back to article Official: AMD now stands for All the Money, Dudes!

AMD is crediting the continued success of Ryzen and Epyc processors, and Radeon graphics chips, in fueling its best quarter since 2011. The other-other CPU vendor turned in a massive Q2 FY2018 on Wednesday with big gains in both sales and net income. For the quarter, ending June 30: Revenues of $1.76bn were up 53 per cent …

  1. Rajiv_Chaudri

    Lisa Su deserves "CEO of the Year." She has great technical vision and can execute. Just an amazing turnaround for AMD.

    1. a_yank_lurker

      @Rajiv - She is proof you hire competency not to fill a tick box. Too many are obsessed with check boxes.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "She is proof you hire competency not to fill a tick box. Too many are obsessed with check boxes."

        have you actually met any woman who was there simply cos she 'ticked the boxes'? or is that just an assumption you make about any woman till she manages to impress you?

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          have you actually met any woman who was there simply cos she 'ticked the boxes'?

          cf Dr Su / Martha Lane Fox

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Are you assuming that it was directed at women and not just positions in the workforce in general, sure looks like it.

  2. Big Al 23

    It's good for all except Intel

    It's great to see AMD building a outstanding portfolio of products available to all at competitive prices. It's no surprise that Dell and the rest of the PC industry are onboard the money train. They'd be fools not to be as Intel has fallen and can't get up with their failed 10nm process, Optane and other ventures.

  3. guyr

    Great news for AMD, but where's the profit?

    Of course I'm thrilled to see AMD finally turning a profit; my laptop and 2 desktops are AMD powered. But if I'm doing my math correctly, a profit of $116m on revenue of $1.76B is a profit margin of about 6.5%. Intel meanwhile claims a profit margin of over 60%:

    https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/gross_profit_margin

    How can the difference be so massive?

    1. James Pond

      Re: Great news for AMD, but where's the profit?

      If you think about it a bit more, you'll know the answer.

      psstt.....it's due to high prices of their CPU....plus the fact as their revenue is so large their fixed costs are a lower %.

    2. Bronek Kozicki

      Re: Great news for AMD, but where's the profit?

      The other way to look at margin is "how much is the given company ripping its customers". The large figure you see on the Intel side is the reason why AMD has increased, and will keep increasing, its revenue. It is also the reason why Intel needs to make some hard decisions, soon. The relation between both sides is what we call "competition".

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Great news for AMD, but where's the profit?

      You are comparing net vs. gross figures so this looks worse than the real data. Intel's performance is pretty stable and typically has a net profit margin of ~25%. AMD is all over the place and has varied from -30% to the latest +5% over the past 5 years. This is still a factor of 5 but not quite as big!

    4. ridley

      Re: Great news for AMD, but where's the profit?

      Firstly the link that you give is for GROSS profit margin, not NET.

      Secondly, I would suspect that the costs of R&D for the latest processors are broadly similar but Intel's unit sales are far greater, hence more NET profit.

    5. dillbertiniantype

      Re: Great news for AMD, but where's the profit?

      Simple, gross margin is not equal to net income.... still 6.5% is low, for a healthy company this should be 10+ over a long period.

  4. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    I hope AMD can keep this up

    I personally feel that AMD has suffered being in the red for far to long. I want it back in the black and staying there. AMD has historically been able to achieve world-firsts, and has consistently demonstrated inventiveness and reactivity.

    Who knows what it could do if it had the financial reserves Intel has ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I hope AMD can keep this up

      Who knows what it could do if it had the financial reserves Intel has ?

      The evidence is that if you give a company a huge pile of cash, they either spend it on share buy-backs to boost the value of the directors' options, or they fritter it on some huge, misbegotten M&A adventure that ends in sluggish pre-forma growth and big writedowns.

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Coat

        That, unfortunately, sounds like the voice of reason.

        So I'll just have a whisky and dream on . . .

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Pint

          A whisky in this heat? Let me offer you a good quality IPA from the fridge.

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: I hope AMD can keep this up

        Or they could have bought ARM

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'd buy an AMD CPU but where their graphics products fall down is the length of their driver support, match Nvidia's support length (10 years) and I'll consider you again for graphics.

    1. Iainn

      I'm not sure why you think Nvidia support for 10 years. All Fermi architecture is now in legacy status, only being supported by critical bug fixes until Q1 2019.

      https://www.anandtech.com/show/12624/nvidia-moves-fermi-to-legacy-ends-32bit-os-support

      Fermi started releasing in 2011 (maybe some in 2010?), with some of the later cards appearing in 2012. That gives a primary support range of around 6 to 8 years.

    2. Daniel 18

      It all depends on what you are trying to do....

      Nvidia does not provide adequate support and documentation for open source drivers, which means you are stuck with either slower drivers or whatever limitations the proprietary drivers carry, such as poor or no support for switchable graphics, and incompatibility with Wayland, which will likely replace X as the basis of windowing.

