AMD Gives More Zen Details
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-detai...
3.4+ GHz for 8-core base frequency (TDP is apparently 95W) is good news.
I'll be extremely surprised if it's faster than a 4-core core i5 skylake which runs at 65W TDP, in the $200 per cpu price range.
It's worth mentioning that the i7-6900K has a TDP of 140W [1]
I have to admit when I first saw 95W I wasn't impressed because I didn't realize how high the TDP of the 6900K was.
[1] https://ark.intel.com/products/94196/Intel-Core-i7-6900K-Pro...
I know, I was surprised too... I used to buy AMD, but haven't in some time now. Perhaps I will again...
I've been hearing that for the last eight years and it has never been proven to be true, in real world benchmarks and $$$/performance by the time equivalently priced tiers of competing varying $125, $195, $250 and $350 CPUs are available for purchase.
We don't know yet whether Zen is as good as Intel CPUs, but the statement "You're thinking the old AMD architecture, which was quite different from that of Intel, and it sucked. The new Zen architecture is much more similar to that of Intel." Is absolutely correct, and is something that was not correct about any AMD CPU released in the past 8 years.
I used to only buy AMD. Im not exactly sure where they are up to now (probably about 8 years if not more since I touched them)
but i definately remember the bulldozer hype and subsequent flop. lies about the number of cores and other things that just made me say "my computing is to important to my life to play that game".
I was also privy over the years to some test builds of machines including head to head amd vs intel. it is truly painful to say that not only were they often more expensive (new) for the performance, they were also horribly unreliable, pausing, and doing all sorts of stuff that made us sad.
hope thats changed, but saying there is any similarity between the current in use intel vs amd range is very far from the mark.
Are you kidding or did you mistype? Current AMD processors don't generally compare favorably to Intel with respect to some metrics, like absolute performance per core or performance per Watt. However if there is any metric where they match or surpass Intel, it's actually perf/$.
The reason is simple: perf/$ is the only metric where AMD has some control: they can decide to lower and lower their price down to wherever they need to be. If AMD wasn't competitive on at least perf/$ they would be in a much worse situation.
Here is one example I witnessed first hand recently when doing some video work: a good old $100 3.2 GHz 8-core Phenom matches or surpasses most ~$200 Intel processors when encoding MPEG2 files to H.264 with the Linux x264 encoder.
This is bullshit through and through.
Between $100 and $150, you get any of AMD's FX 6xxx and 8xxx line. We're talking about 6 and 8-core processors whose performance are, in the very least, comparable with some of Intel's i5 and i7 offerings.
And Intel's comparable offerings cost over twice what AMD's processors sel for.
The FX-8320E when overclocked can compete in multi-threaded computational workloads, but will use a lot more energy. For games (which is the main area where users stress their processor), the i3-6100 will still be faster. See http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1709?vs=1682. The bigger FX-8s are too expensive and would be pitted against i5s, where they always lose.
The only recent exception I ran across is Watch Dogs 2, which is sufficiently optimized for multiple cores and AMD processors to make the FX-8370 for once competitive against Intels i5. But that is the first game since the release of those processor where that is happening.
What does work for AMD is the Athlon X4 8.0K, the area under 100€. Intels Alternative is the Pentium G4.00, which is worse for most things.
If those results are accurate, they do seem to support that AMD FX CPUs are still competitive with new Intel CPUs in the same price range.
The FX has the potential to be a fast processor in specific workloads. Yes, that fits to what you said. Certainly not when single-threaded, but in multi-threaded workloads it can still be fast. But faster than the i5 it is only very rarely (which, yes, is less harsh on the FX than I was in the comment above). It is a pity that its potential (4 years ago it compared to a weaker i5) could not be used in meaningful ways in common software.
By now it is clearly not a good choice anymore: It uses more energy, depending on what you compare it with it is more expensive or costing the same, and it is on an old platform (AM3+) that won't see further updates.
