The tension is mounting. AMD will report Q2 2019 on July 30. This disappointed quite a few people as some had predicted ER to be one week earlier. Some people suggested that perhaps since the new 7 nm Ryzen and RX5700 have been selling so well that AMD will need more time to project a more robust guidance.
The Q2 earnings should be at $1.52 B as previously guided, or perhaps even at $1.57 B, the upper range. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the guidance, both for Q3 and the whole year.
Given that Lisa Su had guided for high single digit revenue growth for 2019, we are looking for $7.0-7.1 B in total revenue for 2019. Q3 should be $2.0-2.2 B and the whole year guidance needs to be reaffirmed. Given how confident and upbeat Lisa Su and AMD have been since Computex and E3, I think that scenario is highly likely.
I believe that the market is hoping to see that, but I don’t think the market is fully expecting that yet. I don’t think this has been fully priced in, given how the analysts are writing. I feel that once the actual Q3 guidance comes in above $2.0 B, there will be a big reaction, and the share price will take off from there. Of course it is also predictable that analysts will then say that such great revenue may not really happen, and they will have three months to bash AMD. Then in late October the real Q3 numbers will come out, along with the Q4 guidance. At that point it will be increasingly hard to present a bear case for AMD.
Here are some evidences to show how AMD will do well in Q3.
At gpu.userbenchmark.com, RX 5700XT ($400) is beating RTX 2070 Super ($500), here.
Geizhals, a large German online retailer, shows Ryzen to occupy eight of their top ten CPUs, here.
At cpubenchmark.net, AMD’s market share had jumped up in July, from 23.1 % to 30.6 %, over a few weeks, here.
Amazon is expanding the EC2 AMD instances to other regions, like Europe, Canada, Asia and GovCloud, etc, here. This is Naples Epyc. With Rome, watch out!
In this TheStreet article, Eric Jhonsa spoke favorably of AMD’s new offering.
This PCGamesN article compares the Ryzen R9 3900X (12 cores, $499) very favorably to Intel’s i9 9920X (12 cores, $1189).
Jacob Ridley wrote:
“AMD is continuing to ramp up the pace of change with Zen 2. It wasn’t all that long ago that the CPU market was stale, stagnant, and resolutely four-core. Yet the company has been catching up with Intel across the past two years at remarkable speed and changing the face of the market.
The Ryzen 9 3900X acts as fantastic proof of that transition: an uncompromising high-end processor dragging the market kicking and screaming into the affordable, and placing enormous pricing pressure on its opponent’s lineup beyond even the mainstream desktop segment.”
Intel will have no answer to the Ryzen R9 3950X, which is 16 cores, coming in September.
Intel is reporting on July 25, 2019. The next ten days will be exciting indeed.
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