AMD Earnings Soar on Exploding Ryzen Growth, Crypto Mining Craze

[PaulAlcorn]

AMD's Q1 2018 financial report is impressive in almost every facet as it continues to chip away at Intel's market share.

AMD Earnings Soar on Exploding Ryzen Growth, Crypto Mining Craze : Read more

 

[bit_user]

On Newegg, 8 GB RX 580's are going for as little as $350. 4 GB RX 560's for $150 ($135 after rebate).

The Vega's still command a bigger premium, but you can get a GTX 1080 for about $600. We're getting there (and this pricing has held for at least a couple weeks).

Now, if the RAM prices would do the same...

 

[mihen]

In a period when AMD literally cannot produce enough chips, they are still not able to eclipse nVidia's revenue including CPU sales.

 

[bit_user]

In a period when AMD literally cannot produce enough chips, they are still not able to eclipse nVidia's revenue including CPU sales.

Look at the margins, though. Nvidia is selling V100's for nearly $10k each! It's all because Volta sits unopposed.

 

[InvalidError]

7nm EPYC sampling to customers by the end of the year, shipping early next... sounds like everything is still on track for significant 7nm launches in 2019. Intel might fall behind.

 

[ml.imaging]

This is wonderful news for everyone interested in PC building. Now if AMD could offer AMD compatible RAM bundles with their CPUs this would make for additional profits for AMD and savings for us also. >)
Rehards.
Mike

 

[Kahless01]

id like to add buy a new ryzen from them soon. but them being viable again can only help all of us. hopefully they get big enough that they can grow again in austin and a bunch of good paying jobs open up. they all but closed down here.

 

[JamesSneed]

7nm EPYC sampling to customers by the end of the year, shipping early next... sounds like everything is still on track for significant 7nm launches in 2019. Intel might fall behind.

Yeah that is very exciting news. This is the end game for Zen's design as it is supposed to resolve the lower obtainable frequencies vs Intel chips on top of its 7nm so better densities etc. This is going to be huge deal if they can stay on target as they will be ramping up 7nm right around the time Intel's 10nm ramps up.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Woohoo, their stock actually went up (presumably in response to this news?) too!

 

[cryoburner]

On Newegg, 8 GB RX 580's are going for as little as $350...

Graphics card prices have certainly been improving, but I'm not sure I would consider $350 for an RX 580 as being particularly good. The 8GB version launched for $229, and the 4GB version for $199, so we're still looking at prices more than $100 over MSRP for those cards. The prices are thankfully trending downward at least, and they will hopefully come close to where they were a year ago in the coming months.

And while RAM prices are high, it's still possible for someone to make do with 8GB and get good performance in the vast majority of existing games and applications. If anything, RAM prices back in 2016 were abnormally low. Sure, you could get 16GB of relatively fast DDR4 for around $70, but most people didn't actually need that much. I'm sure there are lots of people who put more RAM than necessary in their system at that time, and still haven't even touched more than half of it. I can't help but think that if pricing hadn't been lowered so much at that time, supplies might have been better now.

 

[InvalidError]

I'm sure there are lots of people who put more RAM than necessary in their system at that time, and still haven't even touched more than half of it.

I have 32GB of RAM and most of it is always in use, ~15GB specifically allocated to the boatload of software I have open most of the time and the rest to the file system cache so software rarely needs to reload stuff from HDD after the first time. If you count file system cache as use of RAM, 16GB is a very reasonable amount to have for comfort and most people with 16GB are likely using most of it. I know playing WoW and most other games without enough RAM to keep all of the frequently used world data cached is a patience-sapping exercise when running from HDD. Non-issue with enough RAM to cache the thing.

 

[bit_user]

On Newegg, 8 GB RX 580's are going for as little as $350...

Graphics card prices have certainly been improving, but I'm not sure I would consider $350 for an RX 580 as being particularly good. The 8GB version launched for $229,

I didn't say it was good... just better:

We're getting there (and this pricing has held for at least a couple weeks).

You have to look at it from the perspective of where we were at 2 months ago. This is a massive improvement. Still not there, but better.

 

[bit_user]

I'm sure there are lots of people who put more RAM than necessary in their system at that time, and still haven't even touched more than half of it.

I have 32GB of RAM and most of it is always in use, ~15GB specifically allocated to the boatload of software I have open most of the time and the rest to the file system cache so software rarely needs to reload stuff from HDD after the first time. If you count file system cache as use of RAM, 16GB is a very reasonable amount to have for comfort and most people with 16GB are likely using most of it.

At home, a quad-core Win 7 64-bit PC I use mostly for web has 8 GB and it's fine. It started life @ 4 GB, but that quickly became a problem.

