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With a $5000> card (MI50) AMD is forced to sell at a loss to be able to meet the same performance levels NVIDIA had for the same amount of money ($700) 2 years

With a $5000> card (MI50) AMD is forced to sell at a loss to be able to meet the same performance levels NVIDIA had for the same amount of money ($700) 2 years ago. If this is getting closer I think they need a better tape measurer. With 16GB of aquabolt HBM2 on a 7nm node there is no way AMD is losing less than $150 per card without even accounting for opportunity loss. In fact this card is the reason why the head of the RTG was fired when suggesting to sell it at $749 at a loss. The 2080 for all intents and purposes is a mid range die. The only thing AMD is competing on atm is price and for them it’s a lose lose situation until Navi comes out and that is only if Navi could actually be competitive above the $300 price bracket as it’s a Polaris successor its not clear if AMD will have anything on the level of the 2080 not to mention the 2080ti based on Navi. AMD had to drop the prices of VEGA to around $300 due to the RTX 2060 they are likely also losing money on that front, they are losing money on Radeon 7 and hopefully they will finally make money with Navi.

throwaway2048 8y ago
it is ridiculous to call a $750 GPU "midrange".
- dogma1138 8y ago
  It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. We’re about 1 month away from NVIDIA’s next quarterly report it will be really interesting to see how much revenue they got so far from Turing especially considering the 2060 was released only 1 month prior to the date their revenue will be reported on.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    The 2080 is 545mm^2. Intel's "HCC" 18-core Skylake Xeon is 485mm^2. There's nothing "mid-range" about a die at 545mm^2. Yeah, there are higher-end XCC Intel chips or higher end NVidia chips. But by any practical measurement, things pushing 500mm^2 or bigger is downright massive. Radeon VII is ~350mm^2, but on a very expensive 7nm process. Hard to tell what "high end" or "mid range" will be at 7nm right now, since there aren't too many chips being made to compare against.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Again it’s all relative, NVIDIA always used big dies to win and they are making money hand over fist. It doesn’t change the fact that the TU104 is a mid range die as far as the Turing lineup goes doesn’t matter if it’s 500mm^2 or 5M^2. Radeon 7 is a fairly large die for its processes on a very expensive node using the fastest memory around which barely beats the 1080ti and brings next to nothing new to the table over Vega, heck i doesn’t bring that many new things over Fiji but at least they finally have dot product support. The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. For compute the 2080 might edge it depending on the workload and especially for DL/ML due to the craptastic state of AMDs ecosystem even today. For HPC as in FP64 then the Rad 7 is worse perf/$ than the Titan V you can buy a Titan V 24GB for £2400 today and get 7 tflops of FP64. The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        > The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. I think there's a strong argument to future-proofing 4k gaming experiences. I think the 1080 Ti is a better pick, but the 1080 Ti is sold out in the US Market. The 2080's 8GB of VRAM is usable today, but I'm not entirely sure how long it will be before 4k games blow through that. 1080 Ti had 11GB of VRAM, Radeon 7 is a bit overkill at 16. But 8GB is solidly a mid-range VRAM size. > The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender. FP32 performance is also used in Adobe Premier (video editors). But yo man, 3d renders (like Blender) can take hours under normal circumstances. Its a solid market to try to accelerate.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Adobe Premiere doesn't care about the GPU much, even with pretty heavy effects and 8K you wouldn't notice the difference between a 1060 and a 2080ti, but one thing you usually don't want to do is to pair it with an AMD GPU due Adobe's craptastic support. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-vs-AMD-Radeon-Vega-1206/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2... And 8GB is more than enough, heck if AMD memory management worked as in dev's would've used it then 4GB is enough for 4K even today, there are plenty of GDC talks about it and how some games on average only accessed 3GB of memory for a given level the biggest ones were from Doom and Witcher 3 iirc. This is how the Xbox One X can do 4K even if it's at 30fps with only 12GB of RAM shared between the GPU and CPU and how even the PS4 pro can do 4K with 8GB and in all cases when they can't it's not a memory limitation but rather a fill rate / horsepower issue. I'll take NVIDIA's stellar memory management and compression and tiled rendering over AMD's 1TB of memory bandwidth and 16GB of memory for 4K gaming, and 4K gaming on PCs is well meh, I'm actually regretting getting a 4K monitor and a 1080ti SLI setup something which i will remediate once the 1440P FLAD HDR Gsync monitors come out to the market.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    > It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. yes and no. in a product marketed toward consumers, the price tiers have to be at least somewhat informed by what people are willing/able to pay. a boxster isn't an entry level car just because it's the cheapest one porsche makes.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      It’s an entry level Porsche, just like an entry level Quadro that may cost twice what a gaming card costs while being a 106 or even 107/8 die form NVIDIA is still a mainstream or low end card die.
