The part here I find funny is that AMD's market cap currently sits at @ 2x Intel's so the analysts of the world obviously think they're sitting on something. And yet they are still in headlines as the market underdog.
For anyone who doesn't follow AMD at all (good move, their consumer support for compute leaves scars) they appear to have a strategy of targeting the server market in hopes of scooping out the high-profit part of the GPGPU world. Hopefully that does well for them, but based on my years of regret at being an AMD customer watching the AI revolution zoom by, I'd be hesitant about that translating to good compute experiences on consumer hardware. I assume the situation is much improved from what I was used to, but I don't trust them to see supporting small users as a priority.
Similar experience here. We got burnt betting on ROCm being released in consumer GPUs a few years ago, but it never happened.
I think you have to win the consumer market to get the Enterprise market, not the other way around.
When it comes to comparing market cap, the more apt business relevant to AMD's MI line is Nvidia's data center division, and investors are probably rightly assessing that AMD will not dent Nvidia's market position any time soon. That said, AMD's data center GPU is growing at an extremely healthy pace and enjoys high profit margins, so they have proven their ability to execute in this space to a degree and as a business it shows a promising future.
When looking at the market cap, there are three main pillars of valuation - revenue growth, profit growth, and net income. If all three are growing, you are an industry darling. If two are growing, you are still likely to be valued highly. If you have only one, you are much riskier. If you have none, it's a red flag.
As of the latest earnings report, AMD profit, revenue and net income are all increasing. Intel, they are all decreasing. If analysts assume trends hold, AMD can grow into its valuation and Intel is currently heading towards being worth nothing unless they change their business. Simply put, a business that is losing all three of revenue, profit margin, and net income is simply headed on the wrong path for investors, and will be punished in an outsized way when it comes to predicting it's future value (ie, market cap).
For datacenter GPUs, they're going from ~500M-750M in 2023 full year (can't find proper numbers), to 4.5B+ full year 2024. In GPUs, it's almost like they're entering a new market.
The current Instinct line of products is relatively new too, I found this article [1] on the MI100 launch on Nov, 2020. That's basically start of 2021.
To go from MI100 in 2021, to 4.5B+ of MI300X + MI250X in 2024 is great. They are doing just fine.
On MI355X, I can't find endnotes for the slides they show, but it is not clear if the 9.2PF of FP6 and FP4 is sparse or not (all the other numbers on that slide were non-sparse). If it isn't they're exceeding GB200's sparse FP6/4 numbers with non-sparse flops (!). They both have the same memory bandwidth though. AMD is doing just fine.
MI100 is hardly the first AMD datacenter GPU. The first Instinct branded card, MI25, is from 2017 [1]. But ATI/AMD had FirePro/FireStream branded GPGPU cards going back to the mid 2000s [2,3]. They just never caught on because AMD's software, support and marketing was not competitive with Nvidia's.
Everyone knows that AMD primarily sells CPUs. That is why all the interest is over with Nvidia and a contributing factor to why I don't own an AMD graphics card any more.
This isn't so directly related, and I know that performance figures are highly workload dependent and always under the headline figures but I want to take a moment to point out the multi-petaflop figures. Yes they're not full precision, but still. How long ago would this have felt like an outrageous supercomputer?
Quick thing to show the sheer scale of these figures. This is 10^15 operations per second, and if you sit a foot from your screen that takes light about a nanosecond to reach you. That means that from the light leaving your screen to it hitting your eyeballs these things can have done another million calculations.
I know this isn't particularly constructive, but I'm hit with waves of nostalgia and older performance figures seeing this.
Readit News
For anyone who doesn't follow AMD at all (good move, their consumer support for compute leaves scars) they appear to have a strategy of targeting the server market in hopes of scooping out the high-profit part of the GPGPU world. Hopefully that does well for them, but based on my years of regret at being an AMD customer watching the AI revolution zoom by, I'd be hesitant about that translating to good compute experiences on consumer hardware. I assume the situation is much improved from what I was used to, but I don't trust them to see supporting small users as a priority.
Clearly there are workloads AMD wins at, and just going Nvidia by default for everything without considering AMD is suboptimal.
When looking at the market cap, there are three main pillars of valuation - revenue growth, profit growth, and net income. If all three are growing, you are an industry darling. If two are growing, you are still likely to be valued highly. If you have only one, you are much riskier. If you have none, it's a red flag.
As of the latest earnings report, AMD profit, revenue and net income are all increasing. Intel, they are all decreasing. If analysts assume trends hold, AMD can grow into its valuation and Intel is currently heading towards being worth nothing unless they change their business. Simply put, a business that is losing all three of revenue, profit margin, and net income is simply headed on the wrong path for investors, and will be punished in an outsized way when it comes to predicting it's future value (ie, market cap).
For datacenter GPUs, they're going from ~500M-750M in 2023 full year (can't find proper numbers), to 4.5B+ full year 2024. In GPUs, it's almost like they're entering a new market.
The current Instinct line of products is relatively new too, I found this article [1] on the MI100 launch on Nov, 2020. That's basically start of 2021.
To go from MI100 in 2021, to 4.5B+ of MI300X + MI250X in 2024 is great. They are doing just fine.
On MI355X, I can't find endnotes for the slides they show, but it is not clear if the 9.2PF of FP6 and FP4 is sparse or not (all the other numbers on that slide were non-sparse). If it isn't they're exceeding GB200's sparse FP6/4 numbers with non-sparse flops (!). They both have the same memory bandwidth though. AMD is doing just fine.
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/amd-radeon-instinct-mi100-32gb-...
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-instinct-mi25.c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_FireStream
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_FirePro
Quick thing to show the sheer scale of these figures. This is 10^15 operations per second, and if you sit a foot from your screen that takes light about a nanosecond to reach you. That means that from the light leaving your screen to it hitting your eyeballs these things can have done another million calculations.
I know this isn't particularly constructive, but I'm hit with waves of nostalgia and older performance figures seeing this.
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