and are asking questions to tweak key model assumptions.

So analysts ask pointed questions in shared jargon with management. You don't ask 'are you seeing a big sales drop because the crypto bubble blew up?', you say 'can you provide some color on when you excess inventory will clear from the channel?'

Analysts get their answers. Management avoids bad headlines written by casual listeners.

There's an additional layer, which is the analysts know the industry and company very well, so general bad things are already background knowledge (there's no reason to ask about them). If you want to know what the analyst already knows, then pay for their report—they're not reporters fishing for a sound bite.

My investment in AMD is so small that it seems silly to pay for analyst reports. I don't care about short term, and I have enough faith in my own research to keep believing in a brighter long term.

Are there any public resources dissecting an earnings call? Doesn't have to be recent or AMD.

You don't get much information from earnings calls, only how analysts are thinking (usually short term). Product reviews on HN, tech oriented in-detail sites, youtube reviews from gamers, and long term analysts, like Ark Invest, and even github issues/comments are much better long term predictors of success/failure.

Just as an example, I remember reading a lot about AirBnB here at HN when it wasn't even known in Eastern Europe. I suggested him to use it to rent out his luxury apartment that he just bought there, and he was the first one to rent out a luxury apartment in the country (also somebody from AirBnB-s management flew there personally)...he made lots of money from rental fees of course, but also AirBnB got incredibly successful. There are lots of other examples of course, this was just the least controversial that I can write here :)

For earnings calls specifically, Seeking Alpha sometimes has decent discussion.

Take everything you read with a big grain of salt though. You get what you pay for, especially in finance—'free' content usually comes with an agenda.

From a personal point of view of somebody who just upgraded to an AMD-based desktop from an Intel one, the CPUs work great. It's the software support that feels half-baked. Enabling memory integrity blue-screens my computer. I need to update the chipset drivers every month because AMD is still dialing in their scheduler and frequency scaling over a year after release, and the idle power usage is inexcusable.

AMD's performance is fantastic, which is why I was fine getting it for a home gaming desktop, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pull the trigger on AMD on an enterprise server buildout. Intel still simply (actually or otherwise) feels more reliable.

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