Spoke to someone yesterday who works at DELL. They are in the middle of a corporate reorganization. He also said Dell and AMD are working together at an unprecedented level to push AI to the edge. AMD becoming dominant in datacenter CPUs helps speed things along and AMD having a broader silicon portfolio than INTC also helps.
Great writeup, super comprehensive. I learned so much. A future article idea could be talking more about what the mobile chip inference market would look like in the future. Would they be powered by ARM?
Also would love to hear about your thoughts around the share buyback program. I feel as though there's a better way to allocate cash. That said they only have $5B of cash on hand, so a $10B buyback must mean they're super bullish on the future of the company.
Thanks Ray, really appreciate your comment and I’m glad you liked the article.
It used to seem like ARM would dominate the mobile inference chip space, especially with the advancements from Apple and Qualcomm. But AMD has changed the landscape with their APUs. The benchmarks independent developers are achieving are super impressive. The biggest barrier is still software, but AMD is accelerating improvements and integrating well with the ecosystem. Framework offering AMD-based computers will also help popularize AMD options for running local LLMs.
Looking ahead, it's not just about running Copilot-style assistants. We’re moving toward a future where AI agents will also run locally, which means compute requirements will skyrocket. That’s a market where I believe AMD can thrive like few others. I should probably write a piece focused entirely on this.
As for the buyback, yeah, it’s a lot of cash. I have mixed thoughts. On one hand, what I mentioned in the article still holds true: it’s a vote of confidence. AMD is clearly saying they believe the stock is tremendously undervalued, and I agree. On the other hand, I can’t ignore the concern about how aggressive it is. This is a company at the edge of innovation, and attracting top-tier software talent is critical. Software engineers, especially those building this type of software stack, are expensive, often more so than hardware engineers.
That said, AMD has been investing heavily in this area, and the results speak for themselves. We’ll see how things unfold. At the end of the day, investing is often a matter of trust, and I believe Lisa Su has earned that trust from shareholders.
Hmm the AMD GPU chips are something I’m still skeptical about. In terms of CPU market, I do think they will have a share. In terms of GPU, they dont have much integrations and speed/cost wise they arent as competitive as NVDIA. These are feedbacks from some cloud customers. Contrary to what most believe, NVDIA is quite cost competitive for the same specs (actual price offering).
Integrations are the most crucial for adoption, and since AMD is x86_64, it’s easier to make the switch for existing software and programs from INTC to AMD.
Softwares are built on lots of integrations, so I’m unsure of the % AMD would capture much. Perhaps more of speculation at this moment.
Spoke to someone yesterday who works at DELL. They are in the middle of a corporate reorganization. He also said Dell and AMD are working together at an unprecedented level to push AI to the edge. AMD becoming dominant in datacenter CPUs helps speed things along and AMD having a broader silicon portfolio than INTC also helps.
Great writeup, super comprehensive. I learned so much. A future article idea could be talking more about what the mobile chip inference market would look like in the future. Would they be powered by ARM?
Also would love to hear about your thoughts around the share buyback program. I feel as though there's a better way to allocate cash. That said they only have $5B of cash on hand, so a $10B buyback must mean they're super bullish on the future of the company.
Thanks Ray, really appreciate your comment and I’m glad you liked the article.
It used to seem like ARM would dominate the mobile inference chip space, especially with the advancements from Apple and Qualcomm. But AMD has changed the landscape with their APUs. The benchmarks independent developers are achieving are super impressive. The biggest barrier is still software, but AMD is accelerating improvements and integrating well with the ecosystem. Framework offering AMD-based computers will also help popularize AMD options for running local LLMs.
Looking ahead, it's not just about running Copilot-style assistants. We’re moving toward a future where AI agents will also run locally, which means compute requirements will skyrocket. That’s a market where I believe AMD can thrive like few others. I should probably write a piece focused entirely on this.
As for the buyback, yeah, it’s a lot of cash. I have mixed thoughts. On one hand, what I mentioned in the article still holds true: it’s a vote of confidence. AMD is clearly saying they believe the stock is tremendously undervalued, and I agree. On the other hand, I can’t ignore the concern about how aggressive it is. This is a company at the edge of innovation, and attracting top-tier software talent is critical. Software engineers, especially those building this type of software stack, are expensive, often more so than hardware engineers.
That said, AMD has been investing heavily in this area, and the results speak for themselves. We’ll see how things unfold. At the end of the day, investing is often a matter of trust, and I believe Lisa Su has earned that trust from shareholders.
Hmm the AMD GPU chips are something I’m still skeptical about. In terms of CPU market, I do think they will have a share. In terms of GPU, they dont have much integrations and speed/cost wise they arent as competitive as NVDIA. These are feedbacks from some cloud customers. Contrary to what most believe, NVDIA is quite cost competitive for the same specs (actual price offering).
Integrations are the most crucial for adoption, and since AMD is x86_64, it’s easier to make the switch for existing software and programs from INTC to AMD.
Softwares are built on lots of integrations, so I’m unsure of the % AMD would capture much. Perhaps more of speculation at this moment.
Excellent article
Thanks!
You have to help people understand the importance of NPUs