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ultima_trev
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Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:36 am

Zen has now saturated all markets, excluding Mobile (which should be by the end of the year). Between Ryzen 3-7, Threadripper, Epyc, and the next gen Zen+/Zen 2 (to use the same chipset as Zen 1), does AMD have any chance of achieving "a double digit percentage share of the market?" (I do believe Dr. Lisa Su said that was their goal)

Despite that AMD's best can easily seem to deliver 85% or more of Intel's best (depending on the application being benched), which is much, MUCH better than any of the Bulldozer derivatives, is it too late to proclaim any sort of return to competition has been acheived?
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Airmantharp
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:05 am

Which form?

The challenge for AMD is not just catching up, which they haven't yet done, but also keeping up. This is where companies like Intel and Nvidia differ: they continue to execute. Further, they've been competing well with themselves, absent real competition from AMD. For the moment, I doubt either could really give a rats what AMD does unless AMD starts executing again, like they did with the Athlon/Athlon64/AthlonX2. Their GPUs haven't really been top-end competitive since RTG was ATi.

I have no idea what it would take for AMD to compete in the GPU space; I don't think that they'll be threatening Nvidia any time soon.

But as for the topic of CPUs, they've made some gains and their architecture does show some efficiency competitiveness, and that's where mobile and server marketshare is really won. Further, the drawbacks in the Zen architecture appear to be of the type that may be addressed through revisions, unlike the Dozers, and AMD is close enough that they might actually become competitive in the future. You know, if they can execute.


[the Vega pricing insanity due to AMD dramatically underdelivering isn't promising, but their CPU division isn't RTG; their main issue in either case, though, is that they're fabless and that adds another layer of complexity when it comes to meeting demand]
 
bwoodring
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:19 am

Airmantharp wrote:
Which form?

The challenge for AMD is not just catching up, which they haven't yet done, but also keeping up. This is where companies like Intel and Nvidia differ: they continue to execute. Further, they've been competing well with themselves, absent real competition from AMD.


I don't know how much that matters for the consumer space - I think most people just buy whatever is best in a current generation. I don't really care if the successor to Ryzen gets smoked by the next Intel chip, that's a decision for the next build.

The exception to this would be reliability issues. Back in the Athlon days, it really did take AMD awhile to get the kind of reliable Mobo/chipset support - and in many ways they never quite did. I haven't heard much about Ryzen chipsets, but it's all be pretty good so far.

In short, I think Ryzen is going to do really well with the kind of people who frequent this site - they're more likely to appreciate high thread-count performance and would feel more comfortable dealing with chipset/mobo issues that could come with a new platform.

For system builders (esp laptops which require a lot of design and investment) and enterprises, I would agree - a track record needs to be rebuilt. If I am Dell, and I expect my next Laptop design to last through a few CPU generations, I think I would need a little more data before I committed to designing around Zen. (But I'd jump on desktops, that's easy).
 
Airmantharp
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:28 am

bwoodring wrote:
I don't know how much that matters for the consumer space

I'd argue that it doesn't, but that's not the topic as I interpreted it. I think Zen is great, for the current generation, but the topic implies 'going forward', as 'form' implies a trend.

bwoodring wrote:
I think most people just buy whatever is best in a current generation. I don't really care if the successor to Ryzen gets smoked by the next Intel chip, that's a decision for the next build.

The exception to this would be reliability issues. Back in the Athlon days, it really did take AMD awhile to get the kind of reliable Mobo/chipset support - and in many ways they never quite did. I haven't heard much about Ryzen chipsets, but it's all be pretty good so far.

In short, I think Ryzen is going to do really well with the kind of people who frequent this site - they're more likely to appreciate high thread-count performance and would feel more comfortable dealing with chipset/mobo issues that could come with a new platform.

For system builders (esp laptops which require a lot of design and investment) and enterprises, I would agree - a track record needs to be rebuilt. If I am Dell, and I expect my next Laptop design to last through a few CPU generations, I think I would need a little more data before I committed to designing around Zen. (But I'd jump on desktops, that's easy).

I think most people just buy at random. And by most, I mean the people who constitute the bulk of consumer purchases; those people likely didn't look any further than reviews on their retailer's site. They're certainly not here.

And yeah, I agree that AMD has a cachet to build with the Dell's of the world. Intel changes chipsets and adjusts socket pinouts fairly regularly, but overall, product lines can be reliably planned around and invested in for a good degree of time using whatever's current, and Intel can be counted on to keep the new products coming and thus do their part to keep up sales volume.

That's what AMD is going to have to prove, and Zen is a good start.
 
