Not really surprising news though since It's been a record year for anything semiconductor or tech related.
Even Intel's outdated 9th and 10th gen chips were flying off the shelves and anything truly innovative (RTX 3000 GPUs, Ryzen 5000 CPUs) were paper launches for most consumers with the label "OUT OF STOCK" describing the overall situation.
AMD recently announced that the situation with the Ryzen 5000 will continue at least through the end of this quarter. They might as well not exist. If Intel launches Rocket Lake-S in volume — and why wouldn't they, since that 14nm process must be pretty well dialed in by now — they might have the best product on the market again.
I would really, desperately, like a more equitable way of distributing the option to buy these parts. I absolutely refuse to pay scalpers and let them win... but many others quite obviously are.
Is there some way for me as a consumer to get into a pool and wait for RNG to give me a shot at buying the parts I need for my normal refresh cycle? My 6 year old desktop was due for it's rebuild this last year. X.X
EVGA has a sign up sheet. They'll email you when it's your turn and you have some number of hours to complete the order (don't remember the exact amount of time you get). Note that at this point it'll likely be months before you make it to the head of the line.
As someone who knows nothing about this space, is there a reason GPU manufacturers don’t increase their prices so they get the extra money that is now going to scalpers, and then reinvest that into manufacturing so they can increase supply and then lower prices back to current levels but with stock?
I don't know; and I'd at least be happier with a dutch auction approach where AMD got the lions share of sales of their CPUs and GPUs so that the money could be invested in either more products soon, or better development later. At least in that case economically unnecessary middle-person impediments to customer fulfillment wouldn't reap the creator's profits.
I have always brought Intel but my newest machine is now AMD. This was combination of AMD excelling with their new series of processors but also the lacklustre performance of Intel.
I would by lying if I said that market perception didn't feed into my decision, it did.
I do hope Intel can fight back with their new CEO, ultimately this level of competition should only be a good thing for consumers.
Gamers Nexus found negligible impact from PCIe 4, using RTX 3080 and 4K games to saturate bandwidth so could be a different story from other types of workloads:
I generally don't buy a new PC every year and there's something to be said about future proofing. PCIe 4 may be negligible today, I doubt that will be the case in 2 years when we've been through at least one full graphics card lifecycle and maybe 2, depending on how heated the competition becomes.
Even if I were to buy a new CPU, I don't want to buy a new motherboard too just to have access to 4.0 slots.
I think the integrated graphics in AMD APUs are way beyond adequate for a large number of people. Unless you're running games from the last few years you don't even need a graphics card, never mind a dedicated PCIe slot. 3.0 should provide good performance on NVME drives and WiFi.
As I understand, that is to be expected because PCIe GPUs get 16 lanes, which is more than enough.
There's more to PCIe than just graphics cards. SSDs, Thunderbolt, 10G Ethernet, USB 3.1-2 are some bandwidth demanding applications that could benefit
PCIe NVME drives only get 4 lanes through the m.2 port, and drives run close to the bandwidth limits on 3.0, I think I've seen benchmarks showing 30% improvements on 4.0 compared to 3.0
I'd also be interested in what difference there is running a PCIe 4.0 graphics card with only 8 lanes on 4.0 vs 3.0
The newest Intel 11th-gen i9-11900K actually reduces core count from 10 (on the i9-10900K) to 8, although leaked performance numbers point to the new chip matching last-gen's multi-threaded performance due to a huge single-threaded performance bump.
It's worth pointing out that their new chips aren't out yet ("Q1") and Intel has completely given up on matching AMD's 12C or 16C parts.
So AMD is still cheaper but somehow "story has shifted"? AMD is still ~12% cheaper per core and has more cores. Also, 2nd image you linked, AMD has better performance per core.
I think the comment to which you replied is definitely true for laptops, and it is yet to be clarified for desktops.
Also, not to be overly pedantic but technically that 10900K is not the current generation (see the "10" at the beginning of the model designation); the 11th-gen Rocket Lake is coming out imminently.
the IPC boost might be enough to take back the single-thread crown. I highly doubt the 8-core top SKU is going to beat the 12-core 5900X in parallel workloads, but we'll see soon enough.
