News AMD Posts First Loss in Years as Consumer Chip Sales Plummet

[Admin]

Sales of AMD's datacenter products remain strong, but client CPU shipments drop 65% year-over-year.

AMD Posts First Loss in Years as Consumer Chip Sales Plummet : Read more

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Maybe they had better get serious and bring prices down to where they should be

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Not so sure the CPUs were the thing. For me on zen 4, the big thing was when you factored in the motherboard and ram costs on top of cpu. One reason I’m sticking to am4 a bit longer.

 

[InvalidError]

Looky here, Intel isn't the only one eating some losses on some spectacular sales drops!

 

[AgentBirdnest]

Not so sure the CPUs were the thing. For me on zen 4, the big thing was when you factored in the motherboard and ram costs on top of cpu. One reason I’m sticking to am4 a bit longer.

Same... the RAM isn't even a big issue for me anymore. The "sweet spot" DDR5 6000 kits are down to around $125 for 32GB; less than half the price compared to when Zen4 launched. And the non-3D CPUs have been reduced to attractive prices.

The motherboards though, jeez... Anything under $500 is pretty much a downgrade compared to my X570, and that just feels kinda bad. :-\ And most models aren't dropping prices much, if at all.
Maybe with sales down so much, AMD will finally do something about it, like reimburse board makers for more drastic price drops. (I can dream.)

 

[Makaveli]

Same... the RAM isn't even a big issue for me anymore. The "sweet spot" DDR5 6000 kits are down to around $125 for 32GB; less than half the price compared to when Zen4 launched. And the non-3D CPUs have been reduced to attractive prices.

The motherboards though, jeez... Anything under $500 is pretty much a downgrade compared to my X570, and that just feels kinda bad. :-\

Its always been motherboard pricing.

Its why I added a 5800X3D to my build and will stay on AM4 until Zen 5 is out. They may refresh the chipset and pricing should be much better for boards in 2024 time frame.

And totally agreed on your last point.

I paid $330 for my Asus Prime X570 Pro

The AM5 version

ASUS Prime X670E-PRO WIFI $479

 

[BeedooX]

Same... the RAM isn't even a big issue for me anymore. The "sweet spot" DDR5 6000 kits are down to around $125 for 32GB; less than half the price compared to when Zen4 launched. And the non-3D CPUs have been reduced to attractive prices.

The motherboards though, jeez... Anything under $500 is pretty much a downgrade compared to my X570, and that just feels kinda bad. :-\

As someone who's been stuck on a TR2950X and a 5930K, upgrades have been a long time waiting based on the idea of building a couple of gens on the AMD platforms.

I decided to upgrade the wife's PC (the 5930K), and whilst I could easily get a 5800X3D, I was unable to find an AM4 motherboard I liked (outside US) - assuming AM4 is ramping down.

In the end, plumped for a 7700X and ASROCK X670E Taichi Carrara motherboard for AU$799 (on offer - but still ouch). I didn't find the RAM too bad at AU$299 for 32GB DDR5 6000 CL30. I spent a lot more than that on my DDR4 memory.

 

[suryasans]

It seems AMD's stance that DDR4 phased out in a new AM5 platform does not give a good outcome.

 

[JamesJones44]

That Xilinx purchase looks genesis given the environment we are in on the client side.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It's not DDR4 vs DDR5 that's the problem, the problem is that it's not the massive gain of Zen over Bulldozer, Zen 4 is a relatively small gain over Zen 3 for a much higher cost, especially if you already own a Socket AM4 motherboard, but also Socket AM4 products which are still in the chain at a lower cost. Hovering over all of this is global economic chaos which makes computer upgrades sit on the back burner, and all of the people who were AM4 early adopters who were burned and are unwilling to take another chance.

 

[setx]

It seems AMD's stance that DDR4 phased out in a new AM5 platform does not give a good outcome.

It was completely correct decision. I'd choice longer live for socket with compatibility with newer CPUs anytime over old memory support.

Getting cheap DDR5-4800 and overclocking it to 6000+ is not a problem.

 

[sitehostplus]

Maybe they had better get serious and bring prices down to where they should be

They are already 30% less than several decades ago. How much lower can they really go?

 

[Chung Leong]

Hardly surprising. AMD has always been stronger in Europe than in the US, in Germany in particular. Consumers on this side of the pond are just flat out broke. People are struggling to put food on the table.

 

[PackerHater]

Thumbs up to the author for using GAAP numbers while other sites have quoted Non-GAAP numbers often not mentioning the GAAP numbers altogether. If you believe Non-GAAP numbers, AMD made more profits in EPS than analysts expected.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Imagine that.
1. AMD no longer has the fastest platform for the buck,
2. An overall higher entry MSRP and
3. An economic downturn

Leading to being poor financials.

I'm surprised AMD wasn't a worse bloodbath than Intel to be honest. I mean I'm routing for AMD but they had a lot of missteps this release.

