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Rumor has it AMD has a competitive GPU but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots, they can make much more money from a

Rumor has it AMD has a competitive GPU but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots, they can make much more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU one ( due to area size and yield ) But I really hope I'm wrong and they kick Nvidia ass since they become such intolerable arrogant anti-competitive pricks in the last +10 years.

londons_explore 6y ago
TSMC slots are transferrable/sellable... The fact Nvidia hasn't sold their slots to AMD for CPU production, yet AMD's GPU team has given up slots to their CPU team, tells you Nvidias GPU range is more profitable than AMD's one in this high-end market.
- remus 6y ago
  Doesn't that assume that the value of the slots is directly proportional to the price of the product you sell from those slots? That seems like quite a big assumption. For example, I would speculate that having a product shortfall (because you sold your manufacturing capacity) is going to significantly impact your market share and thus long term profitability.
- my123 6y ago
  For this generation, NV only makes the flagship datacenter/professional GPUs/A100 on TSMC, smaller GPUs are made on Samsung's 8nm process.
- Klinky 6y ago
  30xx parts are made at Samsung on a process inferior to TSMC's N7/N7P. This might indicate that Nvidia's datacenter/HPC parts are worth more than AMD CPU production, but that's not very shocking. Also it would be bad business to sell your slots to your competitor, so they could have ever greater production capacity on a leading-edge node.
technofiend 6y ago
The last time I owned an AMD video card was more than a decade ago. At the time their video card drivers needed work and could blue screen your box. There was a lot of back and forth on the internet about which driver version to load to get the most stable experience. Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-fix https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-f.... This may just be confirmation bias since there are also articles refuting that AMD still has driver issues. On the gripping hand AMD themselves apparently acknowledge they have issues and are trying to address them . https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-download-adrenalin-2020 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-downloa...
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  I've had multiple generations of Nvidia GPUs in my PCs, all the way back from a Riva TNT up to a GTX 460 as the last one. I switched to an RX560 and I couldn't be happier. Linux drivers that actually work and aren't a mostly closed source garbage heap. The current Windows drivers are fine too.
  - ZekeSulastin 6y ago
    Am I the only person on this site who has had no issues with the blob (aside from Wayland), especially on desktop? The last actual thing that I remember being a bit of a pain was an Optimus laptop years ago but from what I understand that’s finally been officially fixed; the desktop cards worked quite well, including the 2060 in my current desktop.
    - jamesfmilne 6y ago
      No, I've been using NVIDIA Linux drivers on RedHat/CentOS for the last 14 years and seldom had anything like the problems everyone complains of here. I've not had much luck on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus though, maybe that's improved. The current situation with Wayland and EGLStreams is regrettable though.
    - deleted 6y ago
jayflux 6y ago
I don’t think AMD need to kick Nvidia’s ass to be successful or even competetive. If they can land a decent GPU that’s between the 3080 and 3090 for an affordable price people will buy it. They don’t need to beat the 3090 to win, I think that ship has sailed, let Nvidia have the high end market, there’s still plenty of space in the midrange, low end to succeed.
steffan 6y ago
> but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots Your second assertion that they can make more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU is probably correct, but assuming they don't abandon the GPU market entirely, they will still be using fab capacity to produce GPUs. If they're using limited slots for GPUs anyway, doesn't it make sense to focus on the high-end high-margin parts first?
- sjwright 6y ago
  It makes sense to focus on the GPUs with the highest price per area of die. And remember that the larger the individual chip, the more of the wafer is lost to part failures. So for this rumour to be plausible, AMD’s better GPU tech would probably require larger chips.
swalsh 6y ago
If you don't mind, I have what is probably a dumb question. Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still? I understand why they used to use it, but now they are not only standard, but in some cases the most important part of a PC. I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better. Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose more CUDA cores if that's what I needed? Wouldn't it be nice if I could add more dedicated video RAM? Wouldn't it be nice if the the PCI slot wasn't a bottleneck? They're not graphics cards any more... often enough they're used for AI and scientific computing. It feels to me like moving these pieces to the motherboard would be super beneficial. Plus eaiser for other companies to get their fingers in things.
- bootloop 6y ago
  What makes you think that PCIe is a bottleneck? You can just populate your machine with another GPU if you need more memory or cores (thanks to the PCIe bus system).
  - swalsh 6y ago
    While reading about OpenGL programming, one of the first things nearly all books mention, is the cost of moving data from your system to the GPU's memory.... So I assumed that's still true, is it not? Adding more GPU's does not change things as much as reduce the problem by providing more space.
    - bootloop 6y ago
      That is true in a sense of: Of all the things in the graphics pipeline moving data between CPU and GPU is the slowest thing you can do. But that doesn't really mean the PCIe bus is slow. The truth is that most machines have a single GPU, connected to the CPU with all 16 PCIe lanes but they usually hit their performance cap utilizing much less then that.
    - SCdF 6y ago
      This is coming out to PCs nowish: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi... Nvidia's 3000 series will support it, the new consoles have it one form or another, and we can safely presume AMD's 6000 series will support it as well. Under Windows, obviously. Linux will be a completely different bucket of chum.

