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Bull of the Day: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

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Advanced Micro Devices ((AMD - Free Report) ) is currently a Zacks #2 Rank as EPS growth surges over 25% this year and is projected to jump another 50%+ in 2025. Next year's revenues are also forecast to rise over 25% to cross $30 billion.

AMD is also #2 in another way: next to NVIDIA (
(NVDA - Free Report) ) it is the only other manufacturer of advanced GPU semiconductor systems for accelerated high-performance computing (HPC).

Lisa Su Steals Intel's Lunch Money

Before we discuss how AMD chief Lisa Su is taking on NVIDIA in the GPU market with its new line of Instinct processors, let's review her revitalization of AMD in the past 5 years from a company with only $5 billion on the top line.

I always thought AMD was a bargain compared to NVIDIA, but in 2020 the rising of a new force was becoming clearer to more investors. I wrote about it here...

Release the Ryzen! AMD Roars in the Nanometer Wars

Advanced Micro Devices has strengthened its position in the semiconductor market on the back of its evolution as an enterprise-focus company from a pure-bred consumer-PC chip provider. AMD has emerged as a strong challenger to NVIDIA's dominance in the graphic processing unit or GPU market based on its Radeon chips.

In consumer-PC market, AMD has become a key challenger to Intel courtesy AMD Ryzen desktop processor family. The company's desktop-based processor offerings include Ryzen and high-end Ryzen Threadripper processors, among others. AMD Athlon and AMD PRO series of processors cater to commercial and consumer desktop PC market.

AMD's processors are primarily powered by the company's proprietary "Zen" CPU and "Vega" GPU architectures. The company’s acquisition of Xilinx has helped in expanding into multiple embedded markets. AMD now offers Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Adaptive SoCs, and Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) products.

The $1.9 billion acquisition of Pensando in 2022 expanded AMD’s footprint into the data center market, where it now offers high-performance data processing units (DPUs) and a software stack.

EPYC as the Datacenter AI Foundation

AMD has spent the last seven years developing AMD EPYC™ Series processors, a family of server CPUs that cater to every level of business and to a wide range of needs.

AMD EPYC™ processors are trusted to power a third of the world’s servers, and for good reason. Offering the world’s best data center CPU to enterprise customers, general-purpose AMD EPYC processors provide up to 96 core options that deliver up to 1.75x the performance per CPU watt.

Today, the lineup offers a wide range of options, supporting customers who are just starting to develop their own infrastructure as well as large enterprises looking to scale cloud and datacenter to new heights.

Instinct as the AI Factory Accelerator

Many AI workloads and use cases require more than what AMD EPYC CPUs can do alone. Large language models continue to grow into the hundreds of billions -- even trillions -- of parameters.

Extending the set of AI workloads managed effectively by AMD EPYC processors, comes the power of GPU acceleration, thanks to AMD Instinct™ accelerators.

Where AMD server CPUs manage small to medium models and mixed workload inference deployments, AMD accelerators facilitate high-volume, real-time AI training, dedicated AI deployments, medium to large models, and large-scale real-time inference, accelerating AI results for enterprises looking to make the most of new technologies.

AMD Instinct™ MI300 Series accelerators are uniquely well-suited to power even the most demanding AI and HPC workloads, offering exceptional compute performance, large memory density, high bandwidth memory, and support for specialized data formats.

The Path Ahead for the AI Duopoly

We recently heard NVIDIA's Jensen Huang state that demand for his company's new Blackwell GPU is "insane." Just another confirmation that this AI revolution is far from over as the build-out will extend the rest of this decade.

I often call NVIDIA and AMD the "AI Duopoly" because of their running head-start with GPU accelerators and datacenter infrastructure expertise. They will both be offering new generations of their best ideas every 18 months, just like iPhones.

A few weeks ago after Oracle earnings, founder and chairman Larry Ellison made some comments about the AI revolution that were startling. He said they currently had 162 datacenters but expected that to grow to between 1,000 and 2,000 over the next decade.

Since NVIDIA's Jensen Huang already has his eyes on helping a $1 trillion installed based of CPU-driven datacenters make the upgrade to GPU-accelerated designs, it only makes sense by logical extension that AMD will be participating in hundreds of billions worth of that transformation.

Learn more at today's AMD event Advancing AI. One thing I'll be listening for Lisa to talk about is the integration of the 1,000 engineers she "acquire-hired" in her $5 billion buyout of datacenter builder ZT Systems. A bold and genius talent grab that Wall Street loved.


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