> They're evenly matched on other tests (e.g. Handbrake & "Agisoft PhotoScan
No. We don't seem to have the same benchmarks. I'm looking at http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1709?vs=1646, where the i5 is clearly faster in the Agisoft and Handbrake benchmarks. It is mainly in the artificial multi-threaded benchmarks as well as Linux 7zip and Linux OpenSSL that the FX can win. For games the FX is almost always behind, but often close, however, those are partly limited by the gpu and thus not too meaningful.
> If those results are accurate, they do seem to support that AMD FX CPUs are still competitive with new Intel CPUs in the same price range.
No. They mean get an i5: Way better in single threaded workloads which is what counts for 90% of software, faster in realistic multi-threaded workloads. Get an FX if all you do is run OpenSSL and 7zip under Linux, or if already having a good AM3+ board (for that scenario it still is good enough).
There are 87 benchmarks there. I do not believe they re-do all 87 each time someone releases a processor. It's more likely that they are reusing old 8370 results and comparing with new 6600 results. I question whether all variables (OS, drivers, minor version numbers of software, etc.) are the same. (I'm not saying that re-doing the 8370 tests would favor AMD, just that it would give more accurate results). They don't mention what settings they used for the software, and what exactly each program is stressing. Splitting the PhotoScan results into five seems very arbitrary. Two decimal places in each result with no error bars, no indication of how they performed the measurement, no indication of the number of times they performed the test leads me to think that it's not a very well conducted set of tests.
> > They're evenly matched on other tests (e.g. Handbrake & "Agisoft PhotoScan
> No. We don't seem to have the same benchmarks.
We clearly have the same benchmarks. "evenly matched" was a poor choice of words, but I don't see a ~23% advantage for the 6600 to be very significant, when other results have the 8370/6600 100% faster than the 6600/8370.
> They mean get an i5: Way better in single threaded workloads which is what counts for 90% of software, faster in realistic multi-threaded workloads.
For browsing, office and most games the 8370 and 6600 are close enough that the average user won't notice a difference. Most users don't spend any time waiting for software that eats 100% of <= 4 cores, which is where the i5's advantage lies. What you find "realistic", I may not, and vice-versa. It depends on the user, and what he's using his computer for.
The i5 may well be the better choice for most users. It certainly has a number of advantages: less power-hungry, newer chipset/features, more upgrade options. My point is simply that the FX cpus are still price and performance competitive with new i5s. Which is better depends on the needs of the user.
Well, every gamer does, and this exactly describes what web-browsing does. However, the FX is of course not too slow for that. Just slower.
> It depends on the user, and what he's using his computer for.
Sure. I was joking above with "get The FX if all you do is 7-Zip on Linux", but yours is of course a correct statement. If you identified correctly that the FX will perform better for your workload, then it is a better choice (if okay with higher energy usage and not having further upgrades, which just might be the case, and it is not like intel is known for long socket support anyway). I for example use Funtoo, which is a Gentoo variant, meaning I compile stuff all the time. I'm on an older processor, but I assume the FX would be a good choice for me.
> It's more likely that they are reusing old 8370 results and comparing with new 6600 results.
I think exactly for the FX-8370 that might be not true, as it is the processor you'd have wanted to compare the new skylake-i5 against. But for the others and older models exactly that will happen. I see no big issue there.
> I don't see a ~23% advantage for the 6600 to be very significant, when other results have the 8370/6600 100% faster than the 6600/8370.
~23% advantage is very significant to me. That is way off of measurement errors. 100% difference just matters even more ;) Also, that it is most often pro-i5.
Ah, I just hope Zen will turn out as great as I hope and is announced and I can start recommending and defending those processors :)
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/10/12/amd-fx-8150...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_sued_cores/
Note that they changed that with ZEN
http://wccftech.com/amd-one-fpu-per-core-design-zen-processo...
* http://www.leagle.com/decision/In%20FDCO%2020160408M22/DICKE....
/ ((cost) * (power))AMD has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for quite awhile now. It's unclear how much rope they have left.
