back to article AMD's shares get in a plane, take off and soar to 12,000 ft – then throw open the door, and fall into the cool rushing air

AMD stock plunged following the release of the chip designer's third-quarter financial figures – which showed sales at Intel's antitrust shield suffered due to sluggish interest in its GPU hardware. The House of Ryzen reported on Wednesday $1.65bn in revenue for the three months to September 29, up four per cent year-on-year, …

  1. Nate Amsden

    quite a hit

    So many times I've seen people say a stock tanks or crashes or some other extreme term only to see it down 0-8%. 24% is pretty crazy though. I haven't followed anything stock market related in 4 or 5 years. I think the nasdaq was just over 2000 at that time or something.

    Epyc hasn't impressed me though with all of intel's manufacturing difficulties(and seemingly everyone running into performance or power walls) they certainly have some window of opportunity.

    I'll certainly look to replacing my opteron 6100 and 6200 systems with newer epyc next year. Am quite shocked I was just able to renew support on those systems from HP for another year (entering 8th year of service soon for me anyway). Was expecting HP to EOL them a while ago.

  2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Nothing to do with AMD in particular

    Such stock market noises are akin to the groan a submarine emits as collapse depth is reached.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Nothing to do with AMD in particular

      Since the stock buyers and sellers don't look long term, the submarine analogy is perfect. It appears that the hedge funds, corporate raiders, etc. have changed stockholder's thinking and expectations. No such thing as sticking with a stock for the long haul anymore.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nothing to do with AMD in particular

        >No such thing as sticking with a stock for the long haul anymore.

        Have yet to sell any of my vested company stock. Keeps paying those dividends and though it goes up and down wouldn't be working for the company at this point mid career where have other options if didn't believe in management. Of course amount of stock I hold though nice for me is pocket change for Icahn. Also not crazy enough to put my own money in a single stock even mine and I cash out ESPP stock immediately. All about index stuff in my retirement account.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nothing to do with AMD in particular

        "Since the stock buyers and sellers don't look long term, the submarine analogy is perfect. It appears that the hedge funds, corporate raiders, etc. have changed stockholder's thinking and expectations. No such thing as sticking with a stock for the long haul anymore."

        Agree. With Intel's issues with 7nm, and Nvidia completely bonkers pricing, there's probably no better time to buy AMD shares.

        If I was in this business, I'd buy tons of them !

      3. Halfmad

        Re: Nothing to do with AMD in particular

        I think many of them bought in when TR2 came out expecting to ride the crest for a while until Q3 results.Fact is even AMD fanboys will agree the GPU side needs more work, they need to take Nvidia to task the way they've been doing with Intel recently on CPUs.

  3. Richard 12 Silver badge

    Looks like idiot machines

    40% gross margin is seriously good. Most companies would kill for that.

    And something tanks the shares that far because the growth in revenue was extremely large but very slightly (1%?) less than hoped?

    To me that looks like the shares took a small hit because results were slightly worse than expected, and then some AI bounced off another AI and crashed the price for no reason.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Looks like idiot machines

      No, the price crashed because of the drop in GPU sales that analysts didn't expect. They liked AMD better when it appeared they were in two growing markets. Now they're in one growing market (at least until Intel gets their act together) and one shrinking market, which hobbles their earnings expectations for the next few quarters - which is about as far ahead as most analysts look these days.

      1. Eddy Ito

        Re: Looks like idiot machines

        The thing is the GPU drop was quite predictable as it coincides with the current price of bitcoin and small miners being pushed out since the cost of electricity makes mining with GPUs unprofitable in many if not most locations.

        Look back to mid August, AMD was about the same price as today and it rises to over 30 by mid September and has been dropping through October. Meanwhile BTC had just finished it's drop in mid August and has largely been flat ever since which means many non-ASIC miners are losing money on GPU based rigs.

        It's pretty clear a bunch of analysts missed that even though it's much easier to buy a GPU today than it was six or nine months ago.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Looks like idiot machines

          They're only unprofitable if you have to pay for power. I'll bet there are a fair number of smaller operations that are sitting in basements of apartment or office buildings sucking down "free" electricity.

          Also, if you have electric heat you might as well get some value out of what you pay for heat, there being no difference in cost to power a 1500 watt resistance heater and a 1500 watt quad GPU mining rig.

          1. MonkeyCee

            Re: Looks like idiot machines

            "there being no difference in cost to power a 1500 watt resistance heater and a 1500 watt quad GPU mining rig."

            The rig is actually a lot more efficient at being a heater :) in general the fans and components are of a much higher quality, and the heat generating components do so highly efficiently.

            Obviously you're comparing a "heater" that cost maybe 30 euros with one costing 3k. Or in my case, 4 costing a total of 3k for 1600W total. Xeons, GPUs and server parts run at 50% load. The rack is on a UPS, but the closet heaters are just plugged into normal mains.

            It's the 400W warm closets with quiet fan noises that the police want to have a look at, in case there's an indoor garden.

            " I'll bet there are a fair number of smaller operations that are sitting in basements of apartment or office buildings sucking down "free" electricity."

            Someone is always picking up the tab. You can get away with doing it in any place that requires heating (such as an office), as the net extra power and the lower heating costs will balance each other out. But if it's in somewhere that needs cooling, like a DC, then it'll show up, as it's costing power and AC. Someone will end up paying extra for it.

  4. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Needs flea powder

    This is insane. The stock market is steadily become more of a total parasite.

  5. Korev Silver badge
    Coat

    Movement

    How long until the price starts Ryzen again?

  6. imanidiot Silver badge

    Not unexpected to me really?

    The cryptocoin mining market is slowing, so less sales for mining rigs. On top of that simply looking at the products team green is currently just ahead of the game. AMD is behind the curve on GPU right now, the same way the were with CPUs before Ryzen. Hence why I'm seeing a lot of new gaming PCs being built with Ryzen or Threadripper CPUs and nVidia graphics.

    1. MonkeyCee

      Re: Not unexpected to me really?

      Unless you have free/cheap power, or use for a space heater, cryto mining ezy mode mining has been over for a while. Even for gambling on pre market coins is pretty much penny stocks, and you'd be better selling the hardware and spending the money, like a proper speculator.

      Now it's cold and I still get a fair bit of solar power, I'm running some rigs again. I expect a visit from the cops in 2-4 weeks, but apart from that it's a pretty low hassle way to heat and my house. No profit in it.

      Almost every AMD gamer now has whichever level of shiny card they can afford, and there seems to be normal competition in prices.

      If I was going to buy a new board, I'd get an AMD CPU. But I only change boards every 5+ years, and I'm not serious at anything to warrant a new one before component failure.

      I don't get the stock price dump, other than general "shit on tech" day. AMD seem, at least to my low fiscal analysis skills, to be a very solid performer, who came in slightly below expectations in a sluggish market. So maybe 8-10% if we're being mean, but 20%+ just seems like a good opportunity to buy.

  7. mark l 2 Silver badge

    Just like the crypto coins that people were buying the GPU's to mine, there would always be a point where the bubble would burst. It was never a sustainable business model for AMD to rely on selling GPUs to mine crypto coins.

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      They never relied on the cryptomining boom. Sure they profited off it, but they knew it was short term, so they didn't bother investing to increase production. Everyone knew it was going to pop within a year or so, and nothing AMD have done shows they thought any differently.

  8. UberMunchkin

    I love AMDs new Chips, they are kicking butt all over the place now they have a great new CPU. However they seem to have forgotten to release an upgraded GPU in this cycle, the Vega64 can just about compete with the 1080 Cards but is completely blown out of the water by the new 20XX Series from NVIDIA.

    If they could actually release a high end GPU that competes then I expect they'd start making ground in that area as well, after all freesync is a great technology and uses an open standard so you're stuck with the £200 Nvidia tax on a monitor that works with it.

    1. MonkeyCee

      Price points and market

      "However they seem to have forgotten to release an upgraded GPU in this cycle"

      Why would they? That's not what they do :)

      They have solid GPUs at the major price points. Sure, the consumer grade over 600 quid ePeen market hasn't got any offerings, but who cares?

      If you've sold GPUs, you know there are roughly three tiers to what you sell. Entry level gaming 80-150 quid, all purpose GPU (gaming, media work) 230-300 quid and "high end" cards for 3-500 quid. Plus maybe something premium. But I would sell a couple of dozen 1060/570 grade cards for every 1070/580. And while it's not impossible to sell, a 1080 or Vega will sell once a month at most.

      So consumer grade GPUs over 500 quid seem (to me at least) to be an extremely niche market.

      Now data crunching GPUs are a different beast altogether. But they can cost 10x consumer grade and still be a rounding error in the budget for the tasks they are being used for. And AMD make some nice toys for that market, but you'll not see them on GPUBoss :D

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Threadripper is awesome though

    Recently build my first all new - not second hand part PC in 20 years as a treat for myself (at wife's suggestion no less!). Threadripper is simply fantastic for those doing video editing and tinkering with multiple VMs, AMD really smashed it with that CPU.

    Must admit the size of the damn CPU caught me by surprise though, it's a monster!

  10. James 51

    I bought a 2400G at the start of the year, a massive increase from my A6-5400k but I bought that cause I couldn't get a 560 4gb at a sane price (would have paired with a 1600). That's likely to be me though for the forseeable future (6+ years at least). There's probably a lot more casual gamers who were in the same boat and did what I did.

  11. adam payne

    AMD stock plunged following the release of the chip designer's third-quarter financial figures – which showed sales at Intel's antitrust shield suffered due to sluggish interest in its GPU hardware.

    AMD can't have everything their own way but it least they are sticking it to Intel.

  12. Big Al 23

    The knee-jerk reaction

    Thankfully AMD is on solid footing and hitting on all cylinders. Many folks have taken profits as the U.S. and Euro stock markets are struggling with the China tariff challenges. Eventually things will get back to the norm and AMD's stock price will recover like all the other companies who are generating consistent sales, profits and product growth.

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