2. Everybody loves a good "underdog takes over from the big bad empire in decline" story, both the press and the commenting public. The stories about big companies absolutely crushing their competitors in quality are just not as interesting.
3. AMD can't scale up as rapidly as a SAAS because fabs take a while to build. I'd wager Intel has (at least) five to ten years to come up with a good processor design before they get overtaken by AMD in sheer volume.
4. There are no doubt Chinese competitors with even lower sales and even higher P/E and growth rate than AMD. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Nice.
It’s not AMD vs Intel
It’s AMD vs INTEL vs Apple vs Amazon (and nvidia might be next.
I don't think having physical possession of the thing is always the best criteria for whether you really own it.
edit: reading more on the edge-tpu page, they definitely appear to be of limited use compared with the ones available to google's hosted plans.
Except Intel is still growing its revenue. 43%+ YoY in Q2 for their Datacenter.
For example, my parents and all their friends weren't well off enough to afford private university, but majors at public university were limited by the government based on projected need with slots offered to only the highest test scores. They couldn't test high enough to secure a public university slot for accounting, art, architecture, education, medicine, and trades such as automotive repair or plumbing. So they all ended up with computer science and engineering degrees. Fully paid for by the government.
They basically treat the semiconductor industry like how the US treats its defense industry.
I think is a good example of what happens when you do that.
It seems intuitive to me that as war technology progresses, number of humans becomes less of a factor in military strength, but I know so little about this area that I couldn't guess how greatly alternative educational opportunities impact military applications, nor at what point in the past/future the scale might tip between wanting policies that push more into armed forces vs. no longer being so important (and I assume it would be different for different countries, too).
But I do believe good, free education should be a key part of any country, regardless of whether it helps national défense or not. If that drives up the cost of recruiting people to the armed forces then fine - I'm no fan of them in general, but if people are going to risk their lives potentially in wars then it shouldn't be because their choices were limited to that vs a life of poverty.
https://books.google.com/books?id=C6VFJIbxX7MC&lpg=PA71&ots=...
The only chance to sit it out would be a giant technological leap as in quantum computing, I just don't see that leap.
I'd like to see it, but I'm not sure anyone can catch up now.
However, I think NVIDIA is still vulnerable—but against AWS/GCP/Azure, not Intel/AMD.
My opinion is that deep learning is moving to the cloud. That's a bigger conversation with a lot of nuances, but if you take that basic assumption, then the development of ASICs like TPU/Inferentia become a big threat to Nvidia.
If the biggest buyers of chips in deep learning are the clouds, and the clouds are increasingly developing their own chips for deep learning, Nvidia is in a tough spot. They'll always have a place among labs that use their own machine, and of course, Nvidia's business is bigger than machine learning, but in general I think the clouds are a real threat.
One of Nvidia's actual moats is their system building competency, which AMD lacks. They can sell you a box / a whole server room configuration, since their acquisition of Mellanox together with network equipment.
The cost of Hardware Development is the main cost contribution.
Which I think is not true with regards to both GPU and GPGPU computing. The major cost for GPU is Drivers, and CUDA for GPGPU. i.e It is Software.
Unlike ARM where AWS/GCP/Azure can make their chips and benefits from the Software ecosystem already in place for ARM, there is no such thing on GPU. Drivers and CUDA is the biggest moat around Nvidia's CPU. And unless Developers figure out a way to drive the cost of DL and Drivers down, there is no incentives to switch away from Nvidia's ecosystem.
That is why I am interested to see how Intel tackle this area. And if History will repeat itself again in the Voodoo, Rage 3D and S3 Verge era.
If AMD could provide a backend for the most popular frameworks then they could skip over the CUDA patent issue completely.
The real problem is that it seems like AMD’s not investing substantially in software teams to make it happen.
https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/10657
That is the state of Pytorch support for AMD GPUs.
I do. Not everything you can do with a CUDA card is deep learning. In fact that's just one of many applications.
There has been some progress, but PyTorch still isn't fully functional with ROCm yet and that feels like a good litmus test.
Really do not want just one players. And hope the high level plays have more completion.
Still interest in Taiwan part. Purely from economic point of view. How secure are we ok that front, if all eggs are in one basket. Hk is fallen. Taiwan or South China Sea is in play. That will affect the supply chain.
Intel is launching a GPU/Deep learning accelerator, Huawei is thinking about launching a GPU. Pytorch and Tensor flow work well enough on AMD GPUs. There are also custom deep learning ASICs from Google. There is simply too much competition at this point for CUDA to continue to be the standard.
Marketing fad or not, it’s not a bad business to be in.
It is barely starting. In 10 and 20 years it will be huge.
Nvidia will have to validate and launch all of it’s PCIe4 on Epyc/Ryzen processors, so it’s not like AMD won’t benefit from the Deep Learning hype
It also doesn’t help that AMD has stopped supporting ROCm for the current consumer GPUs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/softbank-...
AMD can't ramp up the manufacturing volume it has from TSMC up quickly. TSMC builds capacity to match roughly what it is contracted for. I can just assume that any extra capacity they planned sells for a very good price.
Neither AMD nor TSMC can fully exploit Intel troubles because they can't foresee what happens in Intel manufacturing. Intel is selling chips like hotcakes.
TL;DR Intel has high manufacturing volume and the ability to make money with less competitive product.
The problem for Intel is AMD is putting out a clearly better value proposition in the high-margin server space, with single socket systems beating Intel dual socket systems, and other advantages like more PCI lanes and lower power consumption.
