In the eyes of AMD fans, Ryzen's shortcoming will be viewed as minor and correctable. Ryzen will undoubtedly sell and gain AMD some market share. But AMD has clearly missed the home/enthusiast sweet spot of 4-core/8-thread designs like Kaby Lake. Ryzen is a very large chip being priced like a much smaller chip.
The likely consequence of this is that once again AMD will grow market share and revenue only to fail to be profitable. At least that appears to be the current consensus among analysts polled by
Yahoo Finance. Revenue for the March quarter is projected to grow 18% y/y, but EPS is projected to be loss of $0.04. Probably, based on the review data, the projected revenue increase is overly optimistic.
The review data also indicates that Ryzen's longer-term prospects are seriously in doubt. Broadwell is the oldest architecture of Intel's 14 nm generation, going on three years old. In achieving comparable performance to Broadwell, AMD has only skated to where the puck has been and gone. Intel is already moving its Xeon line to Skylake. Broadwell, which has been the mainstay of Intel's Xeon as well as Broadwell-E consumer chips, is being retired.
Soon Intel will release a Skylake replacement for Broadwell-E, erasing whatever performance advantage Ryzen might have achieved. And next year, Intel's 10 nm consumer chips will become available, raising the bar yet again in the 4-core sweet spot of the consumer market.
On the strength of AMD's likely gains in processor market share, investors can expect AMD stock to continue to rise despite today's 7% drop.