Analysts Claim AMD Will Be Bankrupt by 2020

Dear AMD, why dont I have a HUMA motherboard that i can buy at retail and put an OS on it?
 
Not to crash the party, but I'd like to point out those so called "analysts" are three undergrads from Warwick Business School. And that "report" was intended for The Economist's Investment Case Study competition.

A team of three undergraduate students at Warwick Business School are now seeking votes as part of their participation in The Economist’s first ever undergraduate Investment Case Study competition.

Alessandro Presa Perez, a BSc Accounting & Finance student alongside Ivan Pedretti and Toby Bardavid, both BSc Management students, are competing for the prestigious award, with $26,000 in prizes up for grabs.

The trio had two weeks to prepare a draft proposal on an intriguing business problem entitled Find a Zero: Which Billion Dollar Company Will be Bankrupt by 2020.

They forecast Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) will be the company to fail and file for bankruptcy by 2020 in their 15-minute webinar, now available on The Economist’s education website for viewing and submitting votes.
 
Nobody is pulling numbers out of there butt. It's all in the SEC Filings. They are bleeding money as a Corporation. The contracts you speak of are not near enough to stop the bleeding out of money AMD seems to do so well at.
No.

No you don't get to move the goal post, and yes people were demonstratively pulling bullshit out of their ass with long needle nose pliers.

Multiple people pulled out of their ass that margins are so slim on the consoles, that they are in fact LOSING money, at least initially and that the only reason they won the bid in the first place is not because they had a superior solution but that it was just sold so close to cost, which is made up fantasy with nothing to support it other than they like the sound of it. I have shown that is complete and utter nonsense, with the console sales not only stopping the large losses from the last quarter and the quarter before, but creating a positive profit the quarter immediately after.

There's nothing wrong with debate, but I wish people would stop inventing facts. In fact, 78% of all so called "facts" on the internet are made up with no source provided or available, but only 42% of people are aware of it. ;)

If I knew the future, I'd be rich from wise stock investments, but AMD is now aiming at high end CPU market along with a promising watercooled 300 series with HBM and with DX12 (something IMO made possible thanks to their Mantle development) I think we should see some killer performance out of these setups.
 
If I knew the future, I'd be rich from wise stock investments, but AMD is now aiming at high end CPU market along with a promising watercooled 300 series with HBM and with DX12 (something IMO made possible thanks to their Mantle development) I think we should see some killer performance out of these setups.

Even if all this pans out it's not nearly enough to pull AMD out of it's current situation. High-end CPUs and watercooled GPUs aren't going to turn things around unless there a tremendous market share uptick from these things which I would think is unlikely.
 
Even if all this pans out it's not nearly enough to pull AMD out of it's current situation. High-end CPUs and watercooled GPUs aren't going to turn things around unless there a tremendous market share uptick from these things which I would think is unlikely.
And I'm sure if you could go back in time and tell a virtually bankrupt Apple that a successful MP3 player wasn't going to turn the company around, with 100% confidence, you'd do that too right? People bought Apple products because they liked their iPods, and the iPod transitioned into the iPhone successfully (which I believe the iPhone alone accounts for over half of the company's revenue).

No reason that halo things like good press around high-end processors and GPUs can't change the narrative where the AMD brand has a lot of value in and of itself. Because there's people like my coworker who just buy NVidia because "they make good cards", and then was looking at a 750Ti when I showed him a 280x at the time that offered SOOO much more performance on sale for $5 less than the 750Ti he was looking at.

Branding matters, which is why Apple again paid so much for Beats. And all it takes is a couple really successful product launches combined with the right marketing to turn things around.
 
ammm no, they decided to use what was cheapest, this turn out to be the AMD Soc. both MS and Sony decided they would not lose money on hardware this generation, this is what happened, only AMD didnt have an option that was more valuable than this deal. it's been noted that combined the deals might be worth a total of 60 million, with is a pittiance amount in the overall scheme of things.

Nope, ARM was nowhere near powerful enough when the choice was been made. The only architecture which would work was a custom x86 SOC. That left one choice only, AMD.

It was nothing to do with the cheapest.
 