That will drive Intel prices, and margins, down. That means a lower Intel stock price as probable future earnings shrink.
I haven't fact-checked that, but given Intel's market share, it sounds plausible.
Intel may be behind on process and microarchitecture, but as long as they can ship that volume, and with a far better gross margin than AMD (Intel 53%, AMD 44%), I wouldn't count them done just yet.
TSMC also knows full well that Intel will switch back to their own fabs the instant it's practical for them to do so, making them a less reliable long term customer than Apple, AMD, etc. and so won't be inclined to give them priority or much of a break on pricing.
The other factor is going to be that TSMC has 5nm in risk production already. If they bring 5nm fabs online before Intel has a real answer to their 7nm process, AMD could be buying capacity from the 7nm and 5nm fabs at the same time.
For the most part it's a worthwhile trade for AMD because you get much greater overall compute power with only marginally diminished frequencies, but it's still something for Intel to hang its hat on in benchmarks.
PE or net income is not really relevant for AMD as they are in very high growth phase (and because their gross margins are fine). The most important thing here is that Intel is failing to execute on the upcoming fab process which will unequivocally make them less competitive from 2021 - 2023 (at the very least). The uncertainty of Intel being able to execute here on out is also impacting their share price since they have had a long history of failing to execute on 10nm and now on 7nm.
How volume limited is TSMCs process?
Intel runs their own fab and for whatever reason they've messed this up repeatedly (unclear what the reason is, but it's at least partly a management/strategic failure). Their focus on old designs that are currently profitable instead of the future was a short term benefit and a long term mistake.
AMD uses TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) to fab their chips. Apple does the same.
Intel's profits from older technology and server sales have made them slow to recognize the severity of their situation. First they missed mobile, now they've had years of delays with their own manufacturing process, and now they're going to feel pressure from ARM on the desktop and probably on the server.
No US based fab for modern chips is a concern for national security (particularly given Chinese interest in eventually taking over Taiwan).
AMD spun off their fabs a while ago (Global Foundries) and uses TSMC for modern chip manufacturing. This gives them lower overhead now, but I'm not sure it's a much stronger position overall. There's a benefit to owning your own fab if you can pull it off.
I think Intel is at serious risk long term. They need someone who recognizes the existential crises they're in and can save them. Their current results are a lagging indicator.
Processor IP is Intel's bread and butter.
I think if they do it it's the beginning of irrelevance, really.
What might be more interesting is if Intel became champion of Risc-V...that would be like Microsoft and Linux.
Paradoxically this is likely WHY they are getting punished so much by the market. Their current revenue/margins are too juicy to give up, despite the fact that it's causing them massive pain on the technological front.
Very simple explanation: stocks reflect future (expected) performance, not present performance. So the stock market is really just telling you they expect Intel to continue failing.
Gross oversimplification because it's one ratio that can be interpreted in so so many ways. But, this is one way to look at it.
That is because AMD only has GPUs and CPUs while Intel has a lot more side business (VDSL modem chips, Thunderbolt, FPGAs, ...).
Additionally, the CPU side of Intel doesn't look very promising for the future (architectural issues like the whole sidechannel attacks, technical issues in their lithography process), they will have to invest a lot of money to get this under control - while AMD has a wildly positive outlook and is only limited by the capacity of TSMC's fabs - whatever they produce gets ripped out of their hands by customers.
From a financial point of view, Intel also has the problem that AMD was drastically undercutting prices for competitive products... part of the Intel stock price was the ridiculous amount of money they could squeeze out of customers for their top-notch processors for years. AMD all but flattened that as Intel was forced to cut their prices by a bunch.
Reality is, there is no way TSMC would be able to mfg. all of Intels cpus even if both wanted it. What I can see happening is that Intel licenses some IP from TSMC.
AMD has a ton of room to grow. Intel does too, but not in the processor business where it's had a near-monopoly in some spaces. Intel also has challenges in other areas, and ARM is looking strong too.
It also doesn't help Intel that the long-running data leakage issues hurt it a lot more than AMD.
AMD is in a better position to seriously increase the E by utilizing its P.
Intel has failed to use its P to seriously increase its E for a few years, and just experienced a string of setbacks with long-term consequences. (This is why buying AMD a couple weeks ago was an obvious good move.)
Stock markets assign high P/E for anything they consider as "Growth". TSLA, CMG is all considered as "Growth". For some reason the present market is geared towards "Growth" than "Value".
As an investor it would seem that AMD has more potential upside. Add to that they are currently producing better technology at the moment...
Decline means decreasing. Which is true. But they are decreasing from a big number.
AMD stock is much more a meme stock than TSLA.
3-5 years from now, still 14nm CPU only without any volume productions on 7nm, 10nm? How much can those 14nm 300 Watts CPU can be sold for and who will buy them at that time?
Actually from the past 3-5 process development history of Intel, it is not hard to see what is likely to happen.
You can be be a market leader and still be a failing company.
Past revenue has never and will never be an indicator of future success.
Intel Revenue: 19.7B, Net Income: 5.1B, Market Cap: 209.42B, P/E: 9.06
AMD Revenue: 1.93B, Net Income: 157M, Market Cap: 79.2B, P/E: 133.82
But by the sentiment of all media reports INTC is in sharp decline & AMD is killing it, yet even in their most recent results Intel revenue/earnings still dwarfs AMD's.