For example, Cinebench R20: Ryzen 9 5980HS (35W) scores 4517, Core i9-10980HK scores 3484. Other benchmarks follow suit, but that's the first one listed.
> With Ryzen 5000, and by extension the Ryzen 9 5980HS, AMD is delivering much better single-thread performance. The 5980HS provides a ~20% gain versus the 4900HS, which is significant for an architectural improvement on the same process node. This takes the 5980HS above Intel’s 10th-gen H-series in all workloads, and allows Zen 3 to trade blows with Intel’s Tiger Lake featuring Willow Cove CPU cores
Tiger Lake is competitive in single core, but I believe they currently top out at 4-core CPUs.
> The Ryzen 9 5980HS is by far the fastest mobile processor available in the 35W power class, and easily offers 20-30% more performance than Intel’s best chip, the Core i9-10980HK, at a lower power level.
Indeed, I had to buy a new laptop before Christmas and reluctantly had to go with Intel. AMD just wasn't available on the spec of machine I needed (Dell Precision)
I bought a Comet Lake laptop last year, and then later another laptop with Ice Lake. Both i7. So far, so good. Yesterday, I bought a Tiger Lake i5 laptop; I would have been happy to buy a Zen 4 laptop but I couldn't find any at the price point I needed.
I heard on the AMD earnings call yesterday that there was some tightness in the lower end of the Ryzen laptop lineup due to AMD under-anticipating the demand. Here's a quote:
So certainly, when I look at the semiconductor environment in 2020, it was very strong. So we saw a strong revenue ramp in our business, as well as across some of our peers. It's fair to say that the overall demand exceeded our planning.
And as a result, we did have some supply constraints as we ended the year. Those were primarily I would say in the PC market, the low end of the PC market, and in the gaming markets. That being said, I think we're getting great support from our manufacturing partners. The industry does need to increase the overall capacity levels.
And so we do see some tightness through the first half of the year, but there's added capacity in the second half.
So I anticipate that Intel is going to keep the pricing pressure on, to recapture market share. We already see this in the desktop processors, where AMD now sells at a premium versus Intel (admittedly, for good reason).
Haha, yes you are correct. My time machine is on the fritz. That said, it is true that I would have been happy to buy a Zen 4 laptop. It is also true that they were not available.
The laptop I ended up buying comes in a Ryzen 5 4500U flavor as well as a Tiger Lake i5-1135G7 flavor. I would have preferred the AMD-powered device but it was not available from my preferred retailer and sold out from the manufacturer, so I ended up going with the Intel version.
Thanks for the explanation. I didn't realize that the leading number didn't denote generation.
Hardware naming is awful, in general, in my experience (:
The interesting part of all of this is something that you've experienced directly, here. People crap all over Intel for being stuck on 14nm, and there are definitely good reasons to do so.
But the upshot is that they are sitting on a ridiculously mature, optimized manufacturing node that has ample capacity. They can pump out enough silicon to meet demand, or at least get much closer to it than anyone else right now.
I see it differently. The massive global dependence on TSMC is also a reason why Intel's IDM model is a good thing. More companies should set up their own fabs. We need more foundry, sure -- but I disagree with the "like TSMC" part.
I saw two articles that convinced me of this.
First, I saw that Germany asked Taiwan to ease the semiconductor shortage's impact on the auto industry.
UMC is also exposed to geopolitical risk. Samsung too.
There's a lot of demand for semiconductor fabrication right now, and I don't think that's going away. Why concentrate all of the capex right on China's doorstep? I just don't see the wisdom of that approach.
This was never intentional. When TSMC was founded, their business model was nuts from a Western perspective: why would a company produce chips for someone else, the money is in the design and the brand, not the manufacturing. The market for this started when companies like Intel and TI wanted to derive some profits from unused manufacturing capacity.