Nope, ARM was nowhere near powerful enough when the choice was been made. The only architecture which would work was a custom x86 SOC. That left one choice only, AMD.
The Alienware Alpha is considerably smaller and more powerful than any current console, and is running an Intel processor and dedicated NVidia GPU. I have one and its great... something like that was certainly also pitched as a competitor.

Granted, the Alpha is using tech that wasn't available during the development of the XBone/PS4 way back in 2013, but I'm sure that they put a generation older stuff up against the APU and simply lost. Fast forward two years of technological development though ,and things change.
 
And I'm sure if you could go back in time and tell a virtually bankrupt Apple that a successful MP3 player wasn't going to turn the company around, with 100% confidence, you'd do that too right?
This is an apples to oranges comparison. There are far, far more consumers who demand a portable MP3 player than consumers who demand a $900 piece of PC gaming hardware.

390X isn't going to be AMD's savior. And I suspect their upcoming CPUs will follow the same path that the rest of AMD's CPU have, over promising and under delivering.
 
Reputation people! When AMD blew intel out of water back in the days it was the name that sold all their products. They weren't hurt bad by buying out ATI, they were burned by Bulldozer, it ruined their name and reputation. And they kept on dragging it along and all along they have been more focused on apu's, but they I guess they finally realized that if they don't have high end cpu to compete with Intel no one is going to pay attention to the benefits of APU.

I think they will finally catch up with Zen next year and that might finally be something that they have needed all along. If the market doesn't believe in your product that competes at the top they usually look away from the mid and bottom end. I highly doubt they go bankrupt but if Zen fails like bulldozer I see some serious loss of competition and I would hate to see intel as the only player. But I also believe AMD will get bought out by someone else and they will probably try to become second major player in pc market.
 
so 5 more years of failed expectations, inferior drivers and poor performance in games :D

Horseshit.

I guess I just must be pretty lucky that on my four PCs, (2 AMD, 2 Intel), all four of the Radeons have had zero driver issues and zero difficulty in game performance. In one case, for nearly six years. I purchased an MSI R9 290 about 2 months back. Trust me, if I had a history of suffering with bad AMD drivers over the years, I wouldn't have spent the best part of $300 for it.

Can't prove it, but I'd bet a dollar that half the loons that whine about bad AMD video drivers haven't owned an ATI or AMD card since the Rage Fury Pro, or whatever the hell it was called back in 1939. Some haven't ever owned one.
 
Apple had little to no real competition with its revolutionary products. AMD has some of the fiercest competition against anything it could try to do. Not a valid comparison.
 
Reputation people! When AMD blew intel out of water back in the days it was the name that sold all their products. They weren't hurt bad by buying out ATI, they were burned by Bulldozer, it ruined their name and reputation.

I read that when red and green came together it very much resembled... well, let's just say brown water.

I suspect ATI was the albatross. AMD should have bought nvidia instead and put Jen-Hsun in charge. They'd probably be going head-to-head with Intel right now and consumers would be rolling in it.
 
Apple had little to no real competition with its revolutionary products. AMD has some of the fiercest competition against anything it could try to do. Not a valid comparison.

Exactly. It's not like high CPUs or discrete GPUs are revolutionary products that don't already have two industry leading companies working on them and winning consistently for many years now.
 
And I'm sure if you could go back in time and tell a virtually bankrupt Apple that a successful MP3 player wasn't going to turn the company around, with 100% confidence, you'd do that too right?

AMD would have a much success with a high end MP3 player as it will with high end CPUs and GPUs today.
 
Okay... I hope people don't attack too ferociously, but here it goes.

I completely agree with competition being a good and necessary thing. And as a consumer, naturally the more choices and options the better.

BUT...

What would happen if in a parallel universe, Nvidia bought AMD? Wouldn't we reap the benefits of having both companies R&D engineers working together? Maybe finally get a good combo of Nvidia efficiency with AMD raw power?

Just a thought

First off they can't do this now the ftc would not let them.

second Nvidia at that time was second fiddle and sucked amd bought the best at the time nvidia caught up and surpassed them. And now things have swapped places ati/amd is second fiddle and nvidia is top dog.

The point of no return has not yet been reached for amd IF zen gives a black eye to intel and they manage to keep the price of the chips equal to or lower than intel amd should bounce back. If the new 300 series gpu give nvidia a black eye good there too HBM should be a good foot hold for them. Nvidia has to buy the hbm modules from amd/hynix or they could go with micron's version which is incompatible with amds hbm...

