[dave_sullivan]

As nothing material about their business has changed in 3 years, I think it's safer to say Nvidia has raised AMD's stock price 400%.

See http://imgur.com/a/ul9LE (nvidia green, amd red)

Nvidia clearly started ramping first, after which investors looked at AMD as a "cheaper alternative". Apparently a bunch of people think they're the same company, but Nvidia's recent rise is a result of their work in AI while AMD has totally missed that boat with both developers and industry.

[darksaints]

Surely none of that rise has come from their best in class APUs, open source support, or a headline stealing new architecture that is stomping on Intel benchmarks. Surely their rise is because investors in huge masses are buying them up mistakenly thinking they're nvidia.

[dave_sullivan]

I did chuckle reading that, because yes it sounds ridiculous at first. Buuuut...

> best in class APUs

Best in class because no one else wants the market, there's no profit margin there (as AMD has proven).

> open source support

Just because you support it don't make it good. While I think it's lame Nvidia's stuff is closed source, they have such a superior eco-system that I'm willing to overlook it (along with most of industry). If AMD could somehow get around this, by having an open source ecosystem at parity or better than nvidia, they'd be golden. But as its stands, it's not enough to make a dent.

> huge masses are buying them up mistakenly thinking they're nvidia

Walk that back to "investors think the semiconductor industry is slightly more commoditized than it is and they're misjudging the current landscape" and yes.

> a headline stealing new architecture that is stomping on Intel benchmarks

Stealing headlines and stomping on single benchmarks does not a good product make. Jury's out on if they can come up with a winning flagship product, but I'm not holding my breath.

Also, they need to focus on stomping Nvidia benchmarks; Intel is not their competitor. By relative market cap, it's like saying "yahoo is google's competitor". Nvidia is AMD's "big" competitor.

Current CEO is an engineer (great!) but lacks the ability to see where things are heading; Nvidia's CEO founded the company. They need Jerry Sanders' younger clone back in there or something.

[saosebastiao]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

Just because you care about AI doesn't mean anything about market size or even potential market size. GPUs are still niche compared to CPUs, GPGPUs even more so, and AI specialization is a fraction of that. I mean you're talking about a market measured in hundreds of millions today, a pittance compared to x86...and even assuming massive growth for a decade or more still couldn't catch up to the current market size for x86.

And as the only company in the world that is even legally allowed to compete with Intel on x86, they would be stupid to not try. The fact that they're catching headlines suggests that they actually have a chance of recapturing a portion of that $60B market...something unthinkable 3 years ago, especially for a company with yearly revenues lower than the monthly R&D spend of its competitor. To think that AMDs growth is entirely due to the market misjudging the level of commoditization of GPUs is absurd. If you're that confident of the market being so absurdly off base, some simple bets should put you in the Forbes 400 within a year or two. Get on it.

[dave_sullivan]

> GPUs are still niche compared to CPUs, GPGPUs even more so, and AI specialization is a fraction of that.

Yes, that's definitely AMD's thought process. The apocryphal IBM quote "There's a world market for perhaps only five computers" is why they're wrong.

My main point is this: AMD needs a new CEO; they had an opportunity that they've completely fumbled so far; this piece is so much fluff. You're free to disagree of course, but I don't think my opinion on this is going to change based on your arguments.

> If you're that confident of the market being so absurdly off base, some simple bets should put you in the Forbes 400 within a year or two. Get on it.

I'd be buying put options if the market couldn't stay irrational longer than I could stay solvent. Unfortunately the quality of their decisions as a company has nothing to do with their stock price right now. They were priced right a year and a half ago.