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  • ballsystemlord - Thursday, February 10, 2022 - link

    Interesting times ahead. Will Xilinx get the Radeon treatment? (Re-releasing the previous gen again and again.)
    Or will AMD provide Xilinx with decent funding and management?
  • Makaveli - Thursday, February 10, 2022 - link

    I think Xilinx will keep its current management in place the question of money is the big one. Xilinx on its own is a very profitable business I don't see AMD screwing that up to be cheap with R&D!
  • Shorty_ - Thursday, February 10, 2022 - link

    I think it's important to understand why AMD did that in context. With Polaris etc, they had no money. They were trying to scrimp and scrape and borrow so they could get Zen out the door. Once they did that obviously their fortunes changed. Now they're facing fab constraints so sweating old fab allocations etc makes perfect sense.

    It's also worth mentioning that RTG has always struggled for marketshare, so for a company rebounding from the brink of going under, you can see why they might prioritise other things.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    AMD designed ‘Polaris Forever’ to keep its Jaguar-peddling ‘console’ friends happy. It didn’t need to improve IPC one iota over Fiji for Vega because of mining demand. Look at how much Vega has been still going for.

    The narrative that AMD couldn’t make better cards for PC gaming enthusiasts and get them into their hands for reasonable prices being about the company not being able to afford the R&D is mainly fiction.

    The facts clearly show AMD had multiple stronger incentives to do things how it did them because maximizing margin is the goal of a corporation — not providing the public service of social enrichment.

    The other fact is that as long as there isn’t a single GPU company that puts enthusiast PC gaming customers first, they will get a bad deal. Being forced to buy from a duopoly where the choices are worse and worser is a recipe for continual disappointment. Einstein said insanity is expecting things to change when the variables remain the same.

    Excuses for the situation receive more energy expenditure than work to remedy it. This is because there are two-three companies standing to make bank whilst doing the least possible — the goal of every serious megacorp.

    The ‘console’ scam is the fault of consumer ignorance but also a lack of adequate anti-trust regulation. It’s interesting to see the great concern over Nvidia getting ARM but the utter opposite treatment of AMD when it comes to how it directly competes against the legitimate PC gaming platform (as opposed to the ‘consoles’ which are the same thing duplicated to extract more out of people than they should pay).
  • Abort-Retry-Fail - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link


    Do you want some cheese to go with your sour grapes whine?
  • Qasar - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    oh crap, this is console scam total BS again... oxford guy, either POST SOME PROOF OF THIS CRAP, or shut up about it already. EVERY post you make that contains mention of this scam, is 100% your personal option, NOTHING MORE.

    honestly, i cant tell if this guy just HATES amd to no end, or, jsut hates the WORLD to no end.

    he NEEDS more then just cheese to go with his wine......................
  • mode_13h - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    LOL. In spite of my skepticism of OG's Britishness, I'll concede that he sure whines like a Brit.

    We had a British guy at a previous job and ended up nicknaming him Whiny. Most of what he said was some form of complaint.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    More ad hom from mode, with elementary school name-calling. Keep impressing.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    Do you expect anyone to read posts like that? The sad caps screeching can be seen without even having to wade through any of the muck.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    ‘Do you want some cheese to go with your sour grapes whine?’

    How about intelligent comments?
  • mode_13h - Sunday, February 13, 2022 - link

    > How about intelligent comments?

    Try making some yourself and maybe others will reply in kind.

    Also, note that neither pomposity is not a substitute for intelligence. Nor are unconventional points of view, at least if they're not well-supported by facts and sound reasoning.
  • Reflex - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    Nah, lots of us are capable of reading quarterly results and understand how strapped the company was at the time and that they made the strategic choice to invest on the CPU side rather than GPU since they didn't have resources for both.

    Also, some of us know people at AMD. Your conspiracy is dumb and ignores reality.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    Your use of conspiracy in this context exposes the superficiality of your understanding. I understand that glibly and incessantly dropping that buzzword is supposed to have cachet but corporations are themselves conspiratorial. That’s a simple fact that flies right over the heads of our pious Pollyannas.

    Ambrose Bierce is famous, in part, for exposing the corporation (and, of course, the ‘class’ of people who invented them and use them) with his definition. Since he’s dead, taunting him with the ‘conspiracy theory’ dead horse probably won’t get him to retract his words.