The zeitgeist of American business over the past 40 or so years has been that brand is what people buy. Manufacturing is expensive, low-margin, and is best outsourced. Thus, there's been a slow, steady march towards design here, build somewhere else. Not just in the silicon space, but in everything from food processing to plastic tchotchkes.
That is a perfectly valid model, if there is a lot of competition in the manufacturing space. But now TSMC is so far ahead of the competition, and nobody expected that. Sometimes being the contrarian is where the profits are.
1. Intel single Q4 is double the revenue of AMD FY 2020.
2. On Consumer they have their Laptop APU launch along with decent GPU lineup against Nvidia. But this translate to 20% YoY. Compared to Intel 10%+ YoY. Remember AMD's baseline is a lot smaller. 10% growth from AMD and 10% from Intel is quite a bit different.
3. Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom looks good on paper with YoY. But reality is that PS5 and Xbox contributed more. Which means Server Sales still isn't anywhere good enough. Intel has been defending their territory exceptionally well, as shown with their latest report with large decrease of ASP.
This isn't just some supply constrain. It is also AMD needs to do better forecasting. Although arguably AMD is conservative in nature due to not so long ago they were on the verge of bankruptcy.
What is exceptionally good though was their profitability. Even excluding the one off Tax benefits. Their Net Income in 2020 increased by 5X!
Edit: Just checked in 2019 they were paying down their debt, which was partly why their net income were low. So 2020 is a true reflection of their profitability. All of a sudden their stock price doesn't look so insanely high.
Remember that intel's cpus is just one division in a much larger company, where amd is mostly just cpus and gpus, so any comparison of revenue is going to make intel look much better
Doesn't make that much difference really. Intel doesn't have GPU market either.
Intel Client and DC are still vast majority of their revenue. Using the example I gave, just these two are $17B in Q4 and $66B in FY2020, vs AMD $9.8B in FY2020.
They need to work on their DC sales. As I have been saying since 2018.
If you start the year with -$100 in assets and end it with $0, that's $100 net income.
It doesn't matter much if you add to a negative debit or a positive bank account. If AMD was investing into some non-formal asset (brand awareness, R&D, etc), the numbers would change, but that's not the GP's scenario.
The only way paying down debts can affect income is by reducing interest expense, which would make income go up. If a debt was written off by a lender and would no longer be collected, that would affect income (although that's not "paying down") and would also increase income.
One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side AMD gear, the state of AMD laptops and linux leaves a lot to be desired.
It'll be expensive for AMD to close the software gap between both Intel and Nvidia.
When was the last time you used AMD on Linux? The intree amdgpu driver is so much easier to deal with than the out of tree nvidia driver and gets support for new hardware much faster than the nouveau driver.
There was even a period of about of month last year where nvidia didn’t support the new kernel.
And when comparing to Intel, which is usually well-supported by Linux: the kernel-side Intel GPU support had several nasty bugs that persisted through the first few 5.x kernel releases leading to graphics lockups.
One anecdote: I've been using AMD's CPU OpenCL SDK for a while now as the Intel equivalent was a pain to install. Intel have now made it a lot easier so moved to Intel and the performance increase has been ... very material.
And of course that would mean that I'm more likely to use Intel hardware in future as reasonably sure the Intel drivers don't work with AMD CPUs - so sadly no EPYC for me!
One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side AMD gear, the state of AMD laptops and linux leaves a lot to be desired.
What? I have a Thinkpad T14 AMD and even though it has only been on the market for a few months, it's Linux support is excellent. Everything, including the GPU, works perfectly fine.
I ran Intel on desktop for many years partly for that reason, partly due to much lower idle consumption, but to be honest, while full of features the Intel graphic drivers were for a long time (several years) a little bit buggy. I wasn't super impressed with that.
I recently switched to integrated AMD graphics, and the only problem I had was occasional render artifacts. Yes, a bit scary, but in practice only an occasional cosmetic problem. I think those disappeared completely some time ago. This is on a stock kernel.
The only graphics-related problems I have these days are with Wine and some old games, where it looks like there's a difference between what Wine emulates and what it expects to get directly from the 3D driver, e.g. with regards to old 16 bit color modes that I suppose the AMD driver simply doesn't bother with.