They have actually dug themselves out of that hole over the past two years or so. Their engineers are good, but their CFO is a wizard. Somehow he managed to take a company with bad short-term prospects and very questionable long-term ones that was up to it's eyeballs in very expensive short term debt and convert that into cheap long-term debt. Then once things started going better for them and the stock started going up, they have been turning their debt into equity pretty much as soon as possible.
AMD currently is in no risk of bankruptcy:
http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AMD-CFO-C...
Intel Xeon E5-2665 ($80 on eBay) = 8 cores, 2.3-3.1GHz
Intel Xeon E5-2660 ($60-65 on eBay) = 8 cores, 2.2-3Ghz (so you can buy two for $120-130)
Intel Xeon E5-1650 ($97 on eBay) = 6 cores, 3.5-3.8GHz
E5-2665 beats FX-8350 hands down, and is cheaper.
I can buy a whole workstation with E5-2665, motherboard, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD, all for $414, shipped.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/162274529994
I doubt you can find something like that with FX-8350 and cheaper. And it will still be slower.
Depends a lot on your electrical cost. Some people live in places where the power costs $0.05 per kWh. Some people live in places where it cost $0.36 per kWh (Hawaii).
If somebody wants a machine with a lot of xeon cores and a ton of ram (but noisy), you can buy a dell poweredge r910 server with 4 sockets x 8-core xeons and 128GB of RAM for like $1100. Makes an excellent xen or kvm hypervisor dom0/host development machine. It's just noisy, so in a home environment, put it in your garage or something on the far end of a cat5e cable.
I have a AMD FX 8320 workstation, and I assembled it brand new for less than €400.
In fact, if you take away the €130 referring to the price of an AMD FX 8320, you get the remaining budget for the mobo, RAM, and HDs.
My wife's laptop died, and she just wanted me to do put together something cheap for her office (she has a tablet and work laptop). I bought myself a new motherboard (keeping my CPU), gave her my old one and put in an older CPU I had.
A year and half later, I upgraded my CPU to an FX-8350. My old CPU (Phenom x4) moved to the basement NAS/Plex server, a nice upgrade to Athlon II CPU (without requiring a new motherboard).
Had I been on Intel, I would simply not done those upgrades because they wouldn't have been worthwhile. Basically every CPU upgrade requires a new motherboard. And in my experience, nearly every time I've had to get a new motherboard, my memory or video card or some other component is now outdated, and suddenly I'm basically building a completely new PC.
those don't exist
less performance than a $133 intel e5 2650
and neither are worth buying today.
currently, amd does terribly in pretty much every measure. absolute performance, performance per $, throughput. absolutely anything that matters.
There are some promoted intel chips that are worse.
but the only thing amd have been doing well at in recent years is hyperbole with a healthy dose of shilling. So i cant disagree with anyone on here that wont believe anything they say until they see it.
around this time last year we had
Gamers need perf/core. Datacenters need perf/power.
They're only viable for "cheap CPU" in the < $100 range which is low margin.
I'd really like to see Ryzen meet or exceed Intel i7-6700K/7700K single-core performance using boost mode clocks with a reasonable cooling setup. That would eliminate any reason whatsoever to choose Intel for gaming until their 10nm product arrives Q3 2017.
Comparatively, AMD has been building chips to order as of late, since they do not have the money to build a bunch of chips that may or may not sell, so your looking at a 3 to 4 month delay before you can get a new chip like Ryzen after announcement.
The cache arrangement (see pic halfway down) and better branch prediction are interesting though, cache has always been a space where Intel has been able to use way less transistors to store the same amount of data.
Can you elaborate? I'm fairly certain Intel deviating from their existing roadmap to such a degree and on such short notice would be extremely difficult at best.
Most notably this can be seen in review samples of chips sent out, where AMD and Qualcomm will send out chips dated as being made shortly before being sent per the packaging, Intel will send out chips that are dated 4 to 5 years old, as they are from the first or second run of silicon that Intel did with that chip design.