- zmix 8y ago
  2005: it is ridiculous to call a $350 GPU "midrange".
  - pizzazzaro 8y ago
    And that statement still holds.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    A current midrange GPU is around $150-$250 according to the recommendations on https://logicalincrements.com https://logicalincrements.com (not affiliated, just a fan).
tyfon 8y ago
These consumer chips have 60 active CUs compared to 64 for the MI50 so this is probably just the "failed" MI50 chips that are being sold, not something they manufacture to that spec. If they didn't sell it it would have been a much higher loss (if there is one) I think.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  The MI50 has 60CU's and 16GB of memory, the MI60 has 64CU's and 32GB of memory. This is a MI50 with soldered display outputs since the MI cards lack them as they have no rasterization support in the driver.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    Ah I see, I somehow only thought of the MI60 as the MI50 and no "lower" range version of it. My bad! :)
jungler 8y ago
AMD doesn't have to win in discrete at all to make a killing. They only have to dominate the lower end, which they already are positioned to do with current APUs - these chips can manage 30hz/720p playability in most new games, which is easily ignored if your requirement is competitive gaming minimums or 4k, but in terms of price/performance, it's near unbeatable. The Radeon VII is ultimately just a repurposed workstation card given flagship treatment. It's not where AMD's business really is, ever since they went down the route of semi-custom and small dies. While pushing RTX could renew Nvidia's advantages, the only game console they're on these days is the Switch - no raytracing to be seen there. Developers accommodate the Geforce cards for PC releases, but AAA going console-first precludes designing most content around RTX. They've made a lot of moves to try to repurpose high end graphics for other markets, but it looks like it's going to be very rough for Nvidia in the next few years if they can't find a "blue ocean" that needs both speed and programmability.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  AMD's APUs are good but aren't really that popular with gamers, Intel's new iGPU also looks impressive as hell, as they are already competitive with Vega 8 with their current lineup this new one seems to be a powerhouse for integrated graphics. It seems that AMD will have competition on the APU side very soon, and I really hope Intel would pull it off and actually be competitive in the discrete market as well in 2020 or 2021 and that their GPU adventure isn't going to get a backroom abortion.
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    The problem is most people who game aren't "gamers". By which I mean they aren't necessarily interested in the hardware or anything else except "will this game run?".
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Most people that play current titles and invest in gaming might not care about the hardware but they aren't running on AMD APUs either they likely buy a best buy PC with a 1050 or a 1060 in it.
fwip 8y ago
Do you have a bill-of-materials you're using as an estimate, to say that $700 is selling at a loss?
grandmczeb 8y ago
> With 16GB of aquabolt HBM2 on a 7nm node there is no way AMD is losing less than $150 per card without even accounting for opportunity loss. Just curious, but how did you come up with that estimate?
fivefive55 8y ago
I'm sorry, but this just sounds like bullshit to me. "With a $5000> card (MI50) AMD is forced to sell at a loss to be able to meet the same performance levels NVIDIA had for the same amount of money ($700) 2 years ago." Source? What 2 year old nvidia card is beating the instinct mi50 at floating point math? Does it even support fp64? Nothing about that sounds even a bit true. "The 2080 for all intents and purposes is a mid range die." The second fastest gpu in the world is 'mid-range'. Yeah right. Not even close unless you only consult with millionaires for your part info. "AMD had to drop the prices of VEGA to around $300 due to the RTX 2060" Vega 64 competes with the 2070, it blows the 2060 out of the water. Also the price has gone down? Yeah, that's what happens when tech gets older. Prices drop. They always have and always will.

