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Based on the release of Intel's new line of processors "Coffee Lake", analysts see new Intel line extending its performance advantage over AMD. Analysts say AMD's Ryzen underperformed Intel's new chips by 20% and believes the performance gap will only widen in the future as AMD's next process won't be able to close the performance gap enough, allowing Intel to further expand its lead with its next release.
In its recent quarter, AMD returned to profitability with the strength of Ryzen and Epyc series processors. The semiconductor giant posted earnings of $71MM, or $0.07 per share, on revenue of $1.64Bil. The company, however, sees its 4Q17 revenue drop approx. 15% sequentially. But that would still result in a revenue growth of 26% YoY.
Coffee lake was a paper launch. It was originally planned for 1Q 2018, but pushed forward because of Ryzen. Because of this there were very little availability of CPUs and no mainstream motherboards. Once availability goes up I think AMD will make a price cut to make Ryzen more competitive. Also, you got Raven Ridge coming up and Pinnacle (Ryzen on 12nm). Ryzen doesn't need to perform better than Coffee Lake, it just has to be close. The yields are quite high and die size small, so they can sell at a lower price, and still make good profits.
AMD has proven they can compete with Intel in a narrow market (desktop PCs) that Intel has neglected for the past decade. I think AMD still has a lot of catching up to do before they can beat Intel more broadly, especially since Intel has finally woken up to AMD as a competitive threat. It remains to be seen how AMD parts will stack up in the mobile PC market, I expect a decisive Intel victory there. That said, in 2019 when AMD is ramping up on foundry 7nm and Intel is still on 10nm, they will be on a much more even playing field.
AMD always played smart and positioned itself as the underdog with cheaper prices taking on the behemoth Intel. I hope AMD has an advantage over Intel on that front.
AMD has proven they can compete with Intel in a narrow market (desktop PCs) that Intel has neglected for the past decade. I think AMD still has a lot of catching up to do before they can beat Intel more broadly, especially since Intel has finally woken up to AMD as a competitive threat. It remains to be seen how AMD parts will stack up in the mobile PC market, I expect a decisive Intel victory there. That said, in 2019 when AMD is ramping up on foundry 7nm and Intel is still on 10nm, they will be on a much more even playing field.
AMD's Raven Ridge is launching for notebooks this quarter with a wide range of OEM notebooks ramping up in Q1 2018. RR should be competitive in CPU performance with vastly superior graphics and gaming performance both as a result of hardware and software (drivers). I think you will see AMD causing Intel significant share loss in 2018 across desktops (Pinnacle Ridge / Raven Ridge), notebooks (Raven Ridge) and servers (EPYC). Intel's 2017 financials might be its best ever for a long time to come. I think from here on AMD has very competitive products across all segments and a very strong roadmap with Zen 2 in 2019 and Zen 3 in 2020 and will continue to gain market share and grow revenues.
Coffee lake was a paper launch. It was originally planned for 1Q 2018, but pushed forward because of Ryzen. Because of this there were very little availability of CPUs and no mainstream motherboards. Once availability goes up I think AMD will make a price cut to make Ryzen more competitive. Also, you got Raven Ridge coming up and Pinnacle (Ryzen on 12nm). Ryzen doesn't need to perform better than Coffee Lake, it just has to be close. The yields are quite high and die size small, so they can sell at a lower price, and still make good profits.
This was not my understanding. Coffee Lake (14nm), from what I was told, 50,000 chips were shipped to customers before the official announcement so I would not call that a paper launch. I also believe Coffee Lake was pulled in because Cannon Lake (10nm) was delayed so they swapped release dates basically. I have seen no deviation from Intel thus far in response to Ryzen, which, by the way, I feel is a mistake. AMD is doing much better than I imagined. I also think AMD will do quite well with their 7nm product assuming it comes out as planned.
Bottom line: I expect AMD will get double digit market share by 2020.
I need a new light weight note book so I have been looking at cheaper alternatives with the new AMD Raven Ridge APUs. Most have only 8GB maximum memory that is small for fast modern processors. I think because memory is now expensive (result of popularity of big data?). I read Intel's earnings report as losing market share to AMD (Intel says PC market flat to down - AMD says growing slowly). I think Intel's good results was growth in the memory segment.
