Lisa Su deserves "CEO of the Year." She has great technical vision and can execute. Just an amazing turnaround for AMD.
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 …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 26th July 2018 00:43 GMT 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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 05:10 GMT 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?
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Thursday 26th July 2018 08:13 GMT 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".
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Thursday 26th July 2018 11:01 GMT 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!
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Thursday 26th July 2018 06:44 GMT Pascal Monett
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 ?
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Thursday 26th July 2018 13:51 GMT 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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 07:27 GMT 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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 08:32 GMT 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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 12:48 GMT 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
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Thursday 26th July 2018 11:22 GMT phuzz
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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 12:45 GMT 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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 22:43 GMT 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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 11:49 GMT Boothy
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.
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Thursday 26th July 2018 18:05 GMT 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.