That's really good to everyone. Go AMD.

AMD on the Ryze (N) = 😀 I saw what you did there Boss 🙂 Great to see AMD doing so well. Healthy competition on the cpu market it is always welcome and it does benefit all of us enthusiasts.

schmidtbag:

I actually get what Kaarme is saying. What he/she is implying is if a company can't keep up with the demand, those are potential sales that have been lost. Literally, it isn't a loss in profit, but in one perspective, it is money AMD will not get (and therefore a profit they will not see). This is especially bad [for AMD] if Nvidia got the sale instead.

Like i said, i understand that having equal supply and demand is ideal, but that almost never happens. And i understand that sending business my competitors way, potentially, isn't ideal (though i'm not sure if its exactly valid here, since nvidia has nothing new to compete, and by that i mean, they have competing products obviously, but if people wanted the nvidia equivalents, they have had a long time to get them). If i were to make a product, i wouldn't be upset that i can't make enough of what i was worried potentially wouldn't sell well, i'd be ecstatic that i can't keep up with how much people want my product, and do whatever i can to remedy that situation. Whereas what Kaarme states makes it seem like it's a bad thing that a product is selling too much...

Aura89:

Like i said, i understand that having equal supply and demand is ideal, but that almost never happens. And i understand that sending business my competitors way, potentially, isn't ideal (though i'm not sure if its exactly valid here, since nvidia has nothing new to compete, and by that i mean, they have competing products obviously, but if people wanted the nvidia equivalents, they have had a long time to get them). If i were to make a product, i wouldn't be upset that i can't make enough of what i was worried potentially wouldn't sell well, i'd be ecstatic that i can't keep up with how much people want my product, and do whatever i can to remedy that situation. Whereas what Kaarme states makes it seem like it's a bad thing that a product is selling too much...

You're missing a very big point here. AMD NEEDS the revenue. As such, any potential lost sale is bad. As a business, you never want to drive customers to a competitor. That's what causes businesses to fail. If you repeatedly suffer stock deficiencies, eventually customers stop looking to you for products and instead become loyal to your competition. So, while having demand outpace supply might seem like a better position than the contrary, it can actually be just as bad in the long run. Especially in a market where brand loyalty is a dominant factor in sales. Brand loyalty is easy to lose when there's no product availability. As for availability of competing NVidia products. Keep in mind, components fail every day. That's why products stay on the market. Just because someone wasn't looking to upgrade 6 months ago, doesn't mean they don't have a need to upgrade today. There are still people running older cards that are starting to fail. Those people will be looking to buy new cards. For the vast majority of them, it won't matter that the GTX1080 is a year old. If they have the funds to buy it, all that is going to matter is that it's immediately available. Nobody is going to look at the fact that the cards sitting on the shelf have been on the market for the last year and decide to hold off and see if an AMD equivalent will be available soon. Instead, they are going to grab the card sitting on the shelf, pay for it and head home happily, knowing that they'll be able to game again soon. It's simple economics. For a company to survive and profit, supply must be as close to demand as possible. If supply greatly outpaces demand, the company loses money. If demand greatly outpaces supply, the company essentially loses money through lost sales.

Aura89:

Like i said, i understand that having equal supply and demand is ideal, but that almost never happens. And i understand that sending business my competitors way, potentially, isn't ideal (though i'm not sure if its exactly valid here, since nvidia has nothing new to compete, and by that i mean, they have competing products obviously, but if people wanted the nvidia equivalents, they have had a long time to get them). If i were to make a product, i wouldn't be upset that i can't make enough of what i was worried potentially wouldn't sell well, i'd be ecstatic that i can't keep up with how much people want my product, and do whatever i can to remedy that situation. Whereas what Kaarme states makes it seem like it's a bad thing that a product is selling too much...

It doesn't matter if Nvidia has anything new, especially when you consider that Pascal is arguably a newer technology than Vega. People are still going to buy Nvidia if the AMD equivalent is unavailable or priced poorly, and that ultimately comes down to being a success for Nvidia and a failure on AMD's part. I wouldn't phrase the situation as "AMD is selling too much product" but rather "AMD isn't producing enough product", because in the latter perspective, that really is a bad thing. Both phrases imply the same thing. To reiterate - yes, it is good to out-sell your stock, when your production estimates are pretty close to the demand. That's a significant caveat. AMD isn't just barely keeping up production, they're struggling to keep up. There is a hefty amount of revenue they are missing out on and are basically handing to Nvidia. The last thing AMD needs is for Nvidia to gain more marketshare. I'd say Sykozis described the situation pretty well.

sykozis:

You're missing a very big point here. AMD NEEDS the revenue. As such, any potential lost sale is bad.

No, that's a bunch of nonsense. You're basically trying to state that it'd be better if their product was not as "hot" of a seller as it currently is. I'm not missing any point. As a company, you want your product to sell like hot cakes. If you only prep to sell 1000 of an item in a month, because you expect that's as good as it'll sell, at best, and then you get demand for 2000, then you are doing extremely well. Does that mean they should ramp up production to try and not lose potential customers? Absolutely. My goodness you guys are so backwards when it comes to business it's amazing. You're basically saying that you only do good business if you don't have a product that exceeds expectation, lol? Yeah that's totally what companies want "Oh hey lets not make anything TOO good, we don't want to have a product that everybody wants beyond our ability to provide it to them all at once" Bunch of complete nonsense. Look, this is your scenarios: You can only product 1000 of something per month, and that's it. What do you want? 1. To sell all 1000 of them, and have demand for more, to continue to produce 1000 each month, and hope you can find a way to produce more in the future? 2. To sell 800 (which is about as good as you can get to meeting supply and demand) of them the first month, continue the 1000 each month, but demand is less each month meaning your production of the product will also have to decrease after a few months. 3. To sell 200 of them the first month, meaning you don't have to create another batch for quite some time, since obviously no one wants your product. Which do you choose? The one that guarantees you 4000 sold in 4 months and potentially more if you find a way to produce more? The one that gives you, at best, 3200 after 4 months, and will cause production to lower? Or the one that gets you 800 in 4 months, and you finally get to produce another batch? I feel like you guys are making this nonsense idea that AMD had the ability to make more then they do, and how exactly do you get to make up that nonsense idea? You don't know what they are capable of. No matter the reason for the lower stock, or just over demand, be it because they didn't expect it to sell well enough, or that they can't produce it fast enough, NO COMPANY would ever want their product to not be selling BETTER then they'd hope. But apparently that's just too hard for anyone here to understand, because apparently, doing worse, is doing better. Totally makes sense guys. Totally. Bunch of complete and total nonsense here.

schmidtbag:

"AMD isn't producing enough product"

So what you're saying is, it'd be better if AMD was still only able to produce as much as they are currently(since that's something no one can change), but that their product wasn't selling as well, because that'd be better for AMD. Makes sense. I think you guys are 100% missing the point here. No one, including me, is saying that it wouldn't be better if AMD could produce more if possible, or if it it/was possible, if they didn't produce more (given the delay of the GPU and HBM2, i'd say it's not possible) at the very beginning. But all of that is beside the point. None of that can be changed. If AMD can't produce more then they are currently producing, and NOTHING CAN BE DONE ABOUT THAT, there's absolutely NO COMPANY in the world that would not want to be selling more then they can keep up with. If you can only produce 1000 each month of something, and there's NOTHING you can do about that, your BEST CASE SCENARIO would be to sell all 1000 each month, with demand for more, and continue to sell out as long as you can, rather then only sell 80% of what you can produce. You CAN'T DO ANYTHING about the fact that you can only produce 1000, so why the hell would you want to sell less then you can produce? You wouldn't, and it's complete and total nonsense to think you would. Again, no one is saying you wouldn't WANT to be able to produce more, but where do you guys think this stuff gets produced? Out of thin air? That's not how it works. Just because you want to produce 50000 of whatever you have each month, doesn't mean you can, and if you can only produce 1000, then you better hope you sell all 1000 and have demand for more if you want a successful product that makes you money.

