AMD sales going good guns down to mining?

[Garz]

You really have no idea about how many of these things are sold to gamers.  Millions a year. 

How many people have multi-GPU mining rigs?  A few thousand, at most.

Seriously, bitcoin mining is a drop in the ocean to AMD.

I think you're a bit off on your figures.
Top end cards are a drop in the ocean to AMD. Midrange/lowend/OEM and APU are the bread winners of the product lines.

Well his contradictory posts in other threads (indicating to buy multiple cards to mine) which as you quite rightly put are in the companies mid-high end range. This is why even if they are a "few thousand" customers each with say three cards per machine starts to now equate to Tens of thousands...

Tens of thousands high end will be a big chunk as these cards are/were going for £250 - £600.

The low end cards or previous gen typically start around £30 - £120 which will be one per rig. Budget systems will have the onboard graphics too. 

[1714841649]

1714841649

[polarhei]

The Sales good is not only on mining but the optimization.

Normally before work, you will need to pass the CPU for the array. But AMD acts slightly differs. AMD includes some CPU on their GPU called GCN to shorten some complex steps in order to speed up. One more thing, Lowest cost with impressive performance for every aspect.

Additionally the Integer operation is well optimized for performance-per-watt.

[Garz]

Which leads the roundabout back to mining and AMD being the better performer than their counterparts (nVidia). This has buffed their sales enough to focus on their next target leaving them in a good position.

[forevernoob]

Just curious; any of you guys holding AMD stock?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Just curious; any of you guys holding AMD stock?

Not any more.  I held AMD for a long time but Intel is a ruthless competitor.  I began buying AMD back in the 90s and continued through the end of the decade.  For a while things looked bright but post 2002 AMD has struggled and that is more to due to Intel then any failure at AMD.  I sold out the last of my relatively large position in the mid 2000s.  The situation has only gotten worse since then.

As much as I like AMD the company I would not recommend anyone buy AMD the stock.  Intel is just very good at what they do and being "second best" is a bad spot to be in.  With NVidia and AMD/ATI they trade top spot back and forth.  However for pretty much the last decade Intel has been solidly on top.  Gone are the P4 days where they were sloppy and chips were overpriced.  Today they are a full process node ahead of AMD, their "tick tock" strategy has been solid for a half dozen product upgrades, and they can manipulate margins to squeeze AMD out.  Intel can build chips cheaper than AMD and they simply set the price points of various models in the lineup to minimize AMD margins.  Intel pricing isn't just to maximize current dollars for Intel but also to prevent AMD from gaining the resources necessary to become a better competitor in the future.  I doubt Intel will ever risk AMD going bankrupt (monopoly investigations) but they have essentially cornered AMD into a lower margin, lower share business.  Given Intel will keep AMD alive if I absolutely had to put money into AMD it would be AMD corporate bonds.  In the GPU space AMD buying ATI was pure genius and well timed however there is less and less need for more and more CPU cores so expect more "CPU" die space to be devoted to GPU.  As on die GPU become better and better is squezes the discrete graphics market.  Not many people know this but Intel has 70%+ of the GPU space.  All low end but the low end is getting better.



To link back to the OP all the GPU are a rounding error for AMD annual sales.  Total GPU mining was ~25 TH/s.  Lets be generous and say that ended up costing ~$1 per MH/s (GPU cost only).  So we are talking $25M in GPU sales directly due to mining.  Now some of those were existing sales converted to mining but lets ignore that.  Still $25M isn't in one year, GPU mining has been going on for three years, so say ~$8M annually is increased sales.  AMD average sales for the last three years were $5.8B annually.  So we are talking <0.2% of gross sales. Now hypothetically if ASIC/FPGA were impossible then maybe someday it might have been more important.

[Garz]

Nice info, thanks D&T.

[zvs]

Just curious; any of you guys holding AMD stock?

Not any more.  I held AMD for a long time but Intel is a ruthless competitor.  I began buying AMD back in the 90s and continued through the end of the decade.  For a while things looked bright but post 2002 AMD has struggled and that is more to due to Intel then any failure at AMD.  I sold out the last of my relatively large position in the mid 2000s.  The situation has only gotten worse since then.

As much as I like AMD the company I would not recommend anyone buy AMD the stock.  Intel is just very good at what they do and being "second best" is a bad spot to be in.  With NVidia and AMD/ATI they trade top spot back and forth.  However for pretty much the last decade Intel has been solidly on top.  Gone are the P4 days where they were sloppy and chips were overpriced.  Today they are a full process node ahead of AMD, their "tick tock" strategy has been solid for a half dozen product upgrades, and they can manipulate margins to squeeze AMD out.  Intel can build chips cheaper than AMD and they simply set the price points of various models in the lineup to minimize AMD margins.  Intel pricing isn't just to maximize current dollars for Intel but also to prevent AMD from gaining the resources necessary to become a better competitor in the future.  I doubt Intel will ever risk AMD going bankrupt (monopoly investigations) but they have essentially cornered AMD into a lower margin, lower share business.  Given Intel will keep AMD alive if I absolutely had to put money into AMD it would be AMD corporate bonds.  In the GPU space AMD buying ATI was pure genius and well timed however there is less and less need for more and more CPU cores so expect more "CPU" die space to be devoted to GPU.  As on die GPU become better and better is squezes the discrete graphics market.  Not many people know this but Intel has 70%+ of the GPU space.  All low end but the low end is getting better.



To link back to the OP all the GPU are a rounding error for AMD annual sales.  Total GPU mining was ~25 TH/s.  Lets be generous and say that ended up costing ~$1 per MH/s (GPU cost only).  So we are talking $25M in GPU sales directly due to mining.  Now some of those were existing sales converted to mining but lets ignore that.  Still $25M isn't in one year, GPU mining has been going on for three years, so say ~$8M annually is increased sales.  AMD average sales for the last three years were $5.8B annually.  So we are talking <0.2% of gross sales. Now hypothetically if ASIC/FPGA were impossible then maybe someday it might have been more important.

desktop video card sales are a very small portion of that $5.8B annually you're speaking of

[DeathAndTaxes]

Which hardly matters.  If a farmer sells tomatoes and beans and tomatoes only make up 10% of his gross revenue, then finding a way to boost tomato production 2% so that his gross revenue will increase 0.2% doesn't make a material difference.   Still if you have a breakdown for GPU sales then feel free to use that.  $8M (optimisticly unrealistic) is still a rounding error.

[ajw7989]

Most people that buy video cards use them for gaming, video editing ,etc not bitcoin mining otherwise they would make bitcoin video cards asap. Remember a corporation is there to make money

[forevernoob]

Most people that buy video cards use them for gaming, video editing ,etc not bitcoin mining otherwise they would make bitcoin video cards asap. Remember a corporation is there to make money

Yes, but one could argue that gamers and miners fall under the same category: "Enthusiasts"

It's interesting however whether or not mining is helping AMD win market shares in the Enthusiast category. Like D&T pointed out Intel has the biggest market share of GPU's. But that's counting all the GPUs.
Most Enthusiasts buy High-End which means either AMD or NVIDIA.

I realize this doesn't help AMD's profitability more than being popular amongst HTPC Enthusiasts or making really cheap laptops, but at least it's something.

No, I'm not a stock holder. But I wish the best for AMD since we all know competition is what drives innovation & technology forward.

[Garz]

Agreed.

Smudging over the fact that all these people buying mulit-GPU 'risers' to stash away and mine are hardly gamers now are they? 

They have not been bought to play games on, and at 4+ at a time starts making a dent into the what once was a predictable market. You also have an enthusiast (thanks for that word forevernoob) sector that doesn't just mine coins but crunch for science/aliens (whatever project that can utilise CPU/GPU processing power) and then the market widens somewhat.

Maybe when the goldrush settles and the ASICS take over there will be a hugh surplus of decent GPU's on the auction sites for us all to cherry pick at!

I too buy for value (Price/Performance) and have owned both camps in the familiar CPU/GPU brands but as highlighted above competition is key.