AMD stock downgraded due to imminent ETH ASIC Miner release

[aidanjt]

What the hell is it with this constant stream of stock market abuse directed against AMD? It's not as if they wont find customers for their GPUs if ASICs arrive.

[afiretruck]

What both companies really need is a genuine new generation of cards to distance themselves and devalue the last generation enough that people will want to stump up more for a new one. Will that come in time? Will that just be a rebadging exercise? If you can buy a RX 665* for £150 in a couple of months time that is comparable in some way to the (then over a year old) RX 580 then the second hand market will really struggle. I suspect we've plateaued for a while though.

* model name made up

Another thing, there seem to be Linux patches turning up for Vega 12 which implies some sort of new product imminent.

Speculation: AMD are replacing the Polaris line with small Vega chips. Could be just what we need.

[3dcandy]

ETH mining on asics is possible but isn't usually done because most mining software loads the dag into gpu ram and it's nearly 3gb in size. Sooooo they will just increase the dag again and these asics won't be profitable and you will need a 4 gig gpu just to mine...
Roundabouts springs to mind

[DanceswithUnix]

What both companies really need is a genuine new generation of cards to distance themselves and devalue the last generation enough that people will want to stump up more for a new one. Will that come in time? Will that just be a rebadging exercise? If you can buy a RX 665* for £150 in a couple of months time that is comparable in some way to the (then over a year old) RX 580 then the second hand market will really struggle. I suspect we've plateaued for a while though.

* model name made up

For that to happen the RX 660 will need as many transistors as an RX 580 which means a meaningful process shrink down to at least 10nm. I think if 10nm were ready for volume production then AMD wouldn't be messing around with 12nm Zen.

OTOH, developments for 7nm/10nm could reduce the cost of 14nm

ETH mining on asics is possible but isn't usually done because most mining software loads the dag into gpu ram and it's nearly 3gb in size. Sooooo they will just increase the dag again and these asics won't be profitable and you will need a 4 gig gpu just to mine...
Roundabouts springs to mind

Putting 8GB of ram on an ASIC wouldn't be hard. In fact, if the bulk of the contents doesn't change then 8GB of flash and 1GB of ram would be pretty cheap.

Edit: damn, have I just invented the cryptocurrency you can only mine on an SSD?

[scaryjim]

Speculation: AMD are replacing the Polaris line with small Vega chips. Could be just what we need.

AMD's roadmap for this year includes discrete Vega mobile, so I don't think there's any need to speculate on what chip the driver addresses. How that chip is made up, and whether it will make it into any desktop products, is open to wild speculation, however

... For that to happen the RX 660 will need as many transistors as an RX 580 which means a meaningful process shrink down to at least 10nm. I think if 10nm were ready for volume production then AMD wouldn't be messing around with 12nm Zen. ...

AFAIK AMD plans to go straight to 7nm for both CPUs and GPUs. Whether that will happen before the RX 600 series are released is rather questionable, though AFAIK AMD isn't planning any major GPU releases this year...

... Edit: damn, have I just invented the cryptocurrency you can only mine on an SSD? ...

There are several proof-of-storage cryptocurrencies out there already. So no

[Percy1983]

It really depends on how much you can get them for. Firstly I'd hold off unless you can get them (used) for < 50% RRP.

Assuming you can get them for that much, I'd recommend the Vega, as you'll have much better performance scaling and game support with a single card over crossfire.

Though, as you said, it does depend on how long you think it could last.

Well my other through is, it seems the RX580 is the mining king so they will probably be what floods the used market, I don't believe that many vega cards have gone to mining in comparison.

[afiretruck]

Well my other through is, it seems the RX580 is the mining king so they will probably be what floods the used market, I don't believe that many vega cards have gone to mining in comparison.

Good point. If/when the time comes I'll likely be getting a spare 580 or 2 for a living room VR machine, so hopefully they'll be reasonably priced.

[SHSPVR]

Don't forget it not just AMD it also apply to Nvidia as well Hexus

[aidanjt]

I think if 10nm were ready for volume production then AMD wouldn't be messing around with 12nm Zen.