At work, a quad-core Win 7 64-bit PC I use does pretty well with 16 GB.

I know playing WoW and most other games without enough RAM to keep all of the frequently used world data cached is a patience-sapping exercise when running from HDD. Non-issue with enough RAM to cache the thing.

At this point, a smallish SSD is cheaper than an extra 16 GB of DDR4.

I run out of patience whenever I have to deal with a PC running its OS from HDD. That just feels increasingly wrong.

 

[kyotokid]

AMD's Q1 2018 financial report is impressive in almost every facet as it continues to chip away at Intel's market share.

AMD Earnings Soar on Exploding Ryzen Growth, Crypto Mining Craze : Read more

...no real surprise. Even if they are not making the profit margin the resellers are. When cards sell in lots of 6 - 12 or more for mining rigs, that's still good money.

 

[kyotokid]

In a period when AMD literally cannot produce enough chips, they are still not able to eclipse nVidia's revenue including CPU sales.

Look at the margins, though. Nvidia is selling V100's for nearly $10k each! It's all because Volta sits unopposed.

...yeah, but show me a game or 3D enthusiast who can afford one. 10,000$ would buy a beast of a gaming or rendering rig. Besides, Teslas are more geared towards scientific and enterprise computing (the Summit supercomputer has 4600 x 8 V100 nodes with full NVLink both between cards and with the CPUs).

One flaw in the new 9,000$ Quadro GV100 is that it still relies solely on the PCIe interface. Unlike the Tesla V100 and Quadro GP100, there is no NVLink version available. So even with two way NVLink between two cards, it still has to deal with the narrower PCIe connection to the CPU.

 

[cryoburner]

16GB is a very reasonable amount to have for comfort and most people with 16GB are likely using most of it.

I agree that 16GB is a reasonable amount, and will become more needed for gaming and other tasks as time goes on. I'm not sure most people are using most of that amount yet though, especially when talking about systems not used for gaming or other enthusiast purposes. My point was more that many people didn't have any immediate 'need' for more than 8GB two years ago, but went with 16GB even for lower-budget systems due to the extremely low cost compared to where RAM prices have typically been. And anyone wanting a higher-end system might have been tempted to go with 32GB or more, despite them not actually getting all that much benefit out of it. Sure, there's RAM caching utilities, but relatively few people are using them, and their benefits are somewhat lessened with the proliferation of SSDs. You can't blame people for getting more than they necessarily needed when the prices were low, but the manufacturers could have probably held onto stock and doled it out at a less rapid pace to keep the prices more in check, rather than having them swing from one extreme to the other.

That said, the prices aren't necessarily historically terrible though. It has been the case at times in the past where the minimum amount of RAM required for things like gaming could cost close to $100, and where the amount that would be comfortable for a few years might cost close to $200. I think it just seems worse now due to the extremely low prices that it was recently available for. We are likely nearing the point were 8GB will not be enough for some new game releases though, at which point 16GB will be what people will definitely want to have in a system intended for that purpose.

 

[bit_user]

...yeah, but show me a game or 3D enthusiast who can afford one.

That's not their market. They're made for machine learning and high-performance computing. And demand from those sectors is strong, even at that price.

Besides, Teslas are more geared towards scientific and enterprise computing

The financials don't care who's buying them. Blockchain, gamers, 3D artists, scientists, machine learning... as long as they've got money.

 

[kyotokid]

16GB is a very reasonable amount to have for comfort and most people with 16GB are likely using most of it.

I agree that 16GB is a reasonable amount, and will become more needed for gaming and other tasks as time goes on. I'm not sure most people are using most of that amount yet though, especially when talking about systems not used for gaming or other enthusiast purposes. My point was more that many people didn't have any immediate 'need' for more than 8GB two years ago, but went with 16GB even for lower-budget systems due to the extremely low cost compared to where RAM prices have typically been. And anyone wanting a higher-end system might have been tempted to go with 32GB or more, despite them not actually getting all that much benefit out of it. Sure, there's RAM caching utilities, but relatively few people are using them, and their benefits are somewhat lessened with the proliferation of SSDs. You can't blame people for getting more than they necessarily needed when the prices were low, but the manufacturers could have probably held onto stock and doled it out at a less rapid pace to keep the prices more in check, rather than having them swing from one extreme to the other.

That said, the prices aren't necessarily historically terrible though. It has been the case at times in the past where the minimum amount of RAM required for things like gaming could cost close to $100, and where the amount that would be comfortable for a few years might cost close to $200. I think it just seems worse now due to the extremely low prices that it was recently available for. We are likely nearing the point were 8GB will not be enough for some new game releases though, at which point 16GB will be what people will definitely want to have in a system intended for that purpose.

