I thought so too, but looking at it stock recently it seems to be doing much better (especially in last year). Not sure how to interpret that. Wonder if it was mostly investors being happy they divested from that ARM microserver company, or there is genuine upswing and increased market share.
> looking at it stock recently it seems to be doing much better (especially in last year). Not sure how to interpret that.
One interpretation: NVIDIA has been doing a very good job of A) pursuing deep learning and B) talking that up on earnings calls. Even if they're not seeing much money from it right now, investors are excited that they might in the future.
This leads some investors and algos to think, "Hey, NVIDIA is doing well, and AMD is nominally in the same business as NVIDIA, so let's buy AMD because it's cheaper and therefore must represent a better value." This drives up the price of AMD stock, which is itself already prone to more volatility because of their lower market cap.
However, they are two fundamentally different companies. I hear a lot about founder-led vs non-founder-led businesses, and AMD vs NVIDIA is a good example of non-founder-led vs founder-led atm. Also, they've done a very poor job with their ATI acquisition. The ATI acquisition is why they even have a leg to compete with NVIDIA in the first place, but that train has basically left the station at this point.
Intel is in a weird position because their market cap is 10x NVIDIA's, so they need markets where they can make literally 10x more money than for NVIDIA to be interested. Victims of their own success, innovators dilemma, etc. Personally, I think that will hinder them because everything they want to try won't be "big enough" while NVIDIA doesn't suffer from that problem and AMD just has no idea what it's doing besides professional supply chain management.
Respect where it's due, Nvidia will win the hardware side of deep learning and fast matrix multiplication for the foreseeable future.
Right now the only thing I can see holding AMD back is their lack of vision to drop a bit of cash on a CuDNN equivalent (and the ML framework support for it), especially fast convolution kernels optimised for their hardware. They are waiting for the open source community to do the work for them, but no one is picking it up because it's a lot of work.
A couple of good AMD engineers should be able to knock out fast Winograd kernels pretty quick.
Their best bet it to increase support for OpenCL rather than invent something new. And then improve / create OpenCL support for TensorFlow and other popular toolkits.
Caffe has an OpenCL branch, works on AMD but about quarter of the speed of equivalent NVidia hardware using CuDNN 4/5, mostly due to unoptimised kernels - https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/opencl
If they can achieve a big improvement over Nvidia , they can retain their margins.
As for the market being small - as long they can run a self sustaining , high-margin business org at it ,and there's. A big possibility of future growth , why not ? It's not like they lack those resources for another big growth opportunity they're trying to get.
> If they can achieve a big improvement over Nvidia , they can retain their margins.
That's part of my point--they can't achieve a big improvement over Nvidia. Nvidia hires from the same pool that Intel does. Intel doesn't magically get better engineers. If anything the smarter ones are at Nvidia because it's easier to double the stock price of a $13B company than a $150B company, so more upside potential on stock options, which matters to those seeking long and lucrative careers at bigcos. Salaries are about the same at both companies.
So with Nvidia's headstart and the knowledge that a bigger team does not lead to better engineering performance (as per Mythical Man Month), how does Intel magically achieve a "big improvement" over Nvidia?
> As for the market being small - as long they can run a self sustaining , high-margin business org at it ,and there's. A big possibility of future growth , why not ?
I agree logically, but I don't think Intel is quite there as an organization. Once an organization is being run by committee, it's too easy to throw cold water on an idea to kill it. Why take the risk of backing a new initiative?
Also, let's say they were on-board as an organization... See my first point: they can't run a self-sustaining high margin business because there isn't one. There isn't even an especially high margin business for Nvidia; enterprises aren't nearly as stupid or rich as everyone thinks.
If anything, Intel has made the classic big company mistake of waiting too long in the first place, then realizing they're losing, then overcompensating via acquisition. Historically, it's not a good strategy.
My whole point being: I'm glad to see competition, Nvidia (or quantum computing, etc.) will probably win this.
Their semi-custom segment basically stabilised the company and saved them from bankruptcy, their new graphics cards have been good, and from what we know about Zen it's going to be a winner for them (somewhere around Broadwell levels clock for clock).
If you keep in mind that they only need to capture something like 10% to 20% of the server market to double their revenue you can see why people are willing to bet on them.
Of course if they've been fudging the Zen numbers as they've done in the past then they'll probably be done as a company, but it seems very unlikely this time around.
AMD is losing less money than analysts predicted. They've gone from "hopeless" to "it's a longshot" and the stock has repriced accordingly. Long term prospects depend very much on how this new architectures do in the market.
Huh? AMD is too important to Intel to let them fail, if AMD ever went broke, Intel would give them money just so they didn't have to deal with every country going at them for anti-trust law violations.
China bypassed US export laws by licensing from AMD and creating a partnership which re-capitalized AMD. China wants to have the fastest and best of everything to show up the United States that China is the new world power.
I've personally met with quite a few AMD employees over the past few years (hell, they bought me quite a bit of alcohol at times :P). They are not trying to compete in the high performance desktop or server arena anymore, they view it as an area that they will never win big marketshare in.
That being said, any market they can compete with Intel and cause them to have less than 100% marketshare in while making money is a market they are in or want to be in if they aren't already.
Intel literally has a half decade of chips that they could release right now that perform better and are ready to be released, but won't be until years down the road due to a desire to remain top dog in the event they have another Pentium 4 happen.
Perhaps that Joint Venture will go as well as Intel Israel went (brought the Core series out, replacing the failed Pentium 4) which then replaced Intel Oregon, but that is an iffy bet. The Israelis are particularly good at critical thinking, whereas that is generally not encouraged in China. I might be wrong though, but 2 to 3 years from now when we see first silicon for their modified Zen, we'll know.
However, being a monopolist makes certain things illegal for you to do, and some of those things are things that are easy to suspect you of, but hard to prove you're not doing.
As such, being a monopolist constrains you, as well as invites long, expensive, frustrating probes into your business that creates costs and risk (even if you're not intentionally violating anti-trust law, doesn't mean some business unit isn't inadvertently doing so).
E.g. IBM was under an anti-trust probe from 1969 until 1982 over their mainframe business. The probe ended with the DOJ concluding the case was without merit, but it is widely considered to have had a big effect on IBMs decisionmaking for more than a decade.
I thought so too, but looking at it stock recently it seems to be doing much better (especially in last year). Not sure how to interpret that. Wonder if it was mostly investors being happy they divested from that ARM microserver company, or there is genuine upswing and increased market share.