Here's The 411 On AMD's New EPYC Chips

The market reacted very positively to Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD’s EPYC launch event on Tuesday, sending AMD shares higher by 7.5 percent. But not everyone sees EPYC making a meaningful impact for AMD in the near term.

Investors shouldn’t expect the EPYC story to begin until 2018 at the earliest, Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer wrote on Tuesday.

Much like it did with Ryzen, AMD will likely look to price EPYC very aggressively at first in order to gain market share, Schafer wrote. These low prices mean that investors shouldn’t expect EPYC to provide a boost to margins.

“We remain on the sidelines here, seeing limited near-term profitability in the model as AMD works to ramp its new high-end initiatives: Ryzen client CPUs, Naples server CPUs [and] Vega high-end GPU accelerators,” Schafer wrote.

Related Link: As All Eyes Turn To AMD, Intel Has Scheduled Its Own Launch Event In July

For longer-term AMD investors, here’s a rundown of Schafer’s key takeaways from Tuesday’s event:

• Entry-level 8-core EPYC processors are expected to compete with Intel Corporation INTC’s duel-socket E5-2603 CPUS, while high-end 32-core processors are expected to compete with Broadwell E5-2699 processors.
• AMD is hoping its single-socket EPYC chips can compete favorably on price and performance with duel-socket E5 servers.
• Early EPYC partners include Microsoft Corporation MSFT, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co HPE, SAMSUNG ELECTRONIC KRW5000 SSNLF, DropBox, Xilinx, Inc. XLNX, Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. MLNX and VMware, Inc. VMW.
• AMD plans to move from 14nm to 7nm and 7nm+ chips by 2020.

At the end of the day, Schafer urged investors to be realistic about the potential impactEPYC and Ryzen will have on AMD’s bottom line.

“While Ryzen client processors seem to be generating initial traction, it remains unclear if AMD will be able to secure large enough share vs. INTC/NVDA in server CPUs/GPUs to allow meaningful and sustainable profitability,” Schafer concluded.

Oppenheimer maintains a Perform rating for AMD stock.

Image Credit: By Rico Shen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons