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AMD could use that capacity to re-lauch older GPU at a lower price and make gamers happy. Low cost GPUs (even with higher watts) might be marketable again.
by woliveirajr 5y ago
AMD could use that capacity to re-lauch older GPU at a lower price and make gamers happy. Low cost GPUs (even with higher watts) might be marketable again.
- mrweasel 5y agoHow old would those GPUs be? It might be great for those of us who just needs a reasonable GPU for older games and general desktop use.
- dragontamer 5y agoThe 75W GPU market is completely stalled at Rx 560 and NVidia 1050 Ti IIRC. People still buy those because: 1. 75W is the maximum the PCIe x16 slot can power without any additional power (see 6-pin or 8-pin connectors). 2. 75W is too little to really make a "decent" GPU for modern AAA games. But still a huge step up from integrated graphics. Playing 5-year-old or 10-year-old games on lower settings is the only real possibility.
- my123 5y agoBetter 75W GPUs are possible, but they would be quite expensive on a perf per dollar basis. An RTX 3070 Laptop GPU on a PCIe card would be quite nice, but the market for that isn't big.
- SXX 5y agoLaptop 3070 would be sold out immediately. It's too good at mining and sometimes better than desktop part
- Macha 5y agoAMD's last 12nm GPUs were the Radeon 7, Vega 56 and Vega 64, which were all pretty much flops. The rx580, their preceding model did quite well for a few years as a last gen budget model. To my understanding, the radeon 7 and vega were expensive chips to produce. All of them used HBM, which contributed to this, and it's not clear how easy it would be to make a non-HBM variant. Would customers accept them if they needed the same MSRP as the 6xxx GPUs? So if they were to relaunch and old GPU I think the rx 580/590 at $200 would do. In this climate, $200 for a 1080p medium GPU would probably sell.
- dragontamer 5y agoRadeon VII was 7nm. Re-releasing the Vega cards would be excellent for ROCm programmers. AMD needs to do something to get beginner programmers onto their system cheaply. Radeon VII / Radeon VII Pro / MI25 seem like the cheapest option for cards still in production. Vega 56 / 64 still work if you can Ebay a used-card.
- jedbrown 5y agoRadeon VII has comparable memory bandwidth to an RTX 3090 (or V100) and 7x the double precision performance of RTX 3090 for a quarter the cost. It has almost double the memory bandwidth of RX 6800 and 3x the double precision performance at half the price. It would be a compelling card today if it hadn't been EOL'd almost two years ago.
- dragontamer 5y agoRadeon VII isn't really EOL'd. Its now called Radeon VII Pro and worth $2000. Or (EDIT: MI50: the MI25 is Vega64 IIRC). As long as AMD is selling those cards out at the higher price, there's no reason for the $700 price point to come back...
- my123 5y agoIt was a stopgap product that wasn't really profitable to reduce the gaming performance gap between NV and AMD. Its marketing wasn't that much targeted towards compute either. And as soon as they had cards with better gaming perf out, it outlived its usefulness in the AMD product matrix. Nvidia has the Titan V as a prosumer card with HBM2, 1/2 FP64 and all for $3k, but that seems to be out of stock nowadays too...
- jedbrown 5y agoAgreed that it was EOL'd because it was priced too low, though the Pro also lifted the double precision throttle (3.5 TF to 6.5 TF) and added Infinity Fabric.
- MangoCoffee 5y agoAMD APU or Intel Xe for older games?
- dragontamer 5y agoA 7nm design uses less area, and is probably just going to get cheaper over time. A smaller, 7nm RDNA2 design might be easier to make than backporting RDNA2 to 14nm. I think an older GPU might still be useful, but from a cost/benefit perspective, it seems to make more sense to just make a smaller chip on the latest process (especially if your latest technology, like RDNA2, already has lots of data on the 7nm node).
- icegreentea2 5y ago7nm capacity is likely to be tapped out for the new couple years. The OP's suggestion (I believe) was literally just to keep making older 12nm cards (no backporting) to supplement current supply. Normally this would... not really work well. But in the current environment, it'd probably work just fine (just look at how much GT 1030s go on sale for...)
- vzidex 5y agoI think an older GPU would definitely be useful. Used GTX 1080 cards (I picked one up used for C$375 back in September) are listed for C$750-850 where I live. I'm not as familiar with AMD's products but I think 1-2 generation old GPUs would definitely have high demand until current gen ones are more available.
