Who would have thought this would be headline worthy? But here we are.
"Revenue hit $1.027bn, up nine percent year-over-year "primarily due to higher sales of semi-custom SoCs." That beats analyst estimates by $68.7m. By semi-custom SoCs, AMD means the system-on-chips and graphics cores it designs for video game console makers, specifically Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft is due to use AMD-crafted chips in its Project Scorpio console due out next year and a slim Xbox One coming this Fall. Overall, AMD expects to bank $1.5bn in sales over the next three to four years from three games console chips that will hit the shelves soon.
Net income of $69m, up from last year's $181m loss. Peering into the numbers, we see a non-GAAP operating profit of $3m versus an $87m loss a year ago."
Yay, finally. I find it funny that it is consoles that are pointed to as saving AMD, when everyone has been running around screaming that the RX 480 will be AMD's savior. Good ole console gamers, saving AMD for the pc users as well.
If they drop the price anymore I doubt they would turn much of a profit. Its on a new manufacturing process, and its already pretty cheap for a gfx card. I doubt there is much more margin left to give as of right now.
If the rumors are true, the server market is going to see Zen CPUs with up to 32 cores and a total of 64 threads. That alone, if the price margin is lower than Intel, will save AMD's bacon in the long run. Server farms with 4 32 core CPUs per blade at affordable prices will be a shoe-in on the enterprise side of things.
the non-ref are about to hit market soon, and prices look ok. $270 for powercolor devil version. (we've heard that on day 1 they had 8000 rx480's in USA - sold within hours.) -- we can estimate around ~20-40k 480's were sold in USA till today if not more. ~ sell out of their Fury and 300 series ~ for heavy hitters 490 and vega. This way amd has time to sell their existing stock before launching bigger cards maximizing profits.
the new consoles are likely to feature 1-2 480 gpu's. So profits might be higher, new nintendo crap will also run amd.
PS Neo being clocked at 4.19 TFlops is a bit of a stretch away from an RX 480. Although it has the same amount of CU's as an RX 480, so it's an underclocked RX 480? I have no idea about the Xbox One Scorpio, they did touted about having 6 TFlops, which would be impressive, that's Fury levels, but TFlops alone don't equate to how good a GPU is entirely, the gimped ROPs did the 480 no favors above 1080p compared to an R9 390. At least they will have good GPUs, but the CPU of PS NEO is STILL JAGUAR!? WTF! That's gonna be a large bottleneck, but with DX12/Vulkan, the bar may be lowered to make it better.
Only issue with the 480 is the 1060 looks to be a MUCH better card, minus the missing SLI feature and 2GB less memory. I don't think anyone has done a comprehensive comparison of the 480 vs 1060 yet, but my guess is the 1060 will be overclock-able to 1070 speeds! I have not been impressed with the overclocking ability of the 480 yet.
Don't get me wrong, my next videocard will likely be another AMD card (maybe 490 if it isn't a flop). This is mainly due to freesync, which I make use of and can tell it smooths things out in many games quite well.
An RX 480 is an overclocking beast, even compared to the GTX 970, although I suspect the same is true for the GTX 1060 given it's really low power consumption and heat. Good thing I ain't stuck choosing which card, since my card does about as good (albeit a bit worse.)
I have been seeing reviews of the overclocking ability being around 130mhz more core on the 480, not exactly BEAST status compared to Nvidias MASSIVE 400-600mhz overclocks!
NVidia already have large clocks anyways on their higher cards so the boosts are diminishing returns, going from 1000 to 1200 is more impressive from a logarithmic stand point than going from 1800 to 2000. Also, I thought that was the crappy reference RX 480 that had power issues before the driver fix.
Perhaps, but heres a benchmark I just found that compares both cards. Now if you were going for the 4GB version then the 480 makes sense as its decently cheaper, but here these comparisons show the 1060 is kicking arse over a OC'ed 480 even when stock.
Just saying the RX480 in my eye's isn't very impressive, if the 8GB version was $199usd then I'd be quite impressed but its going for $270 which is what the 1060 sells for.
Anyone who does basic 5minute research before buying a new videocard will notice the 1060 trumps, so I'm not sure how well the RX480 is going to do long term at its current price range. Unless everyone goes for the 4GB and that becomes the more popular card (possible).
I think they should push it even more than that. I'd like to see 64 core 128 thread chips with hundreds of megs of cache. The only way I see them beating Intel is to go batshit crazy right out the gate. Otherwise it'll just be the RX 480 again. Intel will announce a faster chip that uses less power for a few percent more money a month later.