 

[Makaveli]

Hovering over all of this is global economic chaos which makes computer upgrades sit on the back burner, and all of the people who were AM4 early adopters who were burned and are unwilling to take another chance.

My rule of not buying first gen products protected me from this. My life on AM4 started on X570 with a 3800X.

So skipped x370 and x470.

I've gone 3800X to 5800X to 5800X3D all on the same board.

 

[neojack]

CPUs have been overpowered for most usages for like 5 years at least. Of course this would slow down sales.

now Nvidia is selling tons of AI chips but that's another story...

 

[shady28]

That -65% revenue on client is pretty epic. Literally went from 2.12B in Q1 2022 to 739M in Q1 2023.

It looks like the only thing that saved them was embedded, which tripled revenue from 595M to 1.562B

So Lisa Su did manage to pull another rabbit out with that Xilinx purchase.

Even data center, being flat in a high inflation environment, is not doing well as shown by the operating income going from 427M to 138M.

Xilinx basically just carried AMD. Without that win, they'd be losing something more like $1B and it would be like 2012 all over.

Good reflection on Lisa.

 

[InvalidError]

It was completely correct decision. I'd choice longer live for socket with compatibility with newer CPUs anytime over old memory support.

Longer socket cycles don't matter much when most people upgrade every 5+ years. And in case you missed the memo, AMD wouldn't commit to 4+ years long socket life with AM5. It likely doesn't want to lock itself into a potential repeat of having a hard time getting Zen 2 to work on AM4 and the backwards/forwards compatibility nightmare that came with Zen 3.

 

[bit_user]

Zen 4 is a relatively small gain over Zen 3

Huh? You're still repeating this nonsense?

​

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-7950x-ryzen-5-7600x-cpu-review/9​

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That's a 45.5% improvement, gen-on-gen! Zen 4 is an excellent upgrade for people that have truly compute-bound workloads.

 

[bit_user]

AMD wouldn't commit to 4+ years long socket life with AM5. It likely doesn't want to lock itself into a potential repeat of having a hard time getting Zen 2 to work on AM4 and the backwards/forwards compatibility nightmare that came with Zen 3.

IIRC, the issue with Zen 2 was just the matter of enabling PCIe 4.0 on prior-generation boards. That's the only thing they backed away from, as I remember it.

Enabling Zen 3, on older boards, was an issue of EEPROM capacity limits on those early boards. Presumably, they've learned their lesson and given themselves ample breathing room.

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

This is sort of a bummer because their GPUs have been solid in Linux for the last 4 years for me, with open source drivers being excellent.

I’m never going back to nvidia as long as I can when I don’t need cuda.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

In regards to the posts about zen 4 being faster than zen 3, yes it’s true that it was faster. For me it was platform cost, as well as the fact that zen 3 for now is still good enough. In other words if your primary function is gaming for example then if you are already able to push 100+ fps on a lot of things what is the point of upgrading? Especially in an economy where money is a bit more scarce?

AMD to a point may have been a victim of their own success though. How many people had b350 or b450 boards, or x370 etc boards that had sat on their CPUs the last 3-4 years and then went from say a ryzen 5 1600 to a 5600 or 5700x? I can say before ryzen came outI was using an fx 6300 overclocked. It seemed like an ok system in the day, but when I got to use a ryzen 5 1600, wow what an upgrade. But you figure for someone like me who on the same board could go all the way to zen 3, what an improvement from zen 1 to zen 3 was. I guess for me I feel an upgrade would be nice, but when I look at comparisons online, I feel like I’d need to upgrade my gpu first to really be able to take full advantage of a new platform anyway, and as we know gpus aren’t cheap these days.

 

[TerryLaze]

Huh? You're still repeating this nonsense?

​

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-7950x-ryzen-5-7600x-cpu-review/9​

​

That's a 45.5% improvement, gen-on-gen! Zen 4 is an excellent upgrade for people that have truly compute-bound workloads.

By going from 118W to 235-247W... 45% improvement in performance for around 100% more power, rough napkin math makes this less than 50% as efficient as the previous gen, but then if you don't care about power you can also go to intel and have it run unlimited.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Review - Impressive 16-core Powerhouse

The Ryzen 9 7950X is a monster CPU. When paired with the right workload it will eat even the 12900K for breakfast. As our review shows, the performance uplifts can be massive: +30-50% gen-over-gen is totally possible. What makes things complicated though, is that keeping the beast cool is almost...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Neilbob]

By going from 118W to 235-247W... 45% improvement in performance for around 100% more power, rough napkin math makes this less than 50% as efficient as the previous gen, but then if you don't care about power you can also go to intel and have it run unlimited.

Oh, knock it off. It was inadvisable and unnecessary of AMD to push the power like they did, and it's been well demonstrated that the power consumption can be knocked all the way down to that of the Zen 3 parts and the result is performance that's barely any lower than default.

This is perfectly demonstrated by the 7950X3D, which is only a few percent slower than the 7950X but for about half the power. Like so: