Comment on Mantle Boost

Joel ,

You ought to take a lesson in logical reasoning.

Mantle mostly helps in "CPU bound" situation does lead to a conclusion that "it’s actually for boosting low-end CPUs."

CPU-bound vs. GPU-bound is a relative comparison of a GPU and a CPU. While low-end CPU is the result of a comparison between CPUs. One measure (CPU/GPU) simply cannot lead to another (CPU/CPU).

You could have a PC with the highest end CPU currently available, but still being CPU-bound due to the GPU being even more powerful. In such a case, Mantle will offer big gains. Similarly, you could have a low-end Celeron paired with a even lower GPU, and Mantle will help a bit but not much.

AMD 1Q04 Guidance Up 25% YoY

AMD had the great 4Q03, which showed a 9% sequential growth from 3Q03.
1Q04 will be down sequentially, but is guided up 25% from 1Q03, from 1.09 billion of revenue in 1Q 2013 to 1.36 billion in 1Q 2014.

AMD put the 8-core Jaguar AMD64 APUs used in XB1 and PS4 into the Graphics category. If you count the XB1 and PS4 as CPUs, you see AMD CPU business increasing at a 40% rate. This is AMD's way of getting more business without alerting Intel, which is a one-trick-pony, but has the resources to acquire the necessary IP. PC business is in perpetual decline. AMD's strategy is to become an chip solutions provider, not a PC component maker.

AMD is no longer endangered by Intel's price wars and illegal marketing ploys. With 55% of its revenue from the non-computing solutions group, AMD has disengaged from Intel's claws. 

AMD's marketing cap is 50% of its revenue. NVDA has less revenue than AMD, but its market cap is 3x of AMD. If AMD can distance itself from the declining PC market, its valuation should be at the same level of NVIDIA or more. The Shorts of AMD like you to treat AMD as a dying company. But AMD has stabilized on its own turf, and is thriving on its broad IP portfolio, which can't be matched by Intel.

Now Intel is fragged

ExtremeTech  shows HSA enabled AMD Kaveri frags Intel Haswell i5-4670S by being almost 500% faster in a LibreOffice Calc test

AMD is no longer just a chips provider

It has become a solutions provider.

It is on a different level from one-trick-ponies such as INTEL and NVIDIA.

NVDA is dead man walking. It lost the gaming market, as the gaming industry standardizing around AMD hardware and APIs; it lost a major chunk of the pro graphics market; it is far behind in OpenCL performance; and it is the hopeless underdog in cryptocurrency mining.

Once HSA gets more software support, Intel will also find its x86 cores no match to AMD APUs.