The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]

[Dave Baumann]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6907/the-king-is-back-raja-koduri-leaves-apple-returns-to-amd

 

[I.S.T.]

I'm surprised the AMD quarterly results haven't been discussed here yet.

 

[jimbo75]

I'm surprised the AMD quarterly results haven't been discussed here yet.

It's more likely to be discussed in the Nvidia doom thread soon.

PC sales are way down yet AMD's GPU revenue remained flat from (generally seasonally down) Q4 to Q1. It's possible that there has been a resurgence of discrete GPU buyers but a bit more likely that Nvidia has lost a fair amount of market share in Q1. Combined with Tegra woes they will probably have a poor quarter.

 

[I.S.T.]

The sad part is much of the reduction in losses came from the sold campus.

 

[jimbo75]

AMD are in better shape now that they've shed so many people, horrible as that sounds.

Break-even point should be around Q3, by which stage they will slowly be shedding their over-dependency on CPU which is totally at the mercy of Intel. They really need the new consoles to capture the imagination though - best thing about that is Sony and MS will do all the advertising for them. I expect the fight between those two to be near epic, with AMD smiling like a bookmaker loaning money to a lawyer, or something like that. Basically they can't lose, that's just money in the bank.

But yeah, it's not that bad. Kabini will increase notebook ASP and margins, Temash can only increase tablet share and Richland won't do any harm until Kaveri arrives. The only weakness is the high-end, but that's already so far gone for them that if it disappeared altogether they wouldn't notice so much.

Hard to say where GPU is going but I'd guess up slightly based on their new gaming-bundle marketing. It's always going to be like a war of attrition vs Nvidia for the GPU department so there can't be money there until one leaves or loses utterly.

Diversification is the key and in that respect AMD is about as diverse as tech companies get. They just need a bit of luck before they run out of money, and no more fuck-ups. They really cannot afford any more of those or they are done for.

The biggest issue is the WSA, somehow they need to continue buying ~$1 billion of wafers from GF every year for the foreseeable future yet they appear to be getting more dependent on TSMC for console and SoC.

 

[AlexV]

The sad part is much of the reduction in losses came from the sold campus.

Well there weren't many other things to bring about a reduction in losses (OPEX decreases are not enough to offset the major revenue loss on the CPU side of the fence). They also show a slight build-up in inventory, but place it at the feet of launch preparation so we'll see how that goes. As it stands, unless Kabini / Temash prove to be rather respectable revenue bringers (not impossible), it appears that their estimate that they can break-even at 1.35bln per quarter OPEX was a bit optimistic. We will see by Q3 whether or not that ends up being true.

The news of Raja returning are rather great, he's a brilliant fellow (and a nice guy from what I recall from a rather brief encounter). I do find the VP of something something something position too managery / red-tape draped for someone with his abilities, but it's definitely a good signing IMHO. I do sincerely hope that he doesn't get a stupid personality cult like Keller though.

 

[3dilettante]

The news of Raja returning are rather great, he's a brilliant fellow (and a nice guy from what I recall from a rather brief encounter). I do find the VP of something something something position too managery / red-tape draped for someone with his abilities, but it's definitely a good signing IMHO. I do sincerely hope that he doesn't get a stupid personality cult like Keller though.

There can be only one best engineer of all time.

 

[jimbo75]

The sad part is much of the reduction in losses came from the sold campus.

That went straight to the balance sheet, as did the Globalfoundries payment of $175 million. The operating numbers that they reported are pretty close to the mark. In a normal year a Q1 loss of this level would generally be close to break-even by Q3. I can see where AMD is feeling positive about it though as they have an awful lot of console revenue coming that they've really not had before.

 

[AlexV]

There can be only one best engineer of all time.

Yes, but does this hold across domains too? After all, we all know GPU engineers and CPU engineers are so different and from different universes. Therefore, what if AMD ends up having...the best CPU engineer of all time AND the best GPU engineer of all time. A bit like Duncan and Connor being both McLeods

 

[Miksu]

Ars Technica has written a nice two-part series on AMD: The Rise and Fall of AMD

Part 1: The rise and fall of AMD: How an underdog stuck it to Intel

Part 2: The rise and fall of AMD: A company on the ropes

 

[fellix]

Mercury Research PC Processors Market Share Bulletin

In the first quarter of 2013 the overall PC processor market declined 7.8 percent compared to the fourth quarter ,2012. This is worse than the seasonal average of the previous five years, which is a 4.9 percent decline for this quarter. On-year growth was down 16.1 percent, making this the third quarter in a row where on-year declines have exceeded all quarters, but the downturn of the first quarter 2001 (which was 16.9%).