Fabrication process advancements (i.e. die shrinks) in that time span are enough to rule out what you said with near complete certainty—let alone the notion Intel is somehow shelving architectures for 4-5 years at a time.
Architectures may be developed over those spans, sure—but not shelved for that long.
I had understood that new generations of cpu to be years from beginning of development to store shelves.
We're slowly power gating our way to clockless CPUs.
Most of the things they're touting in the slides amount to little more than finally catching up to Intel (SMT, branch prediction (minus the neural network thing), cache bandwidth, etc.). Also, some of the areas where they seem to exceed current Intel architectures may turn out to be a mixed blessing. For instance, I'm not sure if doubling L2 caches (512kb/core vs 256kb in Intel CPUs) is a great idea given bandwidth limitations and associativity effects. We also don't know the amount of vector registers these CPUs will have, which will greatly influence the performance of optimal CPU-bound code.
Can anyone with more experience comment on the low level details they've released, particularly the issues per cycle and cache architecture figures?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10591/amd-zen-microarchiture-p... (slide 2 on this page)
1. Wider retire (probably only when executing two threads)
2. 32B fetch from icache.
3. Wider issue when executing from uop cache.
4. Larger icache
5. Larger L2 cache helps hit rate.
6. Larger schedulers, leading to larger practical instruction window
7. Split FP/Int pipelines, meaning more execution resources and instruction window in mixed code.
Mixed:
6. Very different branch prediction. AMD has used perceptron predictors before, the talk about AI-driven CPU is just better marketing on this. Perceptrons work much better on some loads, worse on others. What has been released about their newest seems to point to some kind of mitigation of the worst cases of their predictors. Could be great, could be a letdown.
7. Narrower FPU and load-store. This obviously hurts on wide AVX loads, but the adoption of wide AVX so far has been terrible. Narrower FPU gets them shorter distances on chip, leading to higher clocks.
Disadvantages:
8. Their split integer schedulers can have bubbles caused by their inability to move instructions between lanes after dispatch. Part of their prediction talk seems to be focused on mitigating this, but it's still something that Intel CPUs just don't have to worry about.
9. Less AGUs. On any code without rmw ops, they probably can't maintain full memory throughput.
10. Larger L2 cache probably hurts L2 latency.
Current Intel CPUs are in effect designed for 4uop/clock throughput, with both the frontend and the retire limiting them to that over long term. Especially when both threads are running mixed code, this one appears to have a higher peak throughput. How often it can hit that peak is another question -- if I had to make a quess, I'd say that Zen runs highly optimized code better, but the lower latencies of the modern Intel CPU makes them better at worse-optimized code.
Man, if that holds true in more benchmarks, that's fantastic news. AMD chugged along by "competing" further and further down Intel's product line more or less since Sandy Bridge, if they can genuinely compete with the i7 now I can't wait to see the next few years. Intel has always seemed content to release incremental improvements until they get kicked in the pants by somebody else, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a bunch of stuff waiting in the wings to maintain their edge over AMD.
AMD fell the moment they failed to improve over K10.
I don't know if the designs were really absurd, or if the market couldn't understand AMD's value prop. Or if the programmers couldn't (or wouldn't) tap into their APU idea.
Multiple papercuts made them fall I guess.
The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins.
AMD dedicated graphics have only minor issues imho, they're very competitive with nVidias offerings. But in the professional and compute segments they fail to take off, because nVidia established the popular, proprietary CUDA standard there. I don't think there's a (major) technical reason why AMD has much less market share there.
They're likely fairly consistent income, however, even if the margins are relatively slim. For a company in AMD's state, constant income no matter how small is likely a good thing.
AMD marketing tried to put GPU performance in the spotlight. The unfortunate effect was that a moderately informed consumer then had the choice between a somewhat predictable level of graphics performance paired with whatever CPU that came with it if buying AMD, versus a somewhat predictable level of CPU performance paired with whatever GPU that came with it if buying Intel. In most market segments, uncertainty about graphics performance has much less impact on buying decisions than uncertainty about general purpose compute. The (involuntarily, given their portfolio) focus of AMD's marketing on the graphics part of their APUs made it close to impossible to successfully communicate value-for-money advantages in their price range (assuming they had it).