Also i just read an interesting article about hbm is planned for apu and gpu use...

I would also bet money that the ps5, xbones, and wiiU2 will be running a shiny new amd apu likely with hbm...
 
i'm a couchpotato and i claim that AMD will be the largest arm manufacturer and VR chip manufacturer in the world
 
Please post what NVidia's and AMD's bids were, and how much net profit they are making per thousand units.

Oh, what, you don't have those numbers? :rolleyes:

AMD's gaming revenue went from a big loss to a huge profit leader for the company when they won all three contracts, and at no point were selling at a loss: http://arstechnica.com/business/201...utive-quarterly-profit-on-xbox-one-ps4-sales/

Prior to winning all three contracts, AMD was at a $422 million loss for the quarter. Immediately after they were at a $89 million profit. So that's over a $500 million positive revenue change right away.

They are expected to move 22 million more units this year, so I don't understand where people are pulling these numbers out of their butts.

Don't be silly. These figures are not public. You have to draw some conclusions from incomplete information sometimes. That's just the way it is.

Large volume contracts for consumer electronics (like consoles) are always very low margin. That's just the nature of the business. Comparable - in a way - to being an auto parts supplier.

Note, I never said they were LOSING money on them, but I did say they were a very low margin business. I doubt - when all is said and done - AMD profits much more than a couple of bucks per chip when all is said and done. It's a volume business though, so they will partially make up for it in volume, but it's not like winning the console contracts is going to turn around the company.

Every little bit of business they can get helps though.
 
No.

No you don't get to move the goal post, and yes people were demonstratively pulling bullshit out of their ass with long needle nose pliers.

Multiple people pulled out of their ass that margins are so slim on the consoles, that they are in fact LOSING money, at least initially and that the only reason they won the bid in the first place is not because they had a superior solution but that it was just sold so close to cost, which is made up fantasy with nothing to support it other than they like the sound of it. I have shown that is complete and utter nonsense, with the console sales not only stopping the large losses from the last quarter and the quarter before, but creating a positive profit the quarter immediately after.

There's nothing wrong with debate, but I wish people would stop inventing facts. In fact, 78% of all so called "facts" on the internet are made up with no source provided or available, but only 42% of people are aware of it. ;)

If I knew the future, I'd be rich from wise stock investments, but AMD is now aiming at high end CPU market along with a promising watercooled 300 series with HBM and with DX12 (something IMO made possible thanks to their Mantle development) I think we should see some killer performance out of these setups.

Nobody's moved the goal post. There just trying to shade there eyes from seeing your AMD fanboy panties. Here is the truth >>>> http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amd/sec-filings. Read the info! AMD is in trouble. And has been for years! The info and history is very easy to find. Don't stroke out reading the info.

AMD needs to get it together. And do it in a hella hurry. The new gpu and cpu needs to be in the market right now! And they need to be making buckets of money on these products. They need to get there other tech to market,,, NOW!!! There design cycle, production and to market efforts are horrible. And if they don't start making margins. I doubt they will be in the game past 2018.
 
^ rabble rabble rabbbbleeee

rabblle!!! the world is ending! rabble!

AMD is going to be just fine. nvidian
 
Nobody's moved the goal post.
They haven't?

That's great! So please show us what NVidia and AMD's bids were, and how much profit margin AMD is making per X-units sold to each contract, and how AMD was doing so at a loss, and yet somehow managed to get the division in one quarter out of the red into the black with over a 500 million increase in revenue.

What's that? You can't, and you're talking about something different?

That's the definition of moving the goal post. You can't backup the previous statement, so you move on to something else.
 
The worst that could happen is that Nvidia lost the last bit of competition and they could rip us off freely.
nVidia is still answerable to market realities and shareholders. They have to grow their market and ripping off their customers isn't going to achieve any of that regardless of the competition that may or may not exist. It's not like AMD has exactly been competition to them anyway and it's not like having two major vendors presents competition in the market space.

Companies like AMD don't go bankrupt. They get sold.
They go bankrupt first, shed all financial liability, shutter pension plans, then sell off their brand and patents to the highest bidder.
 
I would hate to see AMD go bankrupt or be sold. Lack of competition is a bad thing.