All segments where down in the quarter, with the mobile processors being particularly hard hit, having the worst on-year decline ever. Quarterly declines in server and desktop CPUs were much more modest. Desktop on-year declines were the worst of any segment, being down 17.9 percent, followed closely by mobile with a 16.4 percent on-year decline. Server shipments are still up on-year, with a 6.2 percent gain.

 

[Wynix]

Mercury Research PC Processors Market Share Bulletin

I think part of this has to do with how all the CPUs and GPUs on the market(with a couple of exceptions) are all old parts, it's time for new parts.

For myself I'd love a steamroller version of the FX8350 sometime this year, but it looks like AMD is going to slip that into 2014 and if that's the case i might just jump on haswell because i'm getting pretty impatient with both the CPU and GPU sides of AMD.

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

JPR's 2013Q1 GPU report

http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch

AMD lost 0.3%, quarter-to-quarter, Intel slipped 5.3%, and Nvidia increased by 3.6%.

...

AMD’s quarter-to-quarter total shipments of desktop heterogeneous GPU/CPUs, i.e., APUs jumped 30% from Q4 and declined 7.3% in notebooks. The company’s overall PC graphics shipments slipped 0.3%.

...

Nvidia’s quarter-to-quarter desktop discrete shipments were flat from last quarter; and, the company’s mobile discrete shipments increased 7.6%. The company’s overall PC graphics shipments increase 3.6%.

 

[Miksu]

So what do you think about the AMD's current situation? There has been some good news lately:

* AMD is in all of the new consoles

* They have received some interesting new employees in the last 6 months: Jim Keller, John Gustafson, Raja Koduri and now Sean Pelletier (Technical Marketing Manager at NVIDIA).

Also the stock has improved 114.97% in the last 6 months.

What I'm most worried about is how they completely missed the Windows 8 laptops. Are they giving up on Intel at that front or are they expected to release a good new APU which allows them to attack Haswell?

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

Nvidia won most Haswell high-end notebooks

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/31461-nvidia-won-most-haswell-high-end-notebooks

Our sources in the Far East are claiming that most Haswell notebooks that are coming out in the next few weeks and have discrete graphics inside will feature Nvidia's latest GPUs.

Haswell does come with decent integrated graphics, but most gamers will still want discrete graphics cards and our sources claim that as much as 90 percent of Haswell discrete graphics card design wins went to Nvidia.

This would mean massive loss of market share for AMD in mobile GPUs, but the same sources do indicate that AMD has more than 90 percent of notebooks based on AMD Trinity or Richland chips. Some vendors will offer AMD graphics cards together with Haswell CPUs, but we hear that the number is much smaller than with the last generation.

Haswell notebooks are expected as of June, especially the high-end gaming machines with quad-core processors and most of them will be announced in early June. The fastest of all Nvidia chips should be the Geforce GTX 780M mobile edition and we heard that it should come at about the same time as Haswell, roughly over the next two weeks.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/31461-nvidia-won-most-haswell-high-end-notebooks

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

Intel dominates microprocessor revenue, AMD falls behind SoC makers

http://techreport.com/news/24843/intel-dominates-microprocessor-revenue-amd-falls-behind-soc-makers

AMD's $3.6 billion was only good enough to put it in fourth place behind Qualcomm and Samsung. Apple's custom SoC orders were included in Samsung's total, and they made up about 83% of the firm's microprocessor revenue last year. Thanks largely to strong iDevice sales, Samsung enjoyed much higher year-over-year revenue growth than anyone else on the list.

Qualcomm and Nvidia also experienced healthy revenue growth. However, Intel and AMD saw their microprocessor revenues decline. Intel's dropped only 1%, but AMD's fell a more substantial 21%.

 

[Malo]

Wouldn't AMD be focusing more on their APUs for notebooks rather than discrete wins with Intels?

 

[silent_guy]

Wouldn't AMD be focusing more on their APUs for notebooks rather than discrete wins with Intels?

APU should have higher margins, I think. But they probably also want a piece of the Intel notebook pie.

Isn't this situation a continuation to what's already the case now anyway? Are there large notebook makers that use discrete AMD GPUs with Intel CPUs?

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

Wouldn't AMD be focusing more on their APUs for notebooks rather than discrete wins with Intels?

With Intel's 86% market share it would be dumb to ignore that market.

The real problem may be with the still broken Enduro. There are lots and lots of posts on forums about problems with Enduro.

Nvidia's Optimus seems to be a hit with the OEMs.

 

[jimbo75]

You're confusing 86% market share with what is likely to be around 5% market share of high-end notebooks.