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This will be a key year for AMD, if they cannot make a GPU that performs as well as a 1080ti then Nvidia will clobber them with Volta.

AlphaSite 9y ago
AMD has GPU and CPU, so their diversity both helps and hinders them. So I don't think they can die, unless both go catastrophically wrong simultaneously, instead they choke the other of resources.
DCKing 9y ago
Even if they make a GPU that is competitive with the 1080 Ti it will be much too late. If NVIDIA stays on top of their game, there's no way AMD can compete with them with a far smaller R&d budget and mindshare. Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is (and prices need to drop a lot before mining becomes unprofitable). AMD will likely never compete with Nvidia again in high performance unless they outsmart them somehow. Their next architecture, Navi, could be a very smart idea but I wouldn't bet much on it. It will also not launch before 2019. Their current Vega architecture does not seem to have what it takes to compete against Pascal, even with scheduled process improvements. Let's not forget that AMD is not dependant on having the top end gaming performance [1]. They can make money with their GPU tech in lots of different ways and they are in fact doing this quite well. So while we don't have to worry about AMD's viability as a GPU company, we should expect the market to become stale from a performance competition perspective. Which is what has driven the market up to around 2016. [1]: In fact their 2013 Radeon R9 290X, their last GPU that was the highest gaming performance in the market by most measures, performed very poorly because of a cryptocurrency mining bubble (gamers couldn't buy one at first, and cheap second hand 290Xes a few months later destroyed AMD's sales) at the time and simply because the card did not have Nvidia's brand recognition. You have to wonder whether they even want to compete in this segment if they were even able to.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Exactly. AMD will do well, but that may not be noticeable in the most visible way: top end gaming benchmarks. Nvidia has huge advantages in their architecture, resources and most importantly in their game driver team (both explicitly and implicitly because game devs use Nvidia cards). Those aren't going to disappear any time soon. AMD will compete the way they always have: with a lower gross margin. Nvidia's 60% gross margin vs AMD's 35% means that you get more transistors per dollar buying AMD. Nvidia uses their transistors more efficiently, so there is always trade-offs and room for AMD. And they've taken some really smart moves to exploit that. Shifting the industry away from DX11 towards DX12 and Vulkan has significantly eroded the advantage that Nvidia gets from their driver group. I also see ROCm and open source Linux drivers as a good way of eroding Nvidia's CUDA dominance.
- Nursie 9y ago
  >> (and prices need to drop a lot before mining becomes unprofitable). I'm watching, with interest, what happens with tether over the coming weeks and months. The tether company (basically bitfinex) have issued almost a billion dollars in tether tokens this year so far, around 2 billion in total. It seems that they get issued and used by bitfinex to buy bitcoin on bitfinex whenever the price dives. The latest printing was just yesterday. I'm not willing to say whether this will explode, or soon, or what effect it might have when it does, but it certainly looks as if someone is printing dollar tokens out of thin air to prop up BTC. If it causes a BTC crash, it'll trigger an all-round crash of the cryptocurrency space, and this may finally reduce pressure on graphics cards.
  - riku_iki 9y ago
    They claim tether is supported by real USDs on parent company account. So, they don't print tethers from air if this is true.
    - Nursie 9y ago
      This is not really a credible claim any more, IMHO, as they have created close to a billion tethers in the last three weeks, and they magically seem to appear when the market goes down. If true, it would represent around 10% of the fiat that has ever been put into cryptocurrency, going in by that one route, in three weeks, during a bear market. Does that seem likely?