Aura89 I really think you're just arguing with us for the sake of arguing. Many of your points we are in agreement with and you don't even realize it. We get your points, you just seem to be ignoring the big the picture. We're not saying AMD would be better off selling a less successful product and I really don't understand where you're getting that from. We're not even remotely implying AMD wants to sell less than they can produce. We're not necessarily ridiculing AMD for not producing enough (because like you said, there's only so much they can do about production). Bringing up how much AMD should/could have made isn't really the point of the discussion. The only point me, skyozis, and kaarme are trying to make is due to the lack of product, AMD is missing out on some major revenue, while Nvidia is gaining those lost sales. It doesn't matter what the reason is, the fact of the matter is this is what's happening. It's really that simple.

Aura89:

My goodness you guys are so backwards when it comes to business it's amazing. You're basically saying that you only do good business if you don't have a product that exceeds expectation, lol? Yeah that's totally what companies want "Oh hey lets not make anything TOO good, we don't want to have a product that everybody wants beyond our ability to provide it to them all at once"

None of us are "backwards". It's simple economics. Nobody is saying that AMD should try to bring a less successful product to market. Fact is, Supply and Demand is how every market works. If AMD can't meet the demand, NVidia will. Every company has to sell a product to make a profit. If you can't supply the product, you can't sell the product and therefore, can't make a profit. The reason selling out of a product isn't necessarily a good thing is the fact that we don't know what the supply figures actually look like. If they're managing 100,000 units a month and selling out, that's potentially good. If they're only managing 1,000 units a month and selling out, that's bad. The production, projection and sales figures make a huge difference as to whether or not selling out of a product is good or bad. If production is based on sales projections and not production limitations, selling out may not be a huge issue if production can be increased to meet updated sales projections. If production is limited below sale projections and can't be ramped up, selling out is a bad thing. Anything that can lead to potential stock value loss, such as production problems, is bad. Then people start losing money in the stock market and the company can be held legally accountable, such as the case of AMD and Llano. Sales Projections were high but there were so many "production issues" that demand faded and Llano was ultimately a failure.

Not sure how this turned into a thread about GPUs, but I'll throw in my two cents here. I think AMD is taking a cautious approach here, and for good reason. They've been down this road before with the 290 during the Bitcoin boom and it did not end favorably for them (when ASICs came about, miners flooded the second-hand market with used 290s and AMD found it impossible to sell their GPUs, forcing them to take a massive writedown). Although Ethereum mining might not end so abruptly, the nature of cruptocurrencies means that changes can happen very rapidly and AMD does not want to be caught with another massive stock of inventory that they cannot move (I think they'd rather lose sales to Nvidia than have to take another large writedown). Nvidia, on the other hand, can feel free to take risks. If the cryptocurrency boom comes to an end then they can just go back to selling their GPUs to gamers (gamers overwhelmingly buy Nvidia cards so any excess will quickly be swallowed up). This is why Jensen Huang was happy with the mining situation while Lisa Su was hesitant about it.

D3M1G0D:

Not sure how this turned into a thread about GPUs, but I'll throw in my two cents here. I think AMD is taking a cautious approach here, and for good reason. They've been down this road before with the 290 during the Bitcoin boom and it did not end favorably for them (when ASICs came about, miners flooded the second-hand market with used 290s and AMD found it impossible to sell their GPUs, forcing them to take a massive writedown). Although Ethereum mining might not end so abruptly, the nature of cruptocurrencies means that changes can happen very rapidly and AMD does not want to be caught with another massive stock of inventory that they cannot move (I think they'd rather lose sales to Nvidia than have to take another large writedown). Nvidia, on the other hand, can feel free to take risks. If the cryptocurrency boom comes to an end then they can just go back to selling their GPUs to gamers (gamers overwhelmingly buy Nvidia cards so any excess will quickly be swallowed up). This is why Jensen Huang was happy with the mining situation while Lisa Su was hesitant about it.

It turned into a thread about GPUs because someone mentioned that AMD was selling out of Vega based cards and claimed that it was "great". Although, it's just as much a thread about simple economics as it is about GPUs. Someone seems to have a hard time understanding that lost sales as a result of low supply is bad for any company though.