      AMD provides the information before release of the GPUs, so open source drivers are about as good as proprietary drivers, Wayland works, and switchable graphics support is much better.

      I have been quite irked by the complications of trying to get graphics on an Intel/Nvidia laptop do the things it should - particularly in driving multiple GPUs, Intel drivers also seem to fail to remove themselves properly when an un-install is triggered. Very messy.

      I look forward to getting an AMD APU laptop, which will probably clear up a lot of issues.

      I suppose I could get easier graphics by running the spyware that is Windows 10, but that's not really acceptable. Currently the only major operating systems for small (non mini/mainframe) devices that looks reasonably secure is a well chosen and configured Linux or BSD. Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Chromebook all look or have been proven inadequate.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It all depends on what you are trying to do....

        >incompatibility with Wayland, which will likely replace X as the basis of windowing.

        A complete fabrication,there are Linux DE's supporting Wayland using propriety Nvidia:

        https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Better-EGLStreams-Mutt

    3. phuzz Silver badge

      match Nvidia's support length (10 years)

      You can still get drivers from AMD for the HD2000 line, which came out in 2007 just after AMD bought ATI (and was still sold as ATI). Of course, they've not updated that driver for years, but what are you expecting? It's not like nVidia are providing fixes specifically for Geforce 8000 series cards either.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        >not like nVidia are providing fixes specifically for Geforce 8000 series cards either.

        The 8000 series was released in 2006, twelve years ago and the last driver is dec 2016.

        I own a hd2000, last driver update for that was21/1/2013, however what's worse is the HD 4000 which was released in 2008 and openly flogged in laptops until about 2011 that the drivers were killed as per HD2000, 21/1/2013.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          ">not like nVidia are providing fixes specifically for Geforce 8000 series cards either.

          The 8000 series was released in 2006, twelve years ago and the last driver is dec 2016."

          Aside from major suite or OS changes, I rarely see actual driver improvements on either side after the first 6 months. Generally, they fix the bugs shortly after the card is released, and then put them into maintenance mode. Any newer drivers just include the old ones as part of their unified driver architecture. So, I really doubt that 8000 series card actually got an update in 2016, and is really just getting included since the driver doesn't break the card.

  6. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Very pleased to see this

    I got a 4 core Ryzen machine in March, and it behaves perfectly doing heavy duty audio processing. That's algorithmic multichannel music generation at less than 2mS latency.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Very pleased to see this

      Impressive that Ryzen 5 can match the performance of my 6+ year old i7-2700k.

  7. Dave K

    Great news to see AMD back in the black. Ryzen is a very nice range of hardware - I've been very impressed with mine since getting it late last year. Also great to see Intel being given some real competition again. Long may it continue!

  8. adam payne

    #GoAMD

    Good to see AMD back in the black. Now I want to see them stick it to Intel.

  9. Boothy
    Go

    Do the same now for GPUs please!

    Good new on the CPU front, and I'm very much thinking about replacing my aging i7 3770k with a new AMD at some point (perhaps even a Threadripper2!).

    Would be nice if AMD could give their GPUs a bit of love though, nVidia have gotten really complacent with their products over the last few years, as there is just no real competition currently from AMD pushing them to release new products. Some hi end cards from AMD, would help bring back some competition again.

  10. John Sanders
    Linux

    AMD Is great

    And they fully support open source Linux graphics drivers, for me instant buy.

  11. Fury556

    I'm glad they're doing better. My first proper PC builds were AMD powered (Athlon 64 era) and ATI graphics cards. Will be good to see some more competition between Intel/AMD/Nvidia

  12. zanginator

    Great Work AMD. Now keep it up!

    Good News for AMD! Let's hope they can keep this up and keep innovating. After all competition in the CPU market is desperately needed to give the consumer better choice and better prices.

    Now keep it up AMD and give your GPUs a little love.

  13. Dropper

    Good

    Always been a fan of ATI and AMD products, however the only game I've been playing for the last 5 or so years is WoW.

    While pairing a decent Ryzen processor and Radeon card is viable for WoW, it's been more cost effective for me to stick with Intel / NVidia. WoW relies almost exclusively on single thread CPU processing power and Intel still leads AMD in this regard. With the video card, the cost of equivalent Radeons still seem heavily affected by the cypto currency "tax".

    The good news on that particular idiocy is that both AMD and NVidia are going to release GFX cards with no video ports at slightly lower prices, which they hope will mitigate the price of regular cards.

    If I played other games, I'd probably return to AMD for at least the processor. But I'm not paying a $100-$200 tax on a video card just because I like the manufacturer. Being brand loyal for the sake of it is idiocy - no corporate gives a crap about you, so you should always go for what gives you the best value for money.

    1. Not That Andrew

      Re: Good

      You do know you can use an AMD CPU with nVidia GPU?

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