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is Isn't that a good thing from AMD's perspective? "People can't get our GPUs because they're sold out everywhere" seems like a nice problem to have.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    It's definitely not in the same problem class as "Nobody is buying our product" But it risks them having much of a position in the gaming market, long term. And right now whilst the mining market is lucrative, I would be trying to cater to the gaming market too, for longer term stability.
  - gruez 9y ago
    If crytpocurrency prices tank, those mining GPUs will flood the second hand market, depressing demand for new GPUs. This will be exacerbated by the fact that they don't have any new/faster products (nothing announced for 2018); why buy new when you could get 80-100% of the performance for 50% of the price?
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Corporate, government, academic enterprise customers don't buy 2nd hand hardware. They should focus there. Trying to battle in the consumer GPU market would be much harder IMO.
      - gruez 9y ago
        and what do Corporate, government, academic enterprise customers use graphics cards for? machine learning and 3d rendering (like CAD). that's not a very big market compared to the (hundreds of?) millions PC gamers out there.
    - DCKing 9y ago
      It's interesting AMD and Nvidia have no specific consumer GPU tech announced for 2018. It makes sense too. AMD's cards are all sold out all the time - it seems they cannot produce enough to meet the market demand. There are rumors of them using a 12nm process better tailored for high power components like GPUs (their current 14nm process is apparently tailored for smartphone chips), but they don't need to. They will sell everything they can make anyway. Nvidia basically also sells everything they have - Nvidia cards in general mine worse but are still profitable if you can't get AMD. Moreover, AMD is barely competitive with their current offerings (especially in performance per watt), so even without mining they have no compelling reason to start pushing new GPUs. There's no incentive at the moment to release new GPUs. Hell, Nvidia and especially AMD could be wise to take some time and restrategize to specifically start catering to the new cryptocurrency market. Find ways to produce more rather than faster cards. It's a stale market, and will likely continue to be so in the near future.
baldfat 9y ago
I don't think the $700+ space is where they need to win. They need to win the APU, $200 and even less so the $500 price points. They already have a very compelling server GPU with the Radeon Instinct MI cards.
- stryk 9y ago
  Not to mention that right now, and for the relatively foreseeable future, the $700 MSRP space is actually the $1400 space. Barring some major development shift in crypto currencies or them seriously ramping up manufacturing in a hurry, I don't see that changing until they start bringing out the mining-centric GPUs they've been touting. And even then who knows what kind of supply of those there will be.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    well the $200 is also realistically in the $450 space :(
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    They should raise MSRP
    - baldfat 9y ago
      Why in the world do you want artificially inflated prices to be official prices? Not only do consumers get hurt but also PC Makers would need to pay the higher inflated prices. This is 100% a supply issue. The miners want video cards but the manufacturers are afraid the whole world of miners will burst and then they have way to much supply.
      - cwkoss 9y ago
        AMD is effectively subsidizing PC makers by selling them hardware significantly below actual market prices. Consumers are already hurting from lack of supply. If they could reinvest these profits in speeding along increases in production capacity, seems like it would generally improve the market for everyone but the PC makers who are getting underpriced hardware.
cwkoss 9y ago
GPU prices have doubled in the last year because of cryptocurrency mining, and most high-end GPUs simply cannot be found in stores. I think production volume will be more important than hardware performance in terms of how successful AMD is in 2018. If they can supply enough mid-tier cards to meet unsatisfied demand, they could see huge growth.