Rumors went around that Intel paid manufacturers to do it intentionally, but nothing was ever proven. However, given how Intel has had similar behavior in the past, it isn't an unreasonable rumor either...
Also IIRC, ryzen wasn't using any form of boost while the 6900k was allowed to push its enveloppe.
Not a time to buy an intel cpu.
If there is no room for boost on Zen parts it's gonna be dead in the water for enthusiasts. My 5820k does 4.6ghz and it's a 6 core part.
That said what's even more important is going to be USB 3/3.1, storage and PCIe performance which ATM on AMDs current platforms are abysmal.
Would be interesting to see the boost stats in that case, 3.7 boost is a bit low for a 6900k part tho everyone I know that had it rubs it around 4.2-4.3ghz.
If AMD left a benchmark to run as a space heater right up to when they started the timed one, the CPU would start at 3.3GHz.
As for the boost, I haven't seen a load that would prevent a core i7 from boosting permanently on air cooling, with water you'll have no problems keeping it at 4.3-4.5 even with an AIO...
This is incorrect. They did a "both CPUs locked to 3.0GHz" test a few months back, today they did a "Intel CPU running absolutely stock, AMD one locked to without boost" test.
But Intel also has an ability to put pressure on OEMs (because of monopoly position and massive supply volume, so if they will not sell CPUs to some vendor as a punishment for buying AMD, AMD will not be able to supply enough CPUs on their own) and brand loyalty, so probably they will keep their "high-end" price points.
Also are the 8 cores they're claiming 8 physical cores or logical?
Shame they still seem to have a 15-year-old in charge of marketing though. Should have just stuck with "Zen".
Also, it sounds like "Ryzen" is their consumer product line. Their server product line might be called something else. It makes sense to have multiple product lines with different names and to refer to the common microarchitecture as "Zen".
AMD was never expected to beat Intel's best, they are expected to beat Intel on price performance.
But as long as it stays under the $1100 of the 6900K I think they can secure the mid to high-end enthusiast grade market which is good because I am tired of intel controlling that portion of the market
If they can't reach at least 4ghz it wouldn't matter.
Games are not optimized well beyound 3-4 cores these days I can disable 2-3 cores on my 6 core CPU and maybe lose 5% fps in CPU intensive games.
Intel can push their clocks pretty darn high especially with OC which now comes out of the box with every enthusiast grade motherboard.
If you end up having a 3.4ghz part going against a 4.5ghz part the 4 extra cores might not matter.
Even in professional use cases adobe doesn't scale above 4 threads like at all and many video encoders also don't scale some even don't scale beyond 2.
The only thing that really scales well universally is 3D rendering.
For ANNs you want as many threads as possible I would think.
Xeon SOCs and what ever AMD would pull out to compete with 48 and 64 thread parts would probably be something quite different than this.
I've mostly used open source encoders, but they all scaled well with more cores, and the Adobe suite has come a long way. It wouldn't make sense for a heavy user to get anything less than 6-8 cores using Adobe.
Heck, even 99% of the "tech media" didn't notice (or didn't care to make a big deal out of it) when Intel swapped Core-based Celerons and Pentiums for significantly weaker, but much more profitable to build, Atoms. The consumers never stood a chance against Intel's progressive rip-off.
Let's see how the market settles in 2-3 years, after the Zen architecture is fleshed out across device lines, and after Qualcomm commences its entrance in the notebook market with 50%-100% of "Core i7" performance (depending on which Core i7 [1]).
[1] http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-renames-core-m-core-...
This chip definitely seems rad, don't get me wrong--I just think the enthusiast market is sensitive to what this isn't, at present, doing.
If you want 6 cores you can get a 6800k for $150 more, but it also has a higher TDP and requires a more expensive motherboard (X99 vs Z170 chipset). This is going to put the total price up by at least $300.