    Spending time imagining kindness from corporations that put the FX 9590 on the market may be a way to cope with the vicious inhumanity of the corporate system but it’s folly.
  • mode_13h - Sunday, February 13, 2022 - link

    > Your use of conspiracy in this context exposes the superficiality of your understanding.

    A rebuttal like that is basically as good as ceding the argument.

    > Ambrose Bierce is famous, in part, for exposing the corporation

    Okay, so then any cynical take on corporate behavior must therefore necessarily be true?

    Perhaps you should take a class on logic or formal reasoning.

    > imagining kindness from corporations that put the FX 9590 on the market

    It was a bad product, made out of desperation. They probably regret having done it, not least because it wasn't very successful for them.

    Kindness doesn't even factor into it. If you look at the commercial success it had (or lack thereof) and reputational impact, then you can understand why they would probably regret doing it, or at least having been in a position where they did it.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, February 14, 2022 - link

    I think you're missing a huge part of that context: it was the rebrandeon years of GCN that helped lead to AMD having no money. Some GCN hardware was sold under the 400 series branding even, the 500 series had them! It wouldnt be until 2019 and the rDNA launch that GCN 1.0 (from 2011) was finally retired.

    AMD ha smade many bad decisions. Many may also remember evergreen getting the rebrandeon treatment with the 6000 series, only to get BTFOd by thermi 2.0.
  • erinadreno - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    Xilinx normally don't release new FPGAs every year. They aren't consumer electronics, they are development equipment.
  • flgt - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    Yeah, which makes you wonder why AMD thought this was a good deal. Data center has enough volume to justify ASIC’s which FPGA’s can’t compete against. I don’t see any synergies in this deal. Maybe tools and software? Xilinx has thrived since Altera has been mismanaged by Intel in recent years. There will be pressure to make some sort of integrated product which will draw focus and resources away from each companies core business.
  • alfalfacat - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    AMD stock is at an all-time high and trading at stratospheric earning multipliers. An all-stock deal means AMD buys a profitable business without paying a single cent. It's a reasonably decent corporate strategy move, even if they do nothing else with Xilinx (admittedly unlikely).
  • flgt - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    Well AMD shareholders pay plenty when their equity is diluted. You could just own stock in both if you wanted to leave Xilinx alone and liked their respective management team. These deals always have to be predicated on 1+1=3. That could be killing off competition so you can raise prices. Or it can be a technology enabler for a product that will take market share. I just don't see either happening given the markets the two companies play in. The problem I see with FPGA's is they will always have a brick wall limiting their growth. Once the market gets big enough customers will choose the cost and performance advantages of ASIC's over the configurability of FPGA's. At that point FPGA sales tend toward zero. FPGA companies need to be tailored to cater to all the niche applications where they excel.
  • whatthe123 - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    depends on the outlook. retail investors are generally nuts and believe it's reasonable for decades of forward profits to get priced on now so they can get rich. institutional investors are more realistic and probably see the gigantic multiple on AMD's stock signalling its overvalued and a good time to spend stock on acquisitions. Underestimating the stock's growth and buying too early is a lot less risky than overestimating and completely losing the chance at a merger if the value drops too far.
  • flgt - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    What I don’t understand is why the shareholders in the company being sold accept that deal. Is it assumed they’ll be able to exit their positions before the stock price drops? If the big investors all know it’s overvalued you wouldn’t think they would hold on to it. I should have taken more business classes I guess. I’m sure there are some tax reasons for structuring the deals a certain way as well.
  • whatthe123 - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    some people will surely cash out. xilinx's stock value wasn't as massively inflated when they set up the deal so it was largely in their favor, similar to getting years worth of stock growth immediately. Semi business is generally pretty risky, with high potential for disruption long term (like whats happening with AMD and Intel now) so just because things look good short term doesn't mean they'll be rosy 5 years from now. If intel becomes competently managed then Altera could swing back and provide real competition to xilinx.
  • mode_13h - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    > its overvalued and a good time to spend stock on acquisitions.

    Exactly. AMD had to make some big acquisitions.

    I'm honestly surprised they haven't snapped up any deep learning ASIC companies. They seem to believe this space will continue to be dominated by GPU-like architectures, but that's really going against the trend. You want less data movement than GPUs require. Look at Tenstorrent and Cerebras - they're all about having huge chunks of on-die SRAM.

