9/10/19 Clickbait Articles, RDNA and Milan

Investopedia is known for useless clickbait articles. Here is a great example. It claimed that AMD had met resistance at 34, mentioned trade war, tariffs, and the old news of cryptobust of 2017-2018, and magically reached a conclusion that a sell off is coming to push AMD down to the 20’s. It never even bothered to talk about the launching of Ryzen 3^rd gen, Epyc Rome and the 7 nm consumer GPUs. Of course it completely ignored the fact that AMD had guided for $4.0B total revenue in H2 2019.

While sometimes SeekingAlpha does post great articles, but a lot of times they are click baits. I find the comments section much useful, once one figures out who are the trolls and who actually have something meaningful to share. Here is a great example. It talks about how the market keeps ignoring how terrible AMD is. I suppose the market is therefore terribly inefficient and stupid, per this very wise author. Once again, it cites old history, past problems etc. None of which is remotely relevant to the present situation.

As I had written right after AMD’s Q2 EC, even though AMD had guided for a terrific H2; but until Q3 ER when real numbers are reported, people will be free to knock down AMD based on nothing but conjectures. Therefore, AMD will trade sideways until end of October, barring any significant news. What could they be?

Microsoft may announce Surface laptop to use Ryzen on October 2. Ryzen 3950X should be available by end of September. Ryzen 3900X remains amazingly out of stock. Any available stock is immediately snatched up. Threadripper 3 should be launching around November. TR 3 motherboards are already leaking out.

This article talks about how AMD will scale RDNA down to beat Qualcomm’s Adreno. This Samsung deal will be a big deal, I predict. Samsung specifically talked about not just handsets but other devices. They could be smart TVs or tablets, both Samsung makes in huge quantities.

This article talks about Milan having 15 chiplets (or tiles). Besides I/O die and CPUs, perhaps AMD will add HBM and/or GPUs. The 15 chiplets variant of Milan will be used in DOE’s exascale Frontier, however, Lisa Su specifically stated at Hot Chips that this design will trickle down into commercial space as well. This is great for Genoa. The DOE contract gives out $500 M for R&D, to be shared by Cray (now HPE) and AMD. It would be even nicer if the fruit of that R&D can be used for Epyc 4 (Genoa)!