HERETIC
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 5:32 am

ultima_trev wrote:
Zen has now saturated all markets, excluding Mobile (which should be by the end of the year). Between Ryzen 3-7, Threadripper, Epyc, and the next gen Zen+/Zen 2 (to use the same chipset as Zen 1), does AMD have any chance of achieving "a double digit percentage share of the market?" (I do believe Dr. Lisa Su said that was their goal)

Despite that AMD's best can easily seem to deliver 85% or more of Intel's best (depending on the application being benched), which is much, MUCH better than any of the Bulldozer derivatives, is it too late to proclaim any sort of return to competition has been acheived?


Simple answer YES.
I think a lot will depend on upcoming APU's.The trend away from box's to lappies continues in homes and business,that's where the high volumes are.
When I see a mailer I see most of the cheaper lappies and all in ones are AMD-from there up are Intell.AMD needs to climb up the stack there.............
 
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 7:22 am

It's going to take a while to see if this is a "return to form" and not just a fluke.

PC sales are not doing well and that's probably not going to change soon. "Gaming" systems, however, do buck that trend. Intel still holds the title of the best gaming CPU by a comfortable margin. Zen+ should get them closer.

It's far more important that Epyc sells well. They need market share first and foremost. They fell into obscurity in the server world and need to make sure that big-money application companies don't just optimize for Intel because that's all there is. That leads, then, to getting sales now and in the future. Traditionally the margines of a server-grade CPU is much higher than a desktop. I don't think AMD is milking Epyc quite yet because of the market share thing I just mentioned. Once they have market share I can see prices going up a little bit. That is one indicator, of many, to know AMD has "returned to form."
 
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Fri Aug 25, 2017 7:37 am

HERETIC wrote:
I think a lot will depend on upcoming APU's.

Yup, you cant discount laptops and work/non-gamer PCs. That's the market share part versus the margin/profit gamer part.

If you were building a new machine today with Ryzen, you'd have to pay $70/$90 for a GTX 1030/RX 550. That easily brings the CPU into/past Intel. And for a business or non-gamer the value proposition isnt that great. More noise, heat, future reliability, space vs an APU/iGPU.

edit: And i dont think its actually true that we are seeing true Zen numbers. Never ever crossed my mind to buy first gen. And i dont think im alone. If Intel is making missteps left and right when its basically same old stuff being very incrementally updated...
 
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Nov 26, 2017 4:49 am

To early to tell really, IMHO.

As much as I'd love to think so, they still need to make it another 2 full release cycles to be considered 100% back to form. Those releases have to also do as well as Ryzen did, and have the marketing behind it to actually turn the market away from Intel and to AMD. Saw some charts showing AMD vs Intel market share in January. AMD sat at around 20%. In order to really be a contender I feel they need to break the 35-40% consistently. If they can break the 50% in consumer parts, they will have done the impossible.

Granted the server market is worth more and the last I saw on that they were in the single digits, just getting to 20% server would be a boon like no other for a company their size.

They just need to prove a track records for 3-4 years to win over minds. It's like their drivers for GPUs, people seem to have complained about their drivers but for about 3 years it's been Rock solid since they hired a bunch of talent. It's started to give people the feeling it's not second rate crap. AMD still gives informed and uninformed consumers that feeling unfortunately. Only time will heal that wound. They had the perfect start with Ryzen. Although I think the Crypto Currency thing is going to hurt their GPU division more than it helped. It put off legitimate long term customers who would buy into Freesync and other all AMD systems to go Nvidia since they couldn't get their hands on the new AMD cards. When the crypto world is done with those 580's they will sell them relatively cheaper and flood the market, but it will have been too late. Cheapos will pickup on the cards (like me), not the people who buy into an entire system and return for upgrades. It really undermines long-term customership for AMD unfortunately.
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Airmantharp
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Nov 26, 2017 5:05 am

Honestly, if they can just properly execute round two, they're gonna get sustainable marketshare.

That is if round two fixes the initial issues, like high-speed RAM compatibility, clockspeeds, efficiency at higher clockspeeds, and internal latency. That last one is killer for the server market and they don't overclock. And that's the easy stuff: they need to kick their IPC and single-core performance into gear too. That sets their performance ceiling.

And if they can run a version with a 'light' Radeon APU that can match Intel's while still bringing the cores (and adding the above) to every consumer/non-HEDT product alongside their bare parts, that'd be nice too. Even as a gaming enthusiast, I regularly use IGPs, even for everyday computing, even while gaming on real GPUs.
 
Welch
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Mon Nov 27, 2017 5:36 am

Airmantharp wrote:
Honestly, if they can just properly execute round two, they're gonna get sustainable marketshare.