..I remember when I could get a 128 GB DDR4 kit for around 750$ - 800$. Being that I am into CG production and use CPU based render engines, that would allow for rendering some really big scenes in extreme high quality format at large resolution without worrying about the process falling to swap mode.

 

[bit_user]

Sure, there's RAM caching utilities, but relatively few people are using them, and their benefits are somewhat lessened with the proliferation of SSDs.

Your OS automatically uses free RAM as a disk cache!

You can't blame people for getting more than they necessarily needed

Well, now that it's increasingly common for low-end computers (not to mention phones, tablets) to have the RAM soldered in, you're increasingly forced to buy all that you think you'll ever need.

Otherwise, yes we can blame people for not getting just enough for today, and then upgrading tomorrow.

 

[InvalidError]

At this point, a smallish SSD is cheaper than an extra 16 GB of DDR4.

I run out of patience whenever I have to deal with a PC running its OS from HDD. That just feels increasingly wrong.

If the PC has enough RAM to cache the OS and keep it there, you can't really tell the difference between SSD or HDD beyond initial boot time and since I reboot my PC only once every couple of months, boot-time/first-time-doing-stuff is a non-concern to me. At the time I built my PC, 16GB cost $80-90 while a 120GB SSD cost ~$120, barely large enough for the OS, essential software and maybe one game!

 

[LordVile]

AMD's Q1 2018 financial report is impressive in almost every facet as it continues to chip away at Intel's market share.

AMD Earnings Soar on Exploding Ryzen Growth, Crypto Mining Craze : Read more

Yup, unlucky for them (not us) that an ethereum ASIC has been built.

 

[kyotokid]

...this may be fine for game purposes. However, dumping to Swap mode really impacts CG rendering. When I built my system over five years ago it had 12 GB of physical memory and dual 7200 RPM HDDs (SSDs were still pretty expensive then and had small capacities). At the time I was using a non PBR render engine so that was more than enough to handle even large rendering jobs. Then about three years ago I started working with Nvidia's Iray. As I had only a 1 GB GPU card to drive the displays, I pretty much was stuck rendering on the CPU (slower than GPU based rendering). Iray turned out to be far more resource intensive than the other engine Iray was using so much, that the process would frequently dump to Virtual Memory which was even slower due to the mechanical nature of HDDs. This was due to the fact that the programme and scene file needed to remain open during the render process (taking up valuable memory and processor resources) as Iray was integrated into the core programme and had no RIB option like Renderman/3DL does.

Therefore the only option to mitigate this was to upgrade system memory (which I did to the maximum of 24 GB - old X58 board) as it cost less than a high VRAM GPU card thanks to the mining craze.

 

[bit_user]

At the time I built my PC, 16GB cost $80-90 while a 120GB SSD cost ~$120, barely large enough for the OS, essential software and maybe one game!

I'm not talking about some unknown point in the past. We're clearly talking about current pricing, and a 120 GB SATA 3 SSD from ADATA will cost you $37 on Newegg. They have a 250 GB Crucial MX500 for $75.

Time for an upgrade!

 

[InvalidError]

I'm not talking about some unknown point in the past. We're clearly talking about current pricing, and a 120 GB SATA 3 SSD from ADATA will cost you $37 on Newegg. They have a 250 GB Crucial MX500 for $75.

One problem with being marginal on system RAM and using an SSD as a makeshift alternative to buying the amount of RAM you need is that swapping may burn through your write-erase cycle count.

I do have an SSD in my PC (gift from THG staff) which I installed when I upgraded to WinX a few years ago, hasn't really changed how I use my PC by much. Things like GIMP still take the same ~15 seconds to load as they did on HDD due to rebuilding caches/indexes on every load, so I still leave all my software open to bypass that.

 

[bit_user]

One problem with being marginal on system RAM and using an SSD as a makeshift alternative to buying the amount of RAM you need is that swapping may burn through your write-erase cycle count.

Sure, I'll grant you that using 15 out of 16 GB is cutting it too close. I don't know how Windows 10 does things, but Windows XP had a small memory mode and a big memory mode, which controlled how much it would allocate for I/O buffers and how much it would pad heaps. Which mode it used depended on the amount of RAM you had. Perhaps they generalized that, so the OS would scale better to different amounts of RAM (Win 10 allegedly runs on Raspberry Pi 3).

Anyway, are you swapping to HDD or SSD? If you don't notice a qualitative difference between the HDD and SSD experience, perhaps that's why. Inactive memory pages tend to get swapped out. So, even leaving apps running doesn't necessarily avoid hitting persistent storage.