Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

I am considering to buy some AMD shares today, after the pullback yesterday. Market cap is around 3.5 times sales, which is a lot, but considering the market potential of the processor, it still seems sensible to me (doubling of sales could be possible I think). Intel trades at a bit more than at 3 times sales (this is a flawed metric but in this case, a quick guesstimate).

I have read some comprehensive reviews of actual benchmark results of Ryzen and the results are really good. It is almost on par with Intel's high end processors. When has that been the case in the past years?

Regarding power, AMD actually is better than Intel, which many seem to oversee easily here. That makes it a very compelling product for servers and also has a big potential for laptops, granted that the right products will be released, which I think is possible since Lisa Su also showed to have a good understanding of the market when she turned around AMDs graphics card business.

For Intel, this may get ugly since they have to lower prices. This time, though, they cannot simply underprice AMD since AMD doesn't own the fabs anymore and I have doubts that Intel can compete in price with the foundries. Even AMDs margins could become better than Intel's, provided the right market volume.

This all could be the start of a next PC boom, which was the strongest when AMD and Intel fought toughest in the past. Maybe some of the PC vendors are a buy now.

AMD has to show that they can turn the momentum into better products, especially for servers and laptops. Designing good laptop processors will still be difficult for AMD, since we know from Haswell that much more than just process tech is needed to achieve this. We'll see how they do.

Ah, regarding the gaming benchmarks: Those are highly tuned to specific hardware, with lots of optimization, compiler tweaks etc. It is not unusual that they have issues with different hardware, no matter how performing it is. That's a matter of time and market penetration of AMDs processors. It's also the same reason that consoles with relative low power AMD hardware can outperform PCs with much higher specs. It's all about optimization.