In a decade, Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at investment bank Bernstein, acknowledged that the previous caution was "the biggest mistake of his time on Wall Street," giving AMD the first rating of "outperforming the broader market."
The news helped AMD close up nearly 2 percent on a dismal Tuesday trading day, pushing its market value up to nearly $190 billion. Since last week, AMD closed for the first time at a higher market cap than Intel, and has once again achieved catch-up.
Source: Bloomberg
Previously, the release of multiple catalysts has boosted AMD's recent rise, and the "zero risk" quarterly report and guidance have been widely praised, and last week, AMD officially announced the completion of the acquisition of FPGA leader Xilinx.
At the same time, Nvidia's acquisition of ARM collapsed after incurring unprecedented opposition, and AMD's largest merger, which is estimated to reach $50 billion, will become the number one merger in the semiconductor industry. And just a day later, Intel's acquisition of Tower for $5.4 billion looks a bit bleak.
The giants of the semiconductor industry seem to be on the verge of a fierce force, and the hot spot of competition in the industry is escalating. This time AMD's "three swords in one" set CPU + GPU + FPGA in one, the Matthew effect began to appear, vowing to share a bigger cake.
"AMD YES!", "Su Ma" attack to turn the tide
After "Su Mama" Dr. Su Zifeng came to power, AMD went from near bankruptcy to now having the funds to dominate the largest acquisition in the history of the semiconductor industry, staging a Jedi reversal.
With her forward-looking strategic decisions and resolute leadership, the revolutionary Zen architecture released in 2017 led AMD to a downward trend, and the product power returned to the front-line level. At the same time, AMD is good at listening to customer needs and coupling with its revenue model, seizing opportunities when competitor Intel is in trouble.
From the launch of the Zen2 architecture built on TSMC's 7nm process in 2019, AMD has fully exploded in process and architecture, giving Intel a substantial threat.
The advent of Zen3 has been suffering for Intel's long-term processor market to experience the sharp rise in core numbers, and enthusiasts have called "AMD YES!" At the same time, as a flagship processor released in 2020, there are still few competitors.
Source: AMD
However, Intel's latest 12th generation Core finally stopped squeezing toothpaste, sacrificing a core i9-12900K with a maximum of 16 cores and 24 threads, and a 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X finally ushered in an opponent.
According to fast technology's performance tests of the two, although the i9-12900K single-thread moved back to a city, the multi-threaded advantage of the Ryzen 9 5950X is obvious, leading by more than 10%.
Source: Fast Technology
In the productivity test of rendering graphics, the i9-12900K builds a hybrid architecture of 16 cores composed of 8 large + 8 small through the combination of performance core and energy efficiency core, which is more difficult to compare with the native 16 complete cores of the Ryzen 9 5950X, and even reaches a gap of 23.24%.
Optimization is a key issue for professional productivity applications, in contrast to the hybrid architecture of the newly born 12th generation Core, its optimization adaptation is still in its infancy, and the problem of large and small cores remains to be solved.
The efficient invocation of the 16 cores of the Ryzen 9 5950X has been put in place, thanks to more complete large cores, and the 64MB tertiary cache is larger, the amD Ryzen™ 9 5950X "multi-core king" title still seems to be unshakable.
At present, in the CPU market, AMD's market share growth is considerable. According to Mercury Research, AMD's share of the x86 processor market reached a record 25.6% in the fourth quarter of 2021, surpassing the record of 25.3% set 15 years ago in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Source: Mercury Research
AMD, which has played a big role in Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X/S, has seen a surge in revenue driven by a significant increase in console shipments in 2021.
AMD's performance in Q4 of 21 was almost unanimously favored by Wall Street, with fourth-quarter and full-year revenue of $4.83 billion and $16.4 billion, respectively, up from 49% and 68% year-on-year, respectively, again better than expected.
Although Intel's revenue scale and profit are still the top, in this year of rapid growth in the semiconductor industry, its single-digit year-on-year growth is too weak.
AMD benefits from the acceleration of two core businesses. Revenue from the Computing and Graphics business increased 32 percent year-over-year to $2.6 billion, bringing revenue and free cash flow to new highs, while corporate revenue, including sales of EPYC processors, surged 75 percent year-over-year to $2.2 billion, potentially surpassing the Computing and Graphics division for the first time in the future.
Due to the strong demand for server processors in the field of high-performance computing, the sales of EPYC processors accelerated and the enterprise business flourished. AMD expects to launch its fourth-generation EPYC processor in the Q3 quarter, which is more likely to help it maintain its high adoption and growth momentum.
Through broad volume advantages in both core businesses and CPU and GPU pricing advantages in end markets, AMD recorded $3.2 billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2021, up to 314% year-over-year.
However, AMD has been losing ground in recent quarters. According to the CPU market share report released by Passmark a few days ago, AMD's market share, which was once stable at 40%, has cooled down, and it has fallen to 34.3% in the Q1 quarter of this year.
Source: Passmark
According to data from the Japanese research company BCN Ranking, since 2019, AMD has suppressed its opponents almost the entire time in the Japanese DIY market, but it has been counter-killed by Intel in the past six months.
Why is it causing market share to plummet? In terms of time nodes, Intel's 12th generation Core new products must be a major factor, on the other hand, AMD is also facing its own challenges.