As you say most games still favour single-core performance so paying extra isn't worth it. DX12 and Vulkan will start to change that though, so let's see...
Also with Intel you can upgrade to more performant Xeons. What can you upgrade AMD to?
For both companies, you typically need a different socket/chipset/mainboard for the server chips.
Personally, I will be buying a new PC with Ryzen as soon as they get out.
And by the way, Xeon CPUs aren't usually faster than regular Intel chips. They may have more cache or more cores, which might speed up some programs. But otherwise, they're the same. Or even slower since their motherboards don't overclock well, overclocking not being a big selling point for servers.
Biggest difference with i7 vs xeon, xeon can handle sometimes upwares of 1tb of ram now. i7 maxes out at 64gb. You be the judge. i7 were usually 32gb, especially the LGA1100 series. The LGA2011 were @ i7 handled 64gb. LGA 2011 Xeon's are all 64GB+. Also support for ECC ram. So basically if you are not pressed for raw CPU, and you need just a lot of cpu for simulations, VM's etc, xeon is your go to CPU. Xeon LGA2011 series has some crazy CPU Socket configurations, you can get a lot depending on the motherboard vendor. I think some as many as 4+ CPU Sockets. i7 cannot run in parallel with another socket I believe. Just like with the LGA2011 1600 vs 2600 series xeons.
The previous generation (5820k, etc) were only officially rated for 64GB, but they too worked fine with 128GB in practice. Intel just never updated the spec sheets once 16GB DIMMs became available.
And even if you don't use GPUs, now there are M.2 SSDs which commonly use 4X PCIe lanes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
It's like saying that mercedes with 2.0 engine is the same as 65 AMG. So writing that they are the same is like writing that every car is the same because they all drive.
You do not overclock in 99.99% cases Xeon server cpus. You do not buy 12 core xeon to use one core, don't you? of course Xeon is faster for the use case you are buying it. A LOT faster in many cases than what you called "regular" chips. You are writing about home use cases from what I see and Xeon series is mainly for server use.
It's a bit cheaper, and the downside is an occasional bad cat pic, or maybe an extra browser crash per month to add to the 399 one already gets from poor code ...
Xeons are not necessarily more performant, in fact, often they are less performant than their desktop brethren...
They're server CPU's, designed for long uptime, typically underclocked compared to the same silicon in an i7/i5 package (they focus on stability, not sheer performance), support ECC memory (again, not performance related, rather stability), support more memory, etc.
In the past, AMD avoided artificial "enterprise" segmentation with security features like IOMMU, but did not always have the necessary BIOS, board (e.g. TPM) and open-source tooling that Intel solutions provided.
‘Neutral network’ is more of a marketing term, though somewhat accurate in that it's a number of perceptrons doing statistical branch prediction. No multilayered networks (as far as I know) have been used in any CPU to date.
Intel uses more traditional predictors but with larger buffers. Both approaches have situations that are more or less favorable to them.
(To those asking, PSP is the equivalent of the Intel Management Engine).
While it's possible they'd switch micro-architectures, if history is any indication, I suspect it's more likely what you'll see is a die-shrink (28nm -> 14nm) combined with higher clock speeds. And hopefully a faster memory controller (I think that's more the bottleneck than raw CPU power). But that's entirely my speculation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(microarchitecture)
Now I don't think they will be able to fit 8 zen cores into a Xbox SoC especially since the Vega GPU also have to fit in there, but quad core with 4 logical cores would still probably be better than the existing Puma cores.
noob alert :p
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13174901 and marked it off-topic.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4030174-advanced-micro-devic...
If they are this pushy to get my information, how pushy are they in selling it or in spamming me?
Theyre digging in "what kind of brokerage work do you do" and then asking very pointed money-market questions.
When you get to "Suggestions" they aren't suggestions; they force you to enter multiple stocks.
So fuck them. Here's a Copy/Paste.
_______________________________________________
Summary
In my previous article I showed how speculation going into Zen's launch greatly exceeded speculation going into the Athlon and Opteron launches.