AlphaSite 9y ago

AMD has GPU and CPU, so their diversity both helps and hinders them. So I don't think they can die, unless both go catastrophically wrong simultaneously, instead they choke the other of resources.

DCKing 9y ago

Even if they make a GPU that is competitive with the 1080 Ti it will be much too late. If NVIDIA stays on top of their game, there's no way AMD can compete with them with a far smaller R&d budget and mindshare. Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is (and prices need to drop a lot before mining becomes unprofitable). AMD will likely never compete with Nvidia again in high performance unless they outsmart them somehow. Their next architecture, Navi, could be a very smart idea but I wouldn't bet much on it. It will also not launch before 2019. Their current Vega architecture does not seem to have what it takes to compete against Pascal, even with scheduled process improvements. Let's not forget that AMD is not dependant on having the top end gaming performance [1]. They can make money with their GPU tech in lots of different ways and they are in fact doing this quite well. So while we don't have to worry about AMD's viability as a GPU company, we should expect the market to become stale from a performance competition perspective. Which is what has driven the market up to around 2016. [1]: In fact their 2013 Radeon R9 290X, their last GPU that was the highest gaming performance in the market by most measures, performed very poorly because of a cryptocurrency mining bubble (gamers couldn't buy one at first, and cheap second hand 290Xes a few months later destroyed AMD's sales) at the time and simply because the card did not have Nvidia's brand recognition. You have to wonder whether they even want to compete in this segment if they were even able to.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
Exactly. AMD will do well, but that may not be noticeable in the most visible way: top end gaming benchmarks. Nvidia has huge advantages in their architecture, resources and most importantly in their game driver team (both explicitly and implicitly because game devs use Nvidia cards). Those aren't going to disappear any time soon. AMD will compete the way they always have: with a lower gross margin. Nvidia's 60% gross margin vs AMD's 35% means that you get more transistors per dollar buying AMD. Nvidia uses their transistors more efficiently, so there is always trade-offs and room for AMD. And they've taken some really smart moves to exploit that. Shifting the industry away from DX11 towards DX12 and Vulkan has significantly eroded the advantage that Nvidia gets from their driver group. I also see ROCm and open source Linux drivers as a good way of eroding Nvidia's CUDA dominance.
Nursie 9y ago
>> (and prices need to drop a lot before mining becomes unprofitable). I'm watching, with interest, what happens with tether over the coming weeks and months. The tether company (basically bitfinex) have issued almost a billion dollars in tether tokens this year so far, around 2 billion in total. It seems that they get issued and used by bitfinex to buy bitcoin on bitfinex whenever the price dives. The latest printing was just yesterday. I'm not willing to say whether this will explode, or soon, or what effect it might have when it does, but it certainly looks as if someone is printing dollar tokens out of thin air to prop up BTC. If it causes a BTC crash, it'll trigger an all-round crash of the cryptocurrency space, and this may finally reduce pressure on graphics cards.
- riku_iki 9y ago
  They claim tether is supported by real USDs on parent company account. So, they don't print tethers from air if this is true.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    This is not really a credible claim any more, IMHO, as they have created close to a billion tethers in the last three weeks, and they magically seem to appear when the market goes down. If true, it would represent around 10% of the fiat that has ever been put into cryptocurrency, going in by that one route, in three weeks, during a bear market. Does that seem likely?
Ajedi32 9y ago
> Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is Isn't that a good thing from AMD's perspective? "People can't get our GPUs because they're sold out everywhere" seems like a nice problem to have.
- Nursie 9y ago
  It's definitely not in the same problem class as "Nobody is buying our product" But it risks them having much of a position in the gaming market, long term. And right now whilst the mining market is lucrative, I would be trying to cater to the gaming market too, for longer term stability.
- gruez 9y ago
  If crytpocurrency prices tank, those mining GPUs will flood the second hand market, depressing demand for new GPUs. This will be exacerbated by the fact that they don't have any new/faster products (nothing announced for 2018); why buy new when you could get 80-100% of the performance for 50% of the price?
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Corporate, government, academic enterprise customers don't buy 2nd hand hardware. They should focus there. Trying to battle in the consumer GPU market would be much harder IMO.
    - gruez 9y ago
      and what do Corporate, government, academic enterprise customers use graphics cards for? machine learning and 3d rendering (like CAD). that's not a very big market compared to the (hundreds of?) millions PC gamers out there.
  - DCKing 9y ago
    It's interesting AMD and Nvidia have no specific consumer GPU tech announced for 2018. It makes sense too. AMD's cards are all sold out all the time - it seems they cannot produce enough to meet the market demand. There are rumors of them using a 12nm process better tailored for high power components like GPUs (their current 14nm process is apparently tailored for smartphone chips), but they don't need to. They will sell everything they can make anyway. Nvidia basically also sells everything they have - Nvidia cards in general mine worse but are still profitable if you can't get AMD. Moreover, AMD is barely competitive with their current offerings (especially in performance per watt), so even without mining they have no compelling reason to start pushing new GPUs. There's no incentive at the moment to release new GPUs. Hell, Nvidia and especially AMD could be wise to take some time and restrategize to specifically start catering to the new cryptocurrency market. Find ways to produce more rather than faster cards. It's a stale market, and will likely continue to be so in the near future.

baldfat 9y ago

I don't think the $700+ space is where they need to win. They need to win the APU, $200 and even less so the $500 price points. They already have a very compelling server GPU with the Radeon Instinct MI cards.

stryk 9y ago
Not to mention that right now, and for the relatively foreseeable future, the $700 MSRP space is actually the $1400 space. Barring some major development shift in crypto currencies or them seriously ramping up manufacturing in a hurry, I don't see that changing until they start bringing out the mining-centric GPUs they've been touting. And even then who knows what kind of supply of those there will be.
- baldfat 9y ago
  well the $200 is also realistically in the $450 space :(
- cwkoss 9y ago
  They should raise MSRP
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Why in the world do you want artificially inflated prices to be official prices? Not only do consumers get hurt but also PC Makers would need to pay the higher inflated prices. This is 100% a supply issue. The miners want video cards but the manufacturers are afraid the whole world of miners will burst and then they have way to much supply.
    - cwkoss 9y ago
      AMD is effectively subsidizing PC makers by selling them hardware significantly below actual market prices. Consumers are already hurting from lack of supply. If they could reinvest these profits in speeding along increases in production capacity, seems like it would generally improve the market for everyone but the PC makers who are getting underpriced hardware.

cwkoss 9y ago

GPU prices have doubled in the last year because of cryptocurrency mining, and most high-end GPUs simply cannot be found in stores. I think production volume will be more important than hardware performance in terms of how successful AMD is in 2018. If they can supply enough mid-tier cards to meet unsatisfied demand, they could see huge growth.