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AMD is not as bad as Morgan Stanley thinks

by on02 November 2017


Let’s downgrade them when making money

AMD took a bit hit after Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore thought he'd figured out AMD, and he doesn’t see rosy things for the company.

Analyst at the same time thinks that Nvidia stock over $200 and market capitalization of 123.642B dollars as Nvidia's move to AI is a good bet. It is for the most part still a big bet as, make no mistake, ML and AI as well as self-driving have many more players than you would think, and they will go hard after Nvidia.

Joseph Moore thinks that AMD was slow to build its microprocessor momentum. AMD, the player which has been absent from the performance and super high-end market in both PC and servers for almost a decade, has come back and the Morgan Stanley guys wanted it to grow faster. Fair enough, Fudzilla wanted IoT to grow faster but even after years of talking about wearable T shirts, there is barely anything news worthy, god forbid money spending worthy.

So our take on this analysis is, chap, it takes time. The fact that Intel launched 6-core desktop processors, Core i9 and made many other rushed decisions, means that AMD got Intel where it hurts. AMD recovered quite a large number of its enthusiasts and it will capture attention in the other parts of market too. It just takes time to win the trust of consumers again.

Another argument is that the only good thing that AMD did with graphics was the surge in cryptocurrency. It is not hard to tell that this guy doesn’t follow the gaming market and that AMD made quite an impact in this market too. It didn’t win against Nvidia, but it got quite close, especially when weighing the price/performance levels.

Crypto market is here to stay

With Bitcoin going over $7,000, it looks like mining of the cryptocurrency is here to stay. The fact that Morgan Stanley thinks it will decelerate next year doesn’t mean it will. It doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

Analysts are fast forgetting that AMD was trading for $2.14 on 1 February 2016 and things looked really bad. In a rather short time, AMD came back with a surprisingly good CPU, one that beats or comes very close to Intel in every single way.

Ryzen, Epyc gaining momentum

It came so strongly back that it returned to the super high end market with its Threadripper, with Ryzen 7 and 5 series and it was good enough to relaunch the server business. After Opteron comes EPYC, the new chip that all the server community was waiting for.

Server cloud manufacturers now have an alternative to the over expensive Intel. This will, of course, generate some sales that have literally risen from the silicon dust made by AMD engineering wizards. The Zen 2 in 7nm is in the works and so is the follow up chip codenamed Zen 3 with 7nm+. 

GPU and semi custom roadmap is 7nm solid

The graphics team has a sturdy roadmap with the next generation 7nm Navi I launching in the next few quarters. Vega is selling well, especially to miners, but gamers like it too. AMD has a huge fanbase that won’t buy Nvidia and again AMD usually has price-performance ratio on its side.

The console/semi custom business is bringing good revenue and AMD always fails to mention that casinos and even military planes are using its custom solutions. This is never a bad source as they have the money to invest.

AMD is definitely making an entry with its AMD instinct AI platform and will capture some portion of that market too. It won’t win against Nvidia, but it will get a part of it, which is again a gain, since it didn’t have any of this market.

Navi

Notebooks are coming 

Notebooks will be tough, Intel is doing rather well there but AMD will challenge it with better graphics. It remains to be seen how good AMD battery life will be.

Qualcomm is the one to fear in thin and light as apparently, Snapdragon on Windows 10 claims the best battery life on a Windows notebook device we’ve ever heard. Of course, AMD will be fighting for the higher end market of the spectrum, probably targeting gamers too.

Overall, with a huge emphasis that to Wall Street makes little or no sense, we are not sure that AMD deserves to have its stocks dropped especially now when they are doing better than in more than a decade.

 

Last modified on 02 November 2017
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