In general though I think the tech industry is having trouble, because we're at a point now where there is not much of a need to upgrade anything. Everything is fast and good enough for most people. Even as an enthusiast I don't really have anything I want to upgrade to, I'm happy with what I have. These companies expect people to upgrade on a yearly basis to stay alive.
 
tldr

If it gets really bad I could imagine AMD "unspinning" ATI back out, or someone just buying the GPU side of the house.... but I guess that would kill of their APU line too? It's all confusing.

I like AMD CPUs (in theory and in price value) and their GPUs (in terms of competition value and technical merits) but how many times have we seen companies with tons of potential get mis-managed down the shitter? Tons. Google "Commodore" for one.

They're not at death's door yet... but if "Zen" doesn't at least get close to competing (forget surpassing) Intel's current stuff, the future doesn't look good.

You could also google "Cyrix" for another example of horrible management decisions killing a company with potential.
 
They haven't?

That's great! So please show us what NVidia and AMD's bids were, and how much profit margin AMD is making per X-units sold to each contract, and how AMD was doing so at a loss, and yet somehow managed to get the division in one quarter out of the red into the black with over a 500 million increase in revenue.

What's that? You can't, and you're talking about something different?

That's the definition of moving the goal post. You can't backup the previous statement, so you move on to something else.
If you actually saw a financial report from AMD that used the term "revenue" and you aren't just using that term yourself, that doesn't actually tell you much about the profit or health of the company.

In a financial report, revenue is an increase of sales but it doesn't take into account overhead. A company landing a huge contract would, by definition, move from the red to black in terms of revenue but still be losing money on that endeavor and still be bleeding money overall.

If it costs AMD to make 1 chip at $4 dollars, but they sell them at $3 dollars, even if they double their output, and reported their revenue at a 100% gain, they'd still be operating at a $2 dollar loss for every unit sale they double.
 
I read the ars report you linked. It shows revenue as well as operating profit/loss

your points would be strengthened if you used those numbers rather than revenue for the reasons I explained above.
 
2020 is a LONG way away. I figure at this rate they're much closer than that. Xen is forced to be a highly successful product. If the Radeon Rx-300 Series isn't massively successful as well the GPU division can completely tank with the Rx-400 Series being their last.

They're going to need a merger or a miracle. I'm going with the former rather than the latter.
 
I hope the new 370x will have hbm ram (not sure if I got the acronym right) might be first upgrade in a while. What I always loved about AMD was budget systems. I think the industry has changed from what I read on hardocp everyone wants bitcoin machines or 2000$+ pcs I can't afford. Are there still budget system builders like me that make good systems under 600 or 700$? thats why I always loved amd. great for teaching teens how to build.
 
I kind of feel like a hypocrite because I truly want AMD to survive but I wouldn't touch their CPU's unless it was given to me. I really hope their new CPU is competitive. Make something people want AMD!
 
I would if it was 12 or 16 core and under 150$ for fun. I'd like them to innovate with cpu as they appear to be doing with gpu.
 
2020 is a LONG way away. I figure at this rate they're much closer than that. Xen is forced to be a highly successful product. If the Radeon Rx-300 Series isn't massively successful as well the GPU division can completely tank with the Rx-400 Series being their last.

They're going to need a merger or a miracle. I'm going with the former rather than the latter.

4.5 years will FLY by. The older you get, the quicker it goes.
 
I don't think they will ever go under, primarily because of their x86 license from Intel. I don't think anyone can put a financial value on that license, other than intel. It's like putting a fixed value on a human life. impossible. That license is 100% non-transferable, born in the days from the primary / secondary sourcing to IBM. Companies will simply invest in AMD and buy portions of the company. I would not be surprised if Samsung buys ~<50% of the company.

Unless x86 fails as a whole to ARM / MIPS / openPower (LOL)
or
VIA somehow gains billions$ and competes with intel
or
intel revamps their licensing policies
or
Intel was forced to offer up x86 licenses for sale by means of a court decision over monopolistic practices

AMD will never die.
 
saying something like this is totally unfair, now I don't want my next card to be an amd card...
 