londons_explore 6y ago

TSMC slots are transferrable/sellable... The fact Nvidia hasn't sold their slots to AMD for CPU production, yet AMD's GPU team has given up slots to their CPU team, tells you Nvidias GPU range is more profitable than AMD's one in this high-end market.

remus 6y ago
Doesn't that assume that the value of the slots is directly proportional to the price of the product you sell from those slots? That seems like quite a big assumption. For example, I would speculate that having a product shortfall (because you sold your manufacturing capacity) is going to significantly impact your market share and thus long term profitability.
my123 6y ago
For this generation, NV only makes the flagship datacenter/professional GPUs/A100 on TSMC, smaller GPUs are made on Samsung's 8nm process.
Klinky 6y ago
30xx parts are made at Samsung on a process inferior to TSMC's N7/N7P. This might indicate that Nvidia's datacenter/HPC parts are worth more than AMD CPU production, but that's not very shocking. Also it would be bad business to sell your slots to your competitor, so they could have ever greater production capacity on a leading-edge node.

technofiend 6y ago

The last time I owned an AMD video card was more than a decade ago. At the time their video card drivers needed work and could blue screen your box. There was a lot of back and forth on the internet about which driver version to load to get the most stable experience. Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-fix https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-f.... This may just be confirmation bias since there are also articles refuting that AMD still has driver issues. On the gripping hand AMD themselves apparently acknowledge they have issues and are trying to address them . https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-download-adrenalin-2020 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-downloa...

KozmoNau7 6y ago
I've had multiple generations of Nvidia GPUs in my PCs, all the way back from a Riva TNT up to a GTX 460 as the last one. I switched to an RX560 and I couldn't be happier. Linux drivers that actually work and aren't a mostly closed source garbage heap. The current Windows drivers are fine too.
- ZekeSulastin 6y ago
  Am I the only person on this site who has had no issues with the blob (aside from Wayland), especially on desktop? The last actual thing that I remember being a bit of a pain was an Optimus laptop years ago but from what I understand that’s finally been officially fixed; the desktop cards worked quite well, including the 2060 in my current desktop.
  - jamesfmilne 6y ago
    No, I've been using NVIDIA Linux drivers on RedHat/CentOS for the last 14 years and seldom had anything like the problems everyone complains of here. I've not had much luck on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus though, maybe that's improved. The current situation with Wayland and EGLStreams is regrettable though.
  - deleted 6y ago

jayflux 6y ago

I don’t think AMD need to kick Nvidia’s ass to be successful or even competetive. If they can land a decent GPU that’s between the 3080 and 3090 for an affordable price people will buy it. They don’t need to beat the 3090 to win, I think that ship has sailed, let Nvidia have the high end market, there’s still plenty of space in the midrange, low end to succeed.

steffan 6y ago

> but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots Your second assertion that they can make more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU is probably correct, but assuming they don't abandon the GPU market entirely, they will still be using fab capacity to produce GPUs. If they're using limited slots for GPUs anyway, doesn't it make sense to focus on the high-end high-margin parts first?

sjwright 6y ago
It makes sense to focus on the GPUs with the highest price per area of die. And remember that the larger the individual chip, the more of the wafer is lost to part failures. So for this rumour to be plausible, AMD’s better GPU tech would probably require larger chips.

swalsh 6y ago

If you don't mind, I have what is probably a dumb question. Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still? I understand why they used to use it, but now they are not only standard, but in some cases the most important part of a PC. I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better. Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose more CUDA cores if that's what I needed? Wouldn't it be nice if I could add more dedicated video RAM? Wouldn't it be nice if the the PCI slot wasn't a bottleneck? They're not graphics cards any more... often enough they're used for AI and scientific computing. It feels to me like moving these pieces to the motherboard would be super beneficial. Plus eaiser for other companies to get their fingers in things.

bootloop 6y ago
What makes you think that PCIe is a bottleneck? You can just populate your machine with another GPU if you need more memory or cores (thanks to the PCIe bus system).
- swalsh 6y ago
  While reading about OpenGL programming, one of the first things nearly all books mention, is the cost of moving data from your system to the GPU's memory.... So I assumed that's still true, is it not? Adding more GPU's does not change things as much as reduce the problem by providing more space.
  - bootloop 6y ago
    That is true in a sense of: Of all the things in the graphics pipeline moving data between CPU and GPU is the slowest thing you can do. But that doesn't really mean the PCIe bus is slow. The truth is that most machines have a single GPU, connected to the CPU with all 16 PCIe lanes but they usually hit their performance cap utilizing much less then that.
  - SCdF 6y ago
    This is coming out to PCs nowish: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi... Nvidia's 3000 series will support it, the new consoles have it one form or another, and we can safely presume AMD's 6000 series will support it as well. Under Windows, obviously. Linux will be a completely different bucket of chum.