throwaway2048 8y ago

it is ridiculous to call a $750 GPU "midrange".

dogma1138 8y ago
It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. We’re about 1 month away from NVIDIA’s next quarterly report it will be really interesting to see how much revenue they got so far from Turing especially considering the 2060 was released only 1 month prior to the date their revenue will be reported on.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  The 2080 is 545mm^2. Intel's "HCC" 18-core Skylake Xeon is 485mm^2. There's nothing "mid-range" about a die at 545mm^2. Yeah, there are higher-end XCC Intel chips or higher end NVidia chips. But by any practical measurement, things pushing 500mm^2 or bigger is downright massive. Radeon VII is ~350mm^2, but on a very expensive 7nm process. Hard to tell what "high end" or "mid range" will be at 7nm right now, since there aren't too many chips being made to compare against.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Again it’s all relative, NVIDIA always used big dies to win and they are making money hand over fist. It doesn’t change the fact that the TU104 is a mid range die as far as the Turing lineup goes doesn’t matter if it’s 500mm^2 or 5M^2. Radeon 7 is a fairly large die for its processes on a very expensive node using the fastest memory around which barely beats the 1080ti and brings next to nothing new to the table over Vega, heck i doesn’t bring that many new things over Fiji but at least they finally have dot product support. The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. For compute the 2080 might edge it depending on the workload and especially for DL/ML due to the craptastic state of AMDs ecosystem even today. For HPC as in FP64 then the Rad 7 is worse perf/$ than the Titan V you can buy a Titan V 24GB for £2400 today and get 7 tflops of FP64. The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      > The simple reality is that for gaming the 2080 is still a better pick if only because of the RTX features. I think there's a strong argument to future-proofing 4k gaming experiences. I think the 1080 Ti is a better pick, but the 1080 Ti is sold out in the US Market. The 2080's 8GB of VRAM is usable today, but I'm not entirely sure how long it will be before 4k games blow through that. 1080 Ti had 11GB of VRAM, Radeon 7 is a bit overkill at 16. But 8GB is solidly a mid-range VRAM size. > The only case where the Radeon 7 would be better than the 2080 is likely in a small subset of GPU accelerated software that properly supports AMD GPUs e.g. blender. FP32 performance is also used in Adobe Premier (video editors). But yo man, 3d renders (like Blender) can take hours under normal circumstances. Its a solid market to try to accelerate.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Adobe Premiere doesn't care about the GPU much, even with pretty heavy effects and 8K you wouldn't notice the difference between a 1060 and a 2080ti, but one thing you usually don't want to do is to pair it with an AMD GPU due Adobe's craptastic support. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-vs-AMD-Radeon-Vega-1206/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2... And 8GB is more than enough, heck if AMD memory management worked as in dev's would've used it then 4GB is enough for 4K even today, there are plenty of GDC talks about it and how some games on average only accessed 3GB of memory for a given level the biggest ones were from Doom and Witcher 3 iirc. This is how the Xbox One X can do 4K even if it's at 30fps with only 12GB of RAM shared between the GPU and CPU and how even the PS4 pro can do 4K with 8GB and in all cases when they can't it's not a memory limitation but rather a fill rate / horsepower issue. I'll take NVIDIA's stellar memory management and compression and tiled rendering over AMD's 1TB of memory bandwidth and 16GB of memory for 4K gaming, and 4K gaming on PCs is well meh, I'm actually regretting getting a 4K monitor and a 1080ti SLI setup something which i will remediate once the 1440P FLAD HDR Gsync monitors come out to the market.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > It’s still a mid range die - TU104, the high end die is the TU102, it’s all relative. yes and no. in a product marketed toward consumers, the price tiers have to be at least somewhat informed by what people are willing/able to pay. a boxster isn't an entry level car just because it's the cheapest one porsche makes.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    It’s an entry level Porsche, just like an entry level Quadro that may cost twice what a gaming card costs while being a 106 or even 107/8 die form NVIDIA is still a mainstream or low end card die.
zmix 8y ago
2005: it is ridiculous to call a $350 GPU "midrange".
- pizzazzaro 8y ago
  And that statement still holds.
- majewsky 8y ago
  A current midrange GPU is around $150-$250 according to the recommendations on https://logicalincrements.com https://logicalincrements.com (not affiliated, just a fan).