I can't speak to the bigger picture but I ordered an AMD-based laptop on Dec. 23, initial arrival date was Feb. 2, it was moved five times and is now Apr. 1. When I called I was told they (lenovo) were waiting for AMD to "make more".
Lol no, that would be a very serious accounting fraud. That is exactly what Enron did - they used to sign a contract and immediately book all the projected profits.
Here's how it works:
1) If the goods weren't delivered and the customer hasn't paid then they're in the inventory on the balance sheet (assuming the goods were already produced) and nothing is in the income statement.
2) If the goods were delivered but the customer hasn't paid then this is in accounts receivable on the assets in the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.
3) If the goods were delivered and the customer has paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.
4) If the goods weren't delivered but the customer has already (pre)paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet, but also in deferred revenue in liabilities, and not in the revenue in the income statement.
TL;DR: you can only recognize revenue if you deliver the product/service, until that time it's either just inventory (asset) or inventory(asset)+cash(asset)+deferred revenue(liability). AMD revenue = chips delivered to customers in the quarter.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadEven Intel's outdated 9th and 10th gen chips were flying off the shelves and anything truly innovative (RTX 3000 GPUs, Ryzen 5000 CPUs) were paper launches for most consumers with the label "OUT OF STOCK" describing the overall situation.
Is there some way for me as a consumer to get into a pool and wait for RNG to give me a shot at buying the parts I need for my normal refresh cycle? My 6 year old desktop was due for it's rebuild this last year. X.X
Any problems come to mind?
I would by lying if I said that market perception didn't feed into my decision, it did.
I do hope Intel can fight back with their new CEO, ultimately this level of competition should only be a good thing for consumers.
Current-gen Intel & AMD processors are pretty much neck-to-neck in both performance and price.
Or PCIe Gen 4 support?
I wouldn't say Intel has anything worth looking into if you want 32 or 64 cores on the desktop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DKVVtirNM8
Even if I were to buy a new CPU, I don't want to buy a new motherboard too just to have access to 4.0 slots.
There's more to PCIe than just graphics cards. SSDs, Thunderbolt, 10G Ethernet, USB 3.1-2 are some bandwidth demanding applications that could benefit
PCIe NVME drives only get 4 lanes through the m.2 port, and drives run close to the bandwidth limits on 3.0, I think I've seen benchmarks showing 30% improvements on 4.0 compared to 3.0
I'd also be interested in what difference there is running a PCIe 4.0 graphics card with only 8 lanes on 4.0 vs 3.0
it's measurable, but not very significant. take a look at these charts: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-p... (pcie 2.0 x16 is equivalent to or slightly worse than pcie 3.0 x8)
I think this is only if you ignore multi-threading but I might be wrong, did Intel release better multi core CPUs or cut down the prices?
It's worth pointing out that their new chips aren't out yet ("Q1") and Intel has completely given up on matching AMD's 12C or 16C parts.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X-vs-I...
This chart from Tom's Hardware shows a similar story:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/auqNuTshdmehuqLXX32BBF-970...
AMD Zen3 has a lead on Intel 10th gen, but the cost/performance story has shifted.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5900X&i...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-10900...
Also, not to be overly pedantic but technically that 10900K is not the current generation (see the "10" at the beginning of the model designation); the 11th-gen Rocket Lake is coming out imminently.
For example, Cinebench R20: Ryzen 9 5980HS (35W) scores 4517, Core i9-10980HK scores 3484. Other benchmarks follow suit, but that's the first one listed.
> With Ryzen 5000, and by extension the Ryzen 9 5980HS, AMD is delivering much better single-thread performance. The 5980HS provides a ~20% gain versus the 4900HS, which is significant for an architectural improvement on the same process node. This takes the 5980HS above Intel’s 10th-gen H-series in all workloads, and allows Zen 3 to trade blows with Intel’s Tiger Lake featuring Willow Cove CPU cores
Tiger Lake is competitive in single core, but I believe they currently top out at 4-core CPUs.
