Support NeoGAF

[llien]

Offering a brief update on the state of future products as part of its post-earnings conference call this afternoon, AMD has confirmed that both their upcoming Rome (Zen 2) CPU and their first Navi architecture GPU will launch in the 3rd quarter of this year.

Rome is this crazy thing:

with 8x8=64 cores, motherf*cker!
AMD calls it EPYC and it looks like it got people in Intel's HQ worried.


Meanwhile Navi is the codename architecture for AMD’s next generation of GPUs. The first Navi GPU, which is also being built on TSMC’s 7nm process, is set to launch in Q3 of this year. It should be noted that Navi isn’t a single GPU, but rather should be a family of GPUs (as is traditional for GPUs), so it’s not clear which exact model is launching – if it’s high-end, mid-range, or otherwise.

Other than that, AMD's finances beat expectations (revenue down a bit, but margins up) boosting its stock price.
Q2 ends in June, Q3 in Sep.

Quarterly Financial Segment Summary

• Computing and Graphics segment revenue was $831 million, down 26 percent year-over-year and 16 percent quarter-over-quarter. Revenue was lower year-over-year primarily due to lower graphics channel sales, partially offset by increased client processor and datacenter GPU sales. The quarter-over-quarter decline was primarily due to lower client processor sales.
• Client processor average selling price (ASP) was up year-over-year driven by Ryzen processor sales. Client ASP was down slightly quarter-over-quarter due to a decrease in mobile processor ASP
• GPU ASP increased year-over-year primarily driven by datacenter GPU sales. GPU ASP was up sequentially driven by improved product mix.
• Operating income was $16 million, compared to operating income of $138 million a year ago and operating income of $115 million in the prior quarter. The year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter operating income decreases were primarily due to lower revenue.
• Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment revenue was $441 million, down 17 percent yearover-year and up 2 percent sequentially. The year-over-year revenue decrease was primarily due to lower semi-custom product revenue, partially offset by higher server sales. The quarter-over-quarter increase was primarily driven by higher semi-custom revenue.
• Operating income was $68 million, compared to operating income of $14 million a year ago and an operating loss of $6 million in the prior quarter. The year-over-year and sequential improvements were primarily driven by a $60 million licensing gain associated with the company's joint venture with THATIC.
• All Other operating loss was $46 million compared with operating losses of $32 million a year ago and $81 million in the prior quarter. The prior quarter included a $45 million charge related to older technology licenses.

Recent PR Highlights

• Google announced at the Game Developers Conference that it has selected high-performance, custom AMD RadeonTM datacenter GPUs and AMD software developer tools for its Stadia nextgeneration game streaming platform. Also at the conference, AMD announced a number of updates to its software tools to help game developers accelerate game design and foster innovation.
• Amazon Web Services announced broader availability of AMD EPYC processor-based service and launched three new EPYC processor-powered EC2 instance families, including the first T3-series instances.
• Sony Interactive Entertainment released new details about its upcoming next-generation game console, which will be powered by a custom AMD chip based on the "Zen 2" CPU and "Navi" GPU architectures.
• Apple announced updates to its 21.5-inch iMac and 27-inch iMac computers, which for the first time offer "Radeon Pro Vega" graphics cards. The 21.5-inch iMac with Radeon Vega 12 GPUs delivers up to 80 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation. The 27-inch iMac with
• Radeon Vega 10 GPUs delivers up to 50 percent faster graphics performance.
• OEMs announced new systems based on the expanded lineup of consumer and commercial mobile processors from AMD.
• HP and Lenovo announced commercial PCs powered by the 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen PRO mobile processors with Radeon Vega Graphics and AMD AthlonTM PRO mobile processors with Radeon Vega Graphics. At HP Reinvent, the company announced the HP ProBook 445R G6 and HP ProBook 455R G6, powered by 2nd Gen Ryzen mobile processors, and the HP ProDesk 405 G4 Desktop Mini powered by 2nd Gen Ryzen PRO processors. For consumers, HP announced the latest HP ENYY x360 13 and 15, both featuring 2nd Gen Ryzen mobile processors.
• Lenovo announced the IdeaPad S540 and IdeaPad S340 powered by 2nd Gen Ryzen mobile processors.
• Multiple customers began shipping new 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen mobile-powered laptops, including the new ASUS FX505 and 705DY TUF Gaming notebooks, with additional systems coming throughout 2019.
• AMD announced the new AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 SoC, growing the AMD Ryzen embedded family of processors. The SoC will be used in numerous embedded applications from customers like Advantech, IBASE, ASRock, Kontron, MEN and others. It will also power the upcoming Atari VCS entertainment system.
• Demonstrating its commitment to workplace equality, AMD was included in the 2019 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index and received a perfect score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's 2019 Corporate Equality Index.