That is if round two fixes the initial issues, like high-speed RAM compatibility, clockspeeds, efficiency at higher clockspeeds, and internal latency. That last one is killer for the server market and they don't overclock. And that's the easy stuff: they need to kick their IPC and single-core performance into gear too. That sets their performance ceiling.

And if they can run a version with a 'light' Radeon APU that can match Intel's while still bringing the cores (and adding the above) to every consumer/non-HEDT product alongside their bare parts, that'd be nice too. Even as a gaming enthusiast, I regularly use IGPs, even for everyday computing, even while gaming on real GPUs.


Couldn't agree more, pretty much covered all bases of concern for me.
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Waco
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:47 am

Intel still wins mindshare over AMD in spades. I keep encouraging family/friends to consider AMD's new chips and the responses are generally "ugh, why would I waste my money on that". :oops:
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Kougar
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Tue Nov 28, 2017 6:25 am

My question is how do we even measure that metric? Steam's hardware survey data seems to be going completely off the rails so badly that the data is useless. The OS share numbers are completely changed around from a few months ago, and if it is to be believed AMD has a mere 10% CPU and 10% GPU of Steam system share as of last month. :lol:

Welch wrote:
It's like their drivers for GPUs, people seem to have complained about their drivers but for about 3 years it's been Rock solid since they hired a bunch of talent. It's started to give people the feeling it's not second rate crap.


They were definitely better in the interim I was using a 380 earlier this year, but I didn't take kindly to F@H sometimes throwing computation errors when I had it running in the background with light games in the foreground. That hasn't been an issue with NVIDIA drivers since the Win 7 era. So I still don't have a positive feeling about Radeon drivers.
 
JustAnEngineer
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Tue Nov 28, 2017 6:51 am

I noticed last week that almost 60% of Windows systems in the latest Steam survey were running the Chinese language. Windows 7's share in the Steam Survey increased from 33% to 65% while Windows 10's share decreased from 52% to 29% in the past few months. The most commonly-reported graphics cards are now the GeForce GTX960 and GTX750Ti, which have both tripled their share in the past few months.

The Asian market may be different from what we experience in North America.
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Welch
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Tue Nov 28, 2017 7:09 am

In order to make anything useful of the steam data, we would have to know the collection method, and what constitutes another computer? Does a single user with multiple computers count? If so you may see the Chinese language and other skewed numbers for things like the OS based on a large influx of Chinese accounts with multiple low cost systems being accounted for. It would likely be related to some specific games where new money making prospects are taking place. If there is an opportunity to profit in the short run, you can bet your bottom dollar that a bunch of Chinese guys will show up to take advantage of it.

Of course I guess it is possible for there to have been an explosion in the legit gaming market from China too. Economic statuses being very different, I'd imagine the computing landscape to be fairly different and a few generations older than the norm when compared to over here in the US.

Odd thing with your R9 380, curious what was causing that. So you never were able to resolve it and moved on to Nvidia? Was it because of that bug or just time for an upgrade?

I had some bad experiences with Nvidia drivers earlier this summer. A customer who knew nothing about computers ordered up some $3,000 Lenovo workstations to act as a POS and didn't order them with graphics cards, Xeons with no IGP of course. The only thing I could get locally on the spot was some Nvidia cards, fairly low end. While installing the drivers on all 3 of these workstations it created a complete blackout screen situation where even safemode displayed nothing. Long story short, multiple hard boots over a few days and 2 of them came back and seemed to be fine. The 3rd one wouldn't come back and of course had some Windows OS issues from the reboot and had to do a fresh install. I was cussing Nvidia hard as I found out it was a VERY common issue for quite some time in their driver releases and they seemed to have ignored it.

They both seem to have their bugs, I've been fortunate to not have really any major issues with my AMD graphics cards in the past, others do. I will say that the F@H stuff isn't the most common thing to run while gaming, doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to do it, just not a mainstream thing.

TR still have the F@H group :D or you going it alone?
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Kougar
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Wed Nov 29, 2017 4:45 am

Well, the most important thing to note is I suspect the Steam hardware survey only measures a randomly selected sample size. This would explain the monthly variations and why some data sets that should change slowly change so drastically month-by-month. In another age, Steam used to ask almost monthly to do the survey but these days I've only been asked once in the last six months to participate.

I can confirm the steam survey pops up on multiple computers with a single account, and it even pops up the survey on a virtual machine, which I'm sure drastically skews the datasets. Anyone farming any games on Steam will be using a million skinny VMs.

Welch, I hear ya. Rather odd issue and it sucks NVIDIA won't address it. Makes me wonder if NVIDIA will begin to cede away the lowest-end of the market to APUs and stick to 750 / 1050 class hardware in a few more years. They have a habit of ignoring low-margin businesses such as consoles already, I wonder if they still produce the low-end cards just because their OEM partners want them.

Regarding folding I got started at Anandtech, these days I fold for EVGA as it offsets the utility costs. All the accumulated EVGA bucks I got from folding paid for the 1080 Ti Hydro I'm now using. The R9 380 was a temporary card I got when my old Titan Black blew an inductor last year... my original plan had been to sit on it until Volta then use the EVGA credit, but after the 380 prices reached absurd levels I caved in and sold the 380. I'm sure I'll regret that when GDDR6 Volta shows up, but such is computer hardware. :lol: Believe it or not Tech Report does have ~30 people still folding.
 
FlamingSpaceJunk
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Wed Nov 29, 2017 8:53 am

Kougar wrote:
Welch, I hear ya. Rather odd issue and it sucks NVIDIA won't address it. Makes me wonder if NVIDIA will begin to cede away the lowest-end of the market to APUs and stick to 750 / 1050 class hardware in a few more years.


Nvidia owns the server space, and they have the prices to prove it. They can cede the low-end since one server card will pay for several boxes of the low-end stuff.

Epyc is getting some looks in the server realm. All those PCIe lanes, all those cores, and AVX512 being half-baked opens lots of doors for AMD. The price helps too.

GPU compute wise AMD is still dead in the server space. The tooling isn't there. They still don't have an answer to CUDA or OpenACC, and they have no presence which means the community isn't going to bail them out.
 
strangerguy
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Dec 10, 2017 6:24 am

If returning to form means having a decent CPU offering against Intel while massively dropping the ball on the dGPUs and even more so on the HPC side, yeah.
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whm1974
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Dec 10, 2017 6:39 am

strangerguy wrote:
If returning to form means having a decent CPU offering against Intel while massively dropping the ball on the dGPUs and even more so on the HPC side, yeah.

I don't know, while I could care less about HPC and servers, I do care about having CPUs and dGPUs with decent performance. Such as better performance then what I have now when I get ready to build a new rig in two or three years.

I do have to get AMD credit for the Ryzen 51600 and 7 1700. I mean six and eight cores at ~3000Mhz with a 65W TDP, close to Intel's IPC? At the prices the Ryzen are selling for, AMD is giving Intel a run for their money.
 
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Dec 10, 2017 10:55 am

strangerguy wrote:
If returning to form means having a decent CPU offering against Intel while massively dropping the ball on the dGPUs and even more so on the HPC side, yeah.


As an HPC guy, I'm pretty excited about EPYC.
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Dec 10, 2017 2:14 pm

Waco wrote:
strangerguy wrote:
If returning to form means having a decent CPU offering against Intel while massively dropping the ball on the dGPUs and even more so on the HPC side, yeah.


As an HPC guy, I'm pretty excited about EPYC.


How so?
I'm on the fence. Intel's per core performance is still better, and we're only doing a small investment into GPU for the next iteration. The AVX512 stuff was already out of the budget anyway.
 
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Dec 10, 2017 3:42 pm

FlamingSpaceJunk wrote:
Waco wrote:
strangerguy wrote:
If returning to form means having a decent CPU offering against Intel while massively dropping the ball on the dGPUs and even more so on the HPC side, yeah.

As an HPC guy, I'm pretty excited about EPYC.

How so?
I'm on the fence. Intel's per core performance is still better, and we're only doing a small investment into GPU for the next iteration. The AVX512 stuff was already out of the budget anyway.

Workloads that scale well with core count and/or benefit from a lot of PCIe bandwidth are pretty good candidates for Epyc.
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Waco
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Re: Now that Zen has saturated market... Is it safe to say AMD has returned to form?

Sun Dec 10, 2017 10:31 pm

FlamingSpaceJunk wrote:
Waco wrote:
strangerguy wrote:
If returning to form means having a decent CPU offering against Intel while massively dropping the ball on the dGPUs and even more so on the HPC side, yeah.


As an HPC guy, I'm pretty excited about EPYC.


How so?
I'm on the fence. Intel's per core performance is still better, and we're only doing a small investment into GPU for the next iteration. The AVX512 stuff was already out of the budget anyway.

Memory bandwidth. That's all that matters for a lot of workloads I deal with - and AMD will sell 8 channels of it for cheaper than Intel will.

That, and PCIe bandwidth for storage servers.

That, and better memory bandwidth / watt for everything else.

AMD hit the jackpot with their newest designs...the only hurdle left is ensuring you can actually buy them from major OEMs.
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