> The Ryzen 9 5980HS is by far the fastest mobile processor available in the 35W power class, and easily offers 20-30% more performance than Intel’s best chip, the Core i9-10980HK, at a lower power level.
I heard on the AMD earnings call yesterday that there was some tightness in the lower end of the Ryzen laptop lineup due to AMD under-anticipating the demand. Here's a quote:
So certainly, when I look at the semiconductor environment in 2020, it was very strong. So we saw a strong revenue ramp in our business, as well as across some of our peers. It's fair to say that the overall demand exceeded our planning.
And as a result, we did have some supply constraints as we ended the year. Those were primarily I would say in the PC market, the low end of the PC market, and in the gaming markets. That being said, I think we're getting great support from our manufacturing partners. The industry does need to increase the overall capacity levels.
And so we do see some tightness through the first half of the year, but there's added capacity in the second half.
So I anticipate that Intel is going to keep the pricing pressure on, to recapture market share. We already see this in the desktop processors, where AMD now sells at a premium versus Intel (admittedly, for good reason).
And you'd need to budget for a time machine, first!
AMD has done a poor job with naming for their new processors and architecture.
The architecture is called 'Zen'. The consumer SKUs have a model name of 'Ryzen'. I'll ignore the server parts for now (model name 'Epyc').
The Zen architecture progressed as follows: Zen-->Zen+-->Zen2-->Zen3
The Ryzen model numbers for desktop progressed as follows: Ryzen 1000-->Ryzen 2000-->Ryzen 3000-->Ryzen 5000.
The Ryzen model numbers for laptop SKUs progressed mostly as follows: Ryzen Mobile 2000-->Ryzen Mobile 3000-->Ryzen Mobile 4000-->Ryzen Mobile 5000.
Some of the newest Ryzen Mobile 5000-series are actually Zen2, aka rebadged Ryzen Mobile 4000-series.
So, Zen4 is still upcoming and not available to anyone except AMD's engineers who are currently developing it.
The laptop I ended up buying comes in a Ryzen 5 4500U flavor as well as a Tiger Lake i5-1135G7 flavor. I would have preferred the AMD-powered device but it was not available from my preferred retailer and sold out from the manufacturer, so I ended up going with the Intel version.
Thanks for the explanation. I didn't realize that the leading number didn't denote generation.
The interesting part of all of this is something that you've experienced directly, here. People crap all over Intel for being stuck on 14nm, and there are definitely good reasons to do so.
But the upshot is that they are sitting on a ridiculously mature, optimized manufacturing node that has ample capacity. They can pump out enough silicon to meet demand, or at least get much closer to it than anyone else right now.
All roads lead to TSMC ....
there's a need for another foundry like TSMC. Samsung is not cutting it.
I saw two articles that convinced me of this.
First, I saw that Germany asked Taiwan to ease the semiconductor shortage's impact on the auto industry.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-autos-chips/german...
Then, I saw that Germany is sending a warship to the South China Sea.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Ind...
UMC is also exposed to geopolitical risk. Samsung too.
There's a lot of demand for semiconductor fabrication right now, and I don't think that's going away. Why concentrate all of the capex right on China's doorstep? I just don't see the wisdom of that approach.
This was never intentional. When TSMC was founded, their business model was nuts from a Western perspective: why would a company produce chips for someone else, the money is in the design and the brand, not the manufacturing. The market for this started when companies like Intel and TI wanted to derive some profits from unused manufacturing capacity.
The zeitgeist of American business over the past 40 or so years has been that brand is what people buy. Manufacturing is expensive, low-margin, and is best outsourced. Thus, there's been a slow, steady march towards design here, build somewhere else. Not just in the silicon space, but in everything from food processing to plastic tchotchkes.
That is a perfectly valid model, if there is a lot of competition in the manufacturing space. But now TSMC is so far ahead of the competition, and nobody expected that. Sometimes being the contrarian is where the profits are.
Yeah, that sounds like more of the Koolaid the business schools were selling.
Remember all the TV brands that were made in the US? Now they are bought and sold in China. Not the products, but the brand names.