    I mean, I guess AMD could just beef up the SRAM in their next CDNA chip, but I'm still not sure it's that simple for them to be competitive.
  • mode_13h - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    > These deals always have to be predicated on 1+1=3.
    > That could be killing off competition so you can raise prices.
    > Or it can be a technology enabler for a product that will take market share.
    > I just don't see either happening given the markets the two companies play in.

    It's a play for the datacenter. I think AMD is betting big on things like software-defined networking, deep packet inspection, threat detection, etc. It's someone akin to the way Nvidia is integrating GPUs into Mellanox network cards.
  • Xajel - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    It's a whole new market for them, and a profitable one also.

    They can incorporate both technologies to sell as a package, and in the future, they can have some exclusive technologies as well like adding an FPGA chiplet in their pro products (special line of Threadripper, Instinct, EPYC) where the user can program it for their needs to accelerate things, even some OEMs can use it as well to promote faster processing, in the far future, even regular consumers can benefit from this if FPGA becomes cheaper, like adding new media decoding, even games could make use of it for their needs (RT, ML, AI, etc..).

    The Chinese rules for the acquisition apply for 6 years if I understood correctly in my quick read, and beyond that, they can do more exclusive technologies.
  • TheReason8286 - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    Yeap. That's just the Chinese market though. They can bundle in all the other markets lol. I just want to see what it looks like when all 3 giants are on equal financial footing.
  • mode_13h - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    I'm skeptical about how big the gap is where it makes sense to use FPGAs rather than CPUs, GPUs, or ASICs.

    Intel announced plans to include Altera FPGAs in some of their Xeons, starting with Broadwell. To my knowledge, they never followed through with it. I think that's telling.
  • Wereweeb - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    Have y'all never heard about CPU's increasingly becoming a "sea of accelerators"? Integrating programmable logic that can become any kind of accelerator could be a way to cater to a huge variety of existing workloads for which dedicated hard logic doesn't make any economic sense - not to speak of the possibility of allowing older CPU's to adopt new standards of e.g. video decoding.

    E.g. for you g*mers: what if AAA games could have dedicated accelerators, maybe for their AI? Decompression?

    As for servers, I'd imagine it has something to do with having some hardware capable of tagging along with their rapidly evolving necessities, since IIRC servers are now usually replaced on a 5-year basis. And for data processing.
  • Wereweeb - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    Although I'd imagine an "Ubisoft AI accelerator" would just use your PC to mine bitcoin.
  • Qasar - Friday, February 11, 2022 - link

    "E.g. for you g*mers: what if AAA games could have dedicated accelerators, maybe for their AI? Decompression? "

    gamers already had something like that, it was called Physics.
  • mode_13h - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    You mean PhysX? Nvidia just turned that into software that runs on their GPUs.

    As for AI, that works quite well on GPUs, especially ones with Tensor cores. And compression/decompression is a hardware block in GPUs.
  • Qasar - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    yep, still i think it kind of proved that an and in card for a specific gaming task, isnt going to work, mostly cause of the lack of PCIe lanes on the desktop. i have to run my 1060 @ 8x, because i also have a m.2 card with 2 m.2 drives in it, and there just isnt enough PCIe to go around. i have been considering going back to 2 sata ssds that the 2 m.2 drives replaced cause of the PCIe lane allocation.

    i really wish, and hope that maybe AM5 increases the lanes, 40 lanes total, or at least an option on a higher end board would happen..... looks like intel has no interest in more lanes like x99 had any more
  • mode_13h - Saturday, February 12, 2022 - link

    For a FPGA to pack enough horsepower to be interesting, it has to be pretty big. And that gets expensive, fast. Otherwise, it's limited to things like simple data transformations and implementing new crypto algorithms.

    Also, an FPGA can't touch the performance of dedicated hardware. So, if you want deep learning performance, put a NPU block in there. If you want graphics, put a GPU block. If you tried to do these functions with a FPGA, it would have to be far bigger than both, to have the same performance of either.

    Yeah, FPGAs can do video compression, but I'm a bit skeptical it's going to be a huge win for something like AV1 over a split CPU/GPU software implementation, and definitely not as small or power-efficient as dedicated hardware.
  • Zoolook - Monday, February 14, 2022 - link

    A 1060 doesn't need more than 8 lanes anyway, esp if it's pci-e 4.

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