Current Outlook
AMD's outlook statements are based on current expectations. The following statements are forward looking, and actual results could differ materially depending on market conditions and the factors set forth under "Cautionary Statement" below. For the second quarter of 2019, AMD expects revenue to be approximately $1.52 billion, plus or minus $50 million, an increase of approximately 19 percent sequentially and a decrease of approximately 13 percent year-over-year. The sequential increase is expected to be driven by growth across all businesses. The year-over-year decrease is expected to be primarily driven by lower graphics channel sales, negligible blockchain-related GPU revenue and lower semi-custom revenue. AMD expects nonGAAP gross margin to be approximately 41 percent in the second quarter of 2019.


FUD Alerts about Navi
"but it's still based on CGN" - meaningless statement with popular buzzword in it
Often used by people who think disaster like 1650 is a good card.
Navi can rock or not, but it will have nothing to do with it not coming out of thin air, but "being based on CGN".


anandtech

 

[TeamGhobad]

navi is just 7nm polaris. got it.

 

[Ar¢tos]

64 cores is crazy, clearly not for gaming. At least in just a few months we can have a better idea of what Navi means to next gen consoles.

 

[wordslaughter]

Soon there will be endless speculation about what secret sauce Sony has added to the PS5 version of Navi. But, that's all part of the fun

Am becoming increasingly hyped for Zen 2!

 

[somerset]

1) GCN is primarily an ISA- instruction set architecture, or the low level binary codes that drive the CPU like machines of the GPU. Saying GCN is 'obsolete' or 'outdated' is every bit as moronic as saying the same of the ISA of the Intel/AMD CPU, x64. An ISA is *not* (repeat, is *not*) an architecture.

However, that being said, with a GPU being quite different from a CPU, we lack the codenames for various levels of architecture that define generations of GPU. All current GCN GPUs share more than just an ISA. There is the ALU structure optimised on Computer Science principles, and pretty much now copied by Nvidia. There are higher level control structures optimised for Async, and now pretty much copied by Nvidia.

The blocking of current GCN parts at the highest level (64 ROP limit etc) is *not* any type of fundamental limitation, but reflects the current memory structure - and this is a weak point. The same type of weak point that utterly ruined Bulldozer. The memory structure links to the insanely complicated state machine that all modern GPUs use to distribute work- and is a giant tech investment in and of itself. It needs replacing by AMD, and it seems as if the architecture after Navi does so. But this architecture has *nothing* to do with GCN.

2) The consoles get Navi fused with features from AMD's next two GPU revisions. This is not unusual- actually AMD has always doen this with console GPU work. This is *not* Sony 'magic source', but current AMD R+D work that will appear in desktop chips across the next few years, but later than the first desktop Navi.

3) Navi was been delayed (and Big Polaris killed) by the power of an AMD lead engineer now working at Intel (thank god). Fury, Vega 64, and Vega VII were all essentially the same design from this engineer, and the greatest wasted effort ever seen at AMD. HBM is a disaster, and AMD's Bulldozer like use of the HBM made things far worse. Despite the propaganda, HBM memory is *very* power hungry, with zero advantage for common usage scenarios.

Big Polaris would have given AMD a cheap card at the 1080 performance level. The best Navi this side of the new console releases should give us a 'cheap' card with around 1080TI performance (killer for current VR and 1440P- a bit too little for current 4K). However, it looks like this performance will need another hot-n-loud card (like the Vega 64), and the better (lower) volted/clocked variant will be somewhat slower - ie., clearly faster than the 1080).