In this article, I take the comparisons further.
I compare both the revenues expected/attained by AMD and the market caps into the 3 launches.
The Investors of today like AMD nearly 4x better than when Opteron (or Athlon, for that matter) was looking pretty.
My thesis on Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) is as follows:
I am negative on AMD because it is my belief, based on leaked benchmarks, that the company's incoming Zen-based CPUs will still underperform Intel's offerings materially, when it comes to single-threaded performance. I believe AMD will compensate for this the same way it has, historically: by selling CPUs with a higher core count. This puts AMD at an intrinsic margin disadvantage, which is made worse by the fact that AMD is fabless whereas Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) runs its own factories (so AMD loses the foundry margin as well).
I also think AMD got way ahead of itself. In my last article, titled "Advanced Micro Devices: Then And Now", I explained this by showing AMD's behavior versus how it behaved during 2 extraordinary past events: the launch of the original Athlon and original Opteron. In both those instances AMD stepped ahead of Intel while with Zen AMD is only expected to get close to Intel. Still, in both of those instances AMD had nothing like the present run going into those launches.
While I am negative on AMD, I am not negative enough to sell it short. I don't think the timing is right for such a move. I also think that there's the chance Zen gets "close enough" even if it underperforms, allowing for substantial share gains while selling at a discount. Thus, before considering selling short AMD, I'm waiting to see how Zen actually performs.
This time is different because the market is larger.
This time AMD is different because it also has GPUs and custom silicon and whatnot.
That's only share price (it was an adjusted share price …), not market capitalization.
AMD was thought to go bankrupt this time, and back in 1999 or 2003 that wasn't the case.
Etc, etc.
Revenues, Now And Then
Over the last 12 months, AMD has produced $4.24 billion in revenues. For 2017, including the early Zen launch, expectations are for $4.55 billion in revenues. Now, remember:
This includes Zen.
This includes GPUs.
This includes custom solutions (consoles, etc).
Athlon. In 2000, AMD had revenues of $4.64 billion.
Opteron. In 2004, AMD had revenues of $5.0 billion.
Market Capitalization, Now And Then
In my previous article I compared just the relative share prices going into product launches. Of course, AMD has had many losses and M&A (acquiring ATI) throughout the years. This naturally led to a much higher share count today, versus what it was back in 1999/2003. How much higher?
As of the last 10-Q, AMD reported a diluted share count of 815 million shares. Potentially, the actual diluted count is over 1 billion shares (diluted shares for the quarter don't include all potential dilution because AMD reported a loss).
As of 1999 year-end, AMD had a diluted share count of 294.6 million shares.
As of 2003 year-end, AMD had a diluted share count of 346.9 million shares.
After the current run, AMD sits at $10.75. This gives it a market capitalization of around $10.75 billion.
When AMD released the Athlon, the stock stood at $9.58. This gave it a market capitalization of around $2.82 billion.
When AMD released the Opteron, the stock stood at $8.47. This gave it a market capitalization of around $2.94 billion.
Conclusion
From this exercise we see that:
AMD today is expected to have lower revenues when it starts selling Zen, versus the revenues it reached when it was selling the Athlon and Opteron. Perhaps estimates will be revised higher. Perhaps even much higher. But the present estimates are factually lower than what was attained back then.
Yet, at the same time, AMD goes for a market capitalization that's 3.6-3.8x higher than it was back then, going into the Zen launch.
Finally, yes, AMD is more diversified today. However, AMD isn't potentially more profitable because back in 1999/2003 it controlled its own foundry and now it doesn't. Instead, right now AMD has contracts which try to assure the foundry's economic returns, while punishing AMD's.
All of this being factual, what we can easily say is that today AMD's stock discounts improvements wildly in excess of the analysts' expectations. If those improvements don't materialize -- well in excess of expectations -- the stock will have very significant downside.
Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.
I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
That said, puts were fairly cheap so I took some as my last gasp effort to see if AMD actually tanked.