Ryzen Release Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/28...provements

First, AMD doesn’t have financial room to pull this kind of trick, even if it wanted to.

As of Q4 2018, AMD’s gross margin was 37.84 percent. This represents a significant long-term improvement over the pre-Ryzen era. The company’s actual operating and net profit margins, however, are much lower — in the 5-6 percent range. This useful tool from MacroTrends.net lets you compare all three values; a screenshot of AMD’s most recent results and historical data is shown below:
...
Investors have made it clear on conference calls that they want AMD’s margins to come up. AMD itself has identified critical markets that it wants to compete in, including servers, laptops, and the burgeoning AI/deep learning market, which is expected to define and drive computing in the next decade. While its server market share is rising, AMD’s share of the entire AI/DL space seems to be basically nil. The company has done some work with Google and there have been rumors that it built Radeon Instinct as a semi-custom solution for a customer, but, as this extensive machine learning overview from AI expert Tim Dettmers demonstrates, AMD isn’t viewed as a strong competitor by professionals working in this field, at least not right now. He writes: “AMD invests little into their deep learning software and as such one cannot expect that the software gap between Nvidia and AMD will close.”
...
Second, AMD has never historically gutted its own product families pricing in the manner these various 7nm rumors anticipate. Prior to the introduction of the Ryzen 7 family, which debuted as high as $500, AMD seized leadership of various markets on two occasions: The introduction of the Athlon 64, and the launch of the Athlon 64 X2. The first re-established AMD’s 64-bit chip as a superior solution in many consumer applications after the Athlon XP had lost that crown. The second gave AMD a serious claim to overall superiority, even in rendering and multi-threaded apps where it had previously lagged the P4 thanks to the latter’s support for Hyper-Threading.