Things are quite different on GPUs than CPUs, though. If a shader unit is defective it only represents a relatively trivial degradation in performance. Losing a CPU core on the other hand is quite significant. That makes GPUs far better candidates for process shrinks, even if the unrefined process kills off a bunch of shaders on the majority of chips, that just makes for a new product tier.

[DanceswithUnix]

Things are quite different on GPUs than CPUs, though. If a shader unit is defective it only represents a relatively trivial degradation in performance. Losing a CPU core on the other hand is quite significant. That makes GPUs far better candidates for process shrinks, even if the unrefined process kills off a bunch of shaders on the majority of chips, that just makes for a new product tier.

I suspect Samsung's limited 10nm production is all booked for the foreseeable though. Don't ask Intel about 10nm, it still doesn't seem to be going at all well. 10nm just isn't really a thing yet.

[3dcandy]

I suspect Samsung's limited 10nm production is all booked for the foreseeable though. Don't ask Intel about 10nm, it still doesn't seem to be going at all well. 10nm just isn't really a thing yet.

Samsungs capacity is gone for mobile Snapdragon SoC's and their Exynos stuff...plus v-nand and memory

[Sunderas]

Umm,so some analyst from one site says AMD stock needs to drop 30% and its newsworthy?? Surely in the light of the other scandal,this is more likely another attempt at stock shorting??

Just what I was thinking.

[Spud1]

AMD cards are more efficient for mining, so are in higher demand for mining.

Not especially to nit-pic (but I am going to anyway ) but this isn't strictly true - AMD cards *can* be more economical to mine specific coins at specific times, but currently for most GPU mineable coins you really want an Nvidia GPU over an AMD one, particularly for ETHash & Equihash based coins like Ether/ZEC/EXP etc. When AMD cards were significantly cheaper than the nvidia offerings @ the equivalent hash rate, it was a no brainer to go AMD, but as prices are not so different at the moment you are currently better off with an Nvidia card setup. If mining Equihash based coins for example I would be buying a bunch of 1070s rather than AMD cards as they are nearly 2x as protifable. If sticking wtih ETHash they are very similar with nvidia only being a few pence a day more profitable, but that adds up if you have lots of cards. Remember that profitability takes into account card cost, power requirements, hash rate and currently coin valuation so things like local power costs and the exchange you use to cash out makes a big difference. Its not so simple as AMD vs Nvidia

The source story seems a little bit ill-informed anyway - truely dedicated ASICs have very likely been mining ethereum for some time now, its just they have not been sold on the public market. Bitmain et al all mine with their ASICS themselves until they are reaching end of life from a difficulty/profitiability POV and then they start to sell to the public at ever decreasing prices as the profitability drops. The real change to ETH and the reason we might see a bit of relief on GPU prices is the upcoming switch from POW to POS, which completely changes the economics of mining (good explanation here if you are interested in why the swap will make a big difference https://blockgeeks.com/guides/proof-...roof-of-stake/ )

It's all "might" though as the serious miners - those who have the funds to invest in hardware - have not really been mining ETH on a GPU for a while..there are simply better options if your interest is in making money rather than in making ETH work as a currency.

edit: Just to add as some of the claims above may seem contrary to popular opinion...source for all the above is www.whattomine.com for profitability, various threads on bitcointalk.org for info on the ASICs/future of ETH, and my own experience mining crypto for the past few years.

[ohmaheid]

Latest stocks: Nvidia down 7.76% AMD down 4.21%

Seems like Nvidia is feeling the pressure more....despite Christopher Rollands predictions.

[spacein_vader]

Latest stocks: Nvidia down 7.76% AMD down 4.21%

Seems like Nvidia is feeling the pressure more....despite Christopher Rollands predictions.

Nvidia has a less diversified product set I guess?

[kalniel]

nVidia is probably more diversified. But it does show the futility of attributing movement down to a single factor - the recent autonomous car set-backs are at least as likely to be causing the slide given how much they've been pushing their tech for it.