Zen is the big play. If they get back to the fx-51 days with price and performance going up against Intel things could seriously better for AMD. This is of course is a big IF. I am a fan, I loved my 486-50' not a dx2 but AMDs straight 50 as well as my fx51. Got seriously disappointed when they started chasing down Intels rabbit whole than their own after the fx51. Pretty much everything after that was downhill. Hell a 5ghz cpu that can't run stock speed with provided cooling solution because you live in a warmer than their test environment is pretty bad
 
4.5 years will FLY by. The older you get, the quicker it goes.

That is the entire life span of zen.

Zens top end chip is going to need to step up and hit intel with 10-15% performance over intel's top end chip at a slightly cheaper or equal price. To even get back in the game the other way they can buy back in will be to price to match what chips they beat so if the top amd beats the top intel price for that if it can't be an i5 talk to samsung about buying you out cause your done.
 
Yes, but look at their financials, hardly an encouraging sign. Though I hope the analysts are wrong. Another rumour was Samsung going to buy them

It would be a sad end. Nvidia owns the dedicated GPU market. Unless AMD can pull out a real hat trick they are doomed. They should have matched up to Intel designs instead of just being the "cheap" option.

In the end it hurts us consumers more than anything. With less choice Intel will just pump up their prices and we'll have no other choice.
 
If it costs AMD to make 1 chip at $4 dollars, but they sell them at $3 dollars, even if they double their output, and reported their revenue at a 100% gain, they'd still be operating at a $2 dollar loss for every unit sale they double.
Mope, darling, the point was obvious.

Some individuals were making bullshit statements with "facts" pulled out of their asses about AMD based on information they couldn't possibly have because it was never public.

They don't know what AMD's bid was.
They don't know what NVIDIA's bid was.
They don't know if the AMD bid outperformed the NVIDIA offering or was just cheaper.
They don't know what AMD's profit margin per chip was.
They don't know that AMD sold them at a loss (with evidence I showed demonstrating quite the opposite)

So don't pretend to know, its not a difficult concept. The evidence we do have, is that winning all three console bids was a huge help to AMD, and that AMD has big plays in the form of Zen and the new 300 series which looks promising, and while the low/midrange are quite a few recycles, they are still beating NVidia on the performance front in DX11, and should see greater gains in DX12 since they are from a raw performance standpoint clearly superior hardware, and NVIDIA has a lot of catchup to do on that front and can't always count on Sabotageworks adoption to gain an edge.

And before anyone declares "fanboidom", that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

I own four computers at my home, and they are all Intel powered, as are the builds for my family. I haven't used an AMD processor in ages. Now, I do believe that AMD GPUs are typically superior on desktops at present if you don't care about power efficiency, but on this forum and in my personal gear where power efficiency matters in ultra-small form factor I go NVIDIA. The Alienware Alpha I pimp hard on this forum as the GPU was an excellent choice because its so very power efficient, same with the one on my Asus gaming laptop.

Remember that back in 1997, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy, and according to Steve Jobs was only around after thanks to a $150M investment by Microsoft to bail them out. Three years later we saw the release of the first hugely successful iPod, and the halo effect that created, and the company transformed. In the tech industry, that's sometimes all it takes to get the momentum going, and so not only don't I understand the fanboism, I don't understand how they think a couple of kids claims that AMD would be bankrupt in five years would be a good thing. *scratching head*
 
I really doubt that'll happen. AMD looks bad now, but they have a number of cool tech coming out soon. Firstly they have the Zen architecture coming out in 2016 which looks really good. It will catch AMD up with Intel in terms of performance. AMD has also partnered up with Samsung to make 14nm chips, which puts them against Intel is power. If AMD's new HBM technology works out, we might even see this tech in their APU's. Finally, AMD does plan to make their FM3+ motherboards work with both x86 and ARM cpus. Something you won't see Intel do.

Doesn't matter how much great stuff they have 'coming out', the issue is no one is buying.

I've said before you can have all the great chips in the world but if the OEMs are not putting them in anything the masses want then its useless.

The OEMs no longer want or need AMD. Why bother switching to AMD if it's chips catch up to Intel when you can just carry on offering Intel. After all the buying public have gotten use to just buying Intel over the past 10 years.

The public know Intel too. Why would they change unless AMD offer their top ZEN chips for less than $100. That ain't going to help.

It's too late. Once the consoles come to an end that's it.

Plus Zen will still come up 20% short of the current mid range i5 next year.
 
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