Taiwan media: Intel’s pain is AMD’s happiness

AMD made a very strong forecast for third-quarter revenue, beating analysts’ expectations, and shares rose more than 15% in after-hours trading, matching Intel’s decline.

AMD announced on the 28th that second-quarter revenue was $1.86 billion and earnings per share were 16 cents, which was quite good. AMD CEO Su Zifeng said sales of Ryzen and Epyc more than doubled year-over-year. Full-year 2020 revenue is expected to grow by nearly 32%, also above market expectations.

Still, that’s not the reason why AMD has been warmly welcomed by investors. AMD also hinted that the company is stealing orders from Intel in the server chip market, and forecast third-quarter revenue of $2.55 billion, up 42 percent from a year earlier and ahead of analysts’ expectations of $2.3 billion. Of course, compared to Intel, AMD’s scale is less than 1/3. But AMD has made it clear that it will grab double-digit server market share this year, up from less than 1 percent before 2017.

In particular, Intel’s recent 7-nanometer setback has pushed up AMD even more. Although many research reports claim that, in fact, the single-thread performance of Intel’s 10nm processor is actually higher than AMD’s 7nm, but unfortunately, in terms of price, Intel has no advantage at all. Regardless of 5nm, AMD’s next use of TSMC’s new 7nm enhanced process is enough to tie it with Intel. At the end of this year, AMD’s 7nm + Zen3 core architecture will come out, and TSMC’s 5nm process Zen4 is expected to be mass-produced in 2022.

Therefore, the market speculates that when Intel’s 7nm chip is launched, TSMC is likely to have developed to 3nm. If AMD continues to maintain close cooperation with TSMC, Intel’s market share may lose blood. Although Intel has launched a contingency plan to cooperate with TSMC, the production capacity it can obtain may still be limited.

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