After Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) badly missed investor expectations in its last earnings report, the company made up for it by announcing AWS instances and a 7nm data center GPU offering on Nov. 7.
AMD launched Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 accelerators, which are the first 7nm datacenter GPUs on the market. These chips will power HPC, deep learning, and cloud computing. In a practical and cost sense, these powerful chips will give customers an alternative to Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) computing. Look for at least a 10% savings on costs for leasing AMD-powered cloud computing offerings over Intel. With this offering, AMD jumps ahead with the raw computing power.
AMD said these chips run on HBM2 (second-generation high-bandwidth memory) with up to 1 TB/s memory bandwidth speeds. The GPUs also support PCIe 4.0 interconnect, which runs up to twice as fast as other x86 CPU-to-GPU interconnects. AMD’s Infinity Fabric link connects GPU-to-GPU, offering up to a six-fold increase in speeds over PCIe Gen 3.
For the week, AMD stock rose a modest 4% but did relatively well compared to chip stocks. Skyworks (NASDAQ: SWKS), which issued a weak forecast, fell 10% and set a negative tone for chip stocks. Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) fell 10.4%, Micron (NASDAQ: MU) was down 3%, and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) fell 4.3%. Nvidia reports results on Nov. 15 after market close.