What I'm referring to as "that approach" is the below suggestion from MangoCoffee, to whom I replied.
> there's a need for another foundry like TSMC.
this podcast with SemiWiki Founder Daniel Nenni. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4DgXtxkZNg
good discussion on how we go from IDM (real man have fab) to the foundry business model.
1. Intel single Q4 is double the revenue of AMD FY 2020.
2. On Consumer they have their Laptop APU launch along with decent GPU lineup against Nvidia. But this translate to 20% YoY. Compared to Intel 10%+ YoY. Remember AMD's baseline is a lot smaller. 10% growth from AMD and 10% from Intel is quite a bit different.
3. Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom looks good on paper with YoY. But reality is that PS5 and Xbox contributed more. Which means Server Sales still isn't anywhere good enough. Intel has been defending their territory exceptionally well, as shown with their latest report with large decrease of ASP.
This isn't just some supply constrain. It is also AMD needs to do better forecasting. Although arguably AMD is conservative in nature due to not so long ago they were on the verge of bankruptcy.
What is exceptionally good though was their profitability. Even excluding the one off Tax benefits. Their Net Income in 2020 increased by 5X!
Edit: Just checked in 2019 they were paying down their debt, which was partly why their net income were low. So 2020 is a true reflection of their profitability. All of a sudden their stock price doesn't look so insanely high.
Intel Client and DC are still vast majority of their revenue. Using the example I gave, just these two are $17B in Q4 and $66B in FY2020, vs AMD $9.8B in FY2020.
They need to work on their DC sales. As I have been saying since 2018.
https://businessquant.com/intel-revenue-by-segment
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/...
If you earn $100, and keep it or use it to pay down debt, net income is still $100.
It doesn't matter much if you add to a negative debit or a positive bank account. If AMD was investing into some non-formal asset (brand awareness, R&D, etc), the numbers would change, but that's not the GP's scenario.
It'll be expensive for AMD to close the software gap between both Intel and Nvidia.
There was even a period of about of month last year where nvidia didn’t support the new kernel.
https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_F...
My Intel NUC8i5BEH would regularly have GPU lockups and it took them several months to fix the issues.
On home systems, Arch Linux provides a system to automate the module generation [0], however features like CUDA break sometimes. [1]
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_S...
[1] https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-45528-is-incompatible-with...
And of course that would mean that I'm more likely to use Intel hardware in future as reasonably sure the Intel drivers don't work with AMD CPUs - so sadly no EPYC for me!
What? I have a Thinkpad T14 AMD and even though it has only been on the market for a few months, it's Linux support is excellent. Everything, including the GPU, works perfectly fine.
I recently switched to integrated AMD graphics, and the only problem I had was occasional render artifacts. Yes, a bit scary, but in practice only an occasional cosmetic problem. I think those disappeared completely some time ago. This is on a stock kernel.
The only graphics-related problems I have these days are with Wine and some old games, where it looks like there's a difference between what Wine emulates and what it expects to get directly from the 3D driver, e.g. with regards to old 16 bit color modes that I suppose the AMD driver simply doesn't bother with.
They can however record the cash on their balance sheet.
Here's how it works:
1) If the goods weren't delivered and the customer hasn't paid then they're in the inventory on the balance sheet (assuming the goods were already produced) and nothing is in the income statement.
2) If the goods were delivered but the customer hasn't paid then this is in accounts receivable on the assets in the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.
3) If the goods were delivered and the customer has paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.
4) If the goods weren't delivered but the customer has already (pre)paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet, but also in deferred revenue in liabilities, and not in the revenue in the income statement.
TL;DR: you can only recognize revenue if you deliver the product/service, until that time it's either just inventory (asset) or inventory(asset)+cash(asset)+deferred revenue(liability). AMD revenue = chips delivered to customers in the quarter.
They need more Linux developers if they don't want their reputation to suffer.
The laptop is a Ryzen 2500u so not the newest, the one with a 3700u is worse, it barely boots because HPs amd bios has some glaring bugs.