4) Zen 2 (Ryzen 3) follows the amazing Zen and Zen+, and continues to slaughter Intel. The process lead TSMC has over Intel is insane. For 'good' parts Intel is stuck at what people commonly know as 14/12nm for the indefinite future. And the multi-core architecture of Zen thrashes Intel's multi-core, which is why the Intel troll factory still pushes *single-threaded* performance- and on Intel 'owned' media sites like Anandtech and Tom's, code that uses x87 instructions (x87 code is decades obsolete- but still used in a tiny percentage of proprietary CAD programs- programs Intel's PR teams pay bent sites to use for 'benchmarking' purposes).

PS the Intel Effect impacts the big open source projects as well. VLC palyer *used* to be mutli-threaded, til that fact became a great help to AMD. Now VLC player only uses one thread to software decode 'difficult' files like 4K 10bit HEVC ones. A 5GHz Intel chip has just about a powerful enough core to do this. A Zen falls a little short (when artificially limited to one thread).

It gets 'better'. VLC player used to perfectly recognise *hardware* video decode, like on the AMD 470/480/570/580 GPUs (they support two streams of 4K 10bit HEVC). The latest version of VLC player, by an amazing 'useful' coincidence for Intel, does not- no matter what settings you use. So today, 4K 10bit HEVC on VLC player is always forced to single-thread software decode - making Intel look 'good' and AMD look 'bad'.

PPS did you know that Nvidia had Gameworks libraries on the Xbox One and PS4- that were *perfectly* optimised for GCN, and actually ran better on AMD GPU hardware? However, the GCN version of Nvidia Gameworks was *never* allowed to be used on the PC. Batman Arkham Knight was peak Gameowrks idiocy, where the gameworks encumbered console version ran like a dream, but the PC version had *fewer* visual features, and ran so poorly thanks to Gameworks (PC version) that WB was forced to give most PC version owners their money back.

*If* you think AMD technology 'inferior' it is not because of 'facts' but because of an extremely well funded online FUD PR campaign by Intel and Nvidia PR teams. In ordinary forums, those apparent 'fanboy' rants against AMD are more often than not from paid members of troll farms known in the industry as 'reputation management companies' Said companies also flood outlets like Amazon and IMDB with *fake* good reviews for products and movies. And now, on Amazon and IMDB, they follow the tactics used against AMD, and post fake *negative* reviews against competing products.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

AMD's profits are pathetic. $16m for the quarter. They gotta start raking it in with 7nm to fund R&D for the future otherwise they're toast.

By comparison Intel made $5.2 BILLION. $16m vs $5 billion. This is a true David and Goliath fight going on here and AMD has no business competing with this behemoth but miraculously their new CPUs might be fastest on the market by all metrics.

 

[appaws]

Sweet. I guess. But I am an Intel stockholder.

 

[TeamGhobad]

AMD's profits are pathetic. $16m for the quarter. They gotta start raking it in with 7nm to fund R&D for the future otherwise they're toast.

By comparison Intel made $5.2 BILLION. $16m vs $5 billion. This is a true David and Goliath fight going on here and AMD has no business competing with this behemoth but miraculously their new CPUs might be fastest on the market by all metrics.

dont they get money for every xbox and playstation sold?

 

[ethomaz]

Saying GCN has nothing to do with the actual GPU situation of AMD is FUD.

GCN is a old arch that even AMD can’t dream the day they will get rip from that.

GCN was something in 2011... not 2019.

AMD needs to move on to something better.

 

[KlickKlack]

next xbox is coming on this e3... the tech is here.

 

[SonGoku]

AMD's profits are pathetic. $16m for the quarter. They gotta start raking it in with 7nm to fund R&D for the future otherwise they're toast.

By comparison Intel made $5.2 BILLION. $16m vs $5 billion. This is a true David and Goliath fight going on here and AMD has no business competing with this behemoth but miraculously their new CPUs might be fastest on the market by all metrics.

Wow AMD is doing amazing all things considered, way back i used to be a huge intel/nvidia fanboy but I've really come to appreciate AMD in recent years.