tyfon 8y ago

These consumer chips have 60 active CUs compared to 64 for the MI50 so this is probably just the "failed" MI50 chips that are being sold, not something they manufacture to that spec. If they didn't sell it it would have been a much higher loss (if there is one) I think.

dogma1138 8y ago
The MI50 has 60CU's and 16GB of memory, the MI60 has 64CU's and 32GB of memory. This is a MI50 with soldered display outputs since the MI cards lack them as they have no rasterization support in the driver.
- tyfon 8y ago
  Ah I see, I somehow only thought of the MI60 as the MI50 and no "lower" range version of it. My bad! :)

jungler 8y ago

AMD doesn't have to win in discrete at all to make a killing. They only have to dominate the lower end, which they already are positioned to do with current APUs - these chips can manage 30hz/720p playability in most new games, which is easily ignored if your requirement is competitive gaming minimums or 4k, but in terms of price/performance, it's near unbeatable. The Radeon VII is ultimately just a repurposed workstation card given flagship treatment. It's not where AMD's business really is, ever since they went down the route of semi-custom and small dies. While pushing RTX could renew Nvidia's advantages, the only game console they're on these days is the Switch - no raytracing to be seen there. Developers accommodate the Geforce cards for PC releases, but AAA going console-first precludes designing most content around RTX. They've made a lot of moves to try to repurpose high end graphics for other markets, but it looks like it's going to be very rough for Nvidia in the next few years if they can't find a "blue ocean" that needs both speed and programmability.

dogma1138 8y ago
AMD's APUs are good but aren't really that popular with gamers, Intel's new iGPU also looks impressive as hell, as they are already competitive with Vega 8 with their current lineup this new one seems to be a powerhouse for integrated graphics. It seems that AMD will have competition on the APU side very soon, and I really hope Intel would pull it off and actually be competitive in the discrete market as well in 2020 or 2021 and that their GPU adventure isn't going to get a backroom abortion.
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  The problem is most people who game aren't "gamers". By which I mean they aren't necessarily interested in the hardware or anything else except "will this game run?".
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Most people that play current titles and invest in gaming might not care about the hardware but they aren't running on AMD APUs either they likely buy a best buy PC with a 1050 or a 1060 in it.

fwip 8y ago

Do you have a bill-of-materials you're using as an estimate, to say that $700 is selling at a loss?

grandmczeb 8y ago

> With 16GB of aquabolt HBM2 on a 7nm node there is no way AMD is losing less than $150 per card without even accounting for opportunity loss. Just curious, but how did you come up with that estimate?

fivefive55 8y ago

I'm sorry, but this just sounds like bullshit to me. "With a $5000> card (MI50) AMD is forced to sell at a loss to be able to meet the same performance levels NVIDIA had for the same amount of money ($700) 2 years ago." Source? What 2 year old nvidia card is beating the instinct mi50 at floating point math? Does it even support fp64? Nothing about that sounds even a bit true. "The 2080 for all intents and purposes is a mid range die." The second fastest gpu in the world is 'mid-range'. Yeah right. Not even close unless you only consult with millionaires for your part info. "AMD had to drop the prices of VEGA to around $300 due to the RTX 2060" Vega 64 competes with the 2070, it blows the 2060 out of the water. Also the price has gone down? Yeah, that's what happens when tech gets older. Prices drop. They always have and always will.