- mastax 5y agoMooresLawIsDead suggested this as well and I think it's a good idea especially in the current climate, though it's hard to react situationally when it takes >12 months to launch a product even an iterative one. Take the 5600XT design and backport it to 12nm. You get something that performs pretty well at 1080p that you can sell for really cheap for a long time. Finally a replacement for the RX480/RX580. One of the strange things with AMDs new GPU push is that their GPUs are less profitable in a supply constrained environment than their CPU/APUs. Ian Cutress recently talked about this (I think on YouTube @TechTechPotato). Even their highest end GPU dies selling to consumers at a price point higher then they planned for is much less profitable per wafer than a midrange APU. If there were no supply constraint they could just make as many of both as they can sell but right now they're just trading off profits against GPU market growth.
- mrweasel 5y agoCan you “just” take the 5600XT and switch it to 12nm? Won’t it require more power and cooling?
- profile53 5y agoSadly no, because everything is closely tied to the node. For example, it might take 0.3ns for a signal to physically travel from one edge of the chip to the other on a 7nm chip. On 12nm, it might take 0.5ns. The chip was designed to compensate for a 0.3ns delay, not 0.5, so now the cache is sending data to the core at the wrong time, leading to corruption and garbage data being processed. This, plus a million other things in both manufacturing and design have to change to build a chip on a different node (manufacturing tolerances, clock speed, metallurgy, patterning issues, etc.).
- mastax 5y agoYou can't "just" do it, but it is possible as shown by Intel Rocket Lake.
- fomine3 5y agoI read great writeup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25926211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25926211
- ArkanExplorer 5y agoBy the time you actually get those products on the shelves, Ethereum will either be on Proof of Stake, in an ice age, or less valuable than now. And thus the GPU shortage will end. In 1-2 years we might see 5nm GPUs, and so the gulf between a 14nm GPU and the latest GPU (even if you can't find them on shelves) will be even greater. Its more realistic for GlobalFoundries to consider opening a new factory with 10nm/7nm, especially if they can pickup established knowledge and hardware from other players.
- rini17 5y agoI doubt it's so simple, there are many other profitable coins to mine.
- screye 5y agoComputer gaming moves in console generations. The PS5/new XBox are targeting a ~5 year generation. This means that games will be mostly playable as long as you get a top of the line 14nm GPU for 5 more years. Remember that graphics have stopped being a bottle neck for games for a few years now. The top played games: Fortnite, Apex, LoL, Dota, Fifa and the like are perfectly playable on mediocre graphics.
- nradov 5y agoNethack also runs pretty well on old GPUs. I consistently get >60fps even on integrated graphics.
- dcow 5y agoAre you sure your terminal emulator is rendering that quickly? d= e.g. iTerm2 caps at 30fps unless you change the default.
- stainforth 5y agoThe more important question is does it register key release events
- 55873445216111 5y agoEngineering resourses are limited. It takes significant effort to transfer and verify a design for a new process. Why pull off engineers working on the next gen products to retapeout an old product on an old node? I doubt it would have ROI.
- sbierwagen 5y agoWhy would AMD want to make less money?
- babypuncher 5y agoHow would selling even more GPUs make them even less money? Right now their problem is that they literally cannot make RX 6000 series cards fast enough.Adding more GPU capacity in the form of reissued 14nm chips to fill some of the gap in demand would not result in fewer RX 6000 cards sold. People just want something, anything they can buy today to hold them over until they can get their hands on something good.
- rozab 5y agoThere are basically no cards available on the consumer market. Nobody is making money in this space. I was looking this week for a replacement for the GPU I bought in 2014 for £80 (r7 260x). The only sub-£600 card available on any site when I checked was the GeForce GT 1030, which would give me slightly worse performance for £90. The situation is unbelievably dire.
- greggyb 5y agoRather, everyone is making money, but the OEMs could make more if they'd be willing to raise MSRP. It's a shortage of supply, not a stoppage.
- woliveirajr 5y ago> and AMD in turn is required to pay for these wafers, whether they use this capacity or not. > AMD expects to buy approximately $1.6 billion [≈ box office sales of Bambi, 1942] in wafers from GlobalFoundries in the 2022 to 2024 period. They'll pay for it, anyway, $1.6bi. I'm pretty sure that there's a way to spend $1.6bi to make GPUs and sell it in the long-tail consumer spectrum without bitting your sales. And create the desire, on those users, to upgrade to a better GPU in the future. Or don't even make money about it, just ensure that your competitors will have to lose money too.
- devwastaken 5y agoGPU's significantly increase performance between generations. My 1060 is already effectively outdated. The cost of production isn't less than it was originally, and $200 for a 4 year old GPU is far too much. Modern titles are going to require 6-8GB vram at a minimum.
- tpxl 5y agoUsed 1080Tis are going for 600€+, so new ones for 400 would probably sell like hot cakes.
- abdulmuhaimin 5y agoyou would be right, if only the market is normal, or only slightly inflated. Go to any used goods site, and you would realised $200 for 1060 is actually below the used market price. Yes it would sell like hot cake