The "red and blue factory" fights with each other, and the mind and the next plate need to be stable
Limited production capacity in the global semiconductor industry in the past two years has been a constant central topic, although AMD has now jumped to the second largest customer of TSMC, but the capacity problem can not be ignored.
AMD's long-released Ryzen™ 5000 series, its performance advantages in the contrast between poor supply and high prices are not enough to make it quickly occupy the market, coupled with the long-term lack of mid-range and entry-level desktop model layout also makes it unable to expand the market.
In the face of tight production capacity, AMD can only prioritize the supply of notebook and server platforms, sacrificing the supply of desktop platforms. In the desktop market tracked by PassMark, AMD even reached 51% in Q3 2021, surpassing Intel for the first time after the birth of Core, but now it has fallen back to about 40% in the first quarter, which is the most costly part.
In particular, Intel's 12th generation Core release, its performance has greatly improved and the Ryzen 5000 series is a head-on competition, and the full coverage of the product, high- and low-end is even more cost-effective.
These piled-up problems have led to a decline in AMD's market share, which is not surprising. As a design manufacturer that needs foundry services, Intel's industrial chain channel has a manufacturing cost advantage that AMD cannot have.
Intel also appears to be moving towards expanding its advantages in this area, establishing Intel Foundry Services (IFS) in March 2021 and since then seeking to improve foundry capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.
The announcement on Feb. 15 of its $5.4 billion acquisition of Tower is also aimed at accelerating its efforts to become a major global supplier of foundry services and capacity as a key part of its IDM 2.0 strategy.
Of course, AMD CEO Dr. Su Zifeng also said that they have been studying the supply chain for the past 4 quarters to safeguard and meet the needs of customers. The large-scale AMD directly won Xilinx and will confront Intel in the field of FPGA.
According to cntronics statistics, since 2019, Xilinx has occupied more than 40% of the global FPGA market share, almost equivalent to the sum of Intel and Microchip behind it.
This approach is almost the same as Intel's competitiveness in the FPGA field, when Intel bought the PSG, formerly known as Alterra, for $16.7 billion in 15 years.
Recently, Intel poached Rohit Verma, the chief Radeon independent GPU architect of AMD, to lead the product architecture of independent GPU SoCs in the field of visual computing.
Combined with poaching the lead designer of Apple's M1 silicon SoC and announcing the start of Celestial's architectural planning, Intel expects to launch a "super-performance" GPU in 2024.
This has to mention the current leading GPU boss Nvidia, which previously wanted to occupy the absolute leading position of GPU+ CPU through the acquisition of ARM. Although it did not make the trip, arm seems to be coveted by everyone, and Intel seems to want to participate in investing in ARM in the near future.
At CES2022, the entire product line of 12th generation processors was completed in one go, and the unusual Intel no longer seemed willing to be the laggard.
This may be a glimpse of the competition of the head group, and its fierceness may be far beyond imagination. Combined with the recent trends, semiconductor companies are playing chess layouts to expand their advantages and make up for shortcomings.
As the tide intensifies, the signals of competition escalate
Returning to AMD's acquisition of Xilinx, AMD has been able to complement AMD with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and on-chip adaptive systems (SOCs), focusing on solutions provided by data centers to expand competitiveness in high-performance areas.
This is undoubtedly a big catalyst, and AMD says it can guide its TAM from data centers from $35 billion to $45 billion, while its PC TAM remains at $32 billion.
According to Rambus management, an FPGA can provide application-specific hardware acceleration when paired with a CPU, or AMD may also enable the CPU to benefit from the FPGA. In addition to CPUs, AMD can accelerate specific workloads, including AI and machine learning, complementing its data center GPUs.
What's more, the nightmare of the COVID supply chain has hit Xilinx particularly hard, with it lagging behind by at least 70 weeks when it comes to product lead times. Once the synergy between AMD and Xilinx is realized, it may greatly shorten the delivery time of Xilinx products and ultimately deliver more products, thereby significantly improving product performance and total cost.
Former Xilinx CEO Ming-Bak Peng joins AMD
Xilinx's accumulated enterprise-grade business and high-barrier market segments provide AMD with customer resources in industries such as aerospace, automotive, defense and healthcare. AMD's further enhancement of its capabilities in horizontal cloud and edge computing is not only a gap in the 5G infrastructure, but also expanded to EV-AV, process control and communications.
For the gaming space, Nvidia is pushing hard for DLSS support, and while AMD is lagging behind in the competition for mobile graphics and GPUs, its FSR has already gained a lot of gaming support in a short period of time. At CES 2022, as an offshoot of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), how AMD built Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) was impressive.
On February 25, "Eldon's Ring of Law", known as the opening masterpiece of 2022, was officially released, with a variety of full scores from the media to players. AMD also released the Radeon 22.2.3 graphics driver, zero-jet lag optimization support.
In the GPU space, although there is currently no SKU that can compete with NVIDIA and AMD flagships, Intel is also ambitious, and is expected to launch ARC Alchemist this year to return to the independent GPU market. Intel's attempt to launch a product for enthusiasts may have really changed.
epilogue
AmD's rebirth from the ashes, Intel's no longer turtle speed, and Nvidia's meta-universe exploration are all pictures that everyone is looking forward to.
The semiconductor track is full of opportunities and challenges, and it is not in line with the law of survival to seek defeat alone, and opponents on the same level can create a wonderful competition.
For these head players, the hardware innovation under the confrontation may be the driving force for each other. And the offensive system is built, and good defense follows, which is true on any track.