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> they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), Yep. AMD

> they've never dealt with AMD (who have supply problems for other reasons), whose GPUs haven't been the premium product for a while (arguably, ever), Yep. AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives, their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards, they're nearly useless for computational stuff because most everyone goes for CUDA, and AMD cheated on benchmarks by overclocking/overvolting their cards and slapping huge heatsinks on them so that they'd last just long enough for a benchmark to run before starting to overheat. There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. AMD is properly fucked in the GPU market now that Apple is no longer using discreet GPUs unless they manage to bring to bear the sort of enginering might they did for Ryzen (where they're also slipping as Intel pushes back.) NVIDIA can carry on with all their datacenter-class ML products and lose a bunch of money on the consumer side. The problem is...if AMD drops out of the GPU market, that leaves NVIDIA and Intel, and reportedly Intel's product is even worse than AMD. If NVIDIA is insufferable now, imagine them when they're the only game in town...

ascagnel_ 4y ago
> There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. You're forgetting two more, one of which is massive: consoles and high-performance embedded gaming systems (basically, the Steam Deck and other high-end handhelds). Consoles aren't going to be super profitable on a per-unit basis, but AMD is making the chips both Microsoft and Sony are using in their boxes, and they're selling a lot of those boxes (right now, about 36MM since they debuted a little under two years ago). Similarly, the Steam Deck is a pretty damn good first attempt at a cohesive handheld that runs PC titles, and I could see that extending past Valve and into a generalized marketplace (and the fact you can plug in a USB-C cable into a dock and get a real Linux desktop is really, really cool).
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  and Teslas. Seems like AMD’s play is high performance (somewhat) custom silicon as a service.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  I was very specifically speaking about the market for AMD's GPU cards, in the context of a discussion about GPU cards. I'm not being pedantic here. AMD's embedded GPU unit may do fine, and it would be smart for them to shift their development priority to retain that market share. They lost the desktop/laptop discreet GPU battle years ago.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Replace GPU with CPU and you sound like someone who was very wrong after 2018 came around. Never say never.
  - Jnr 4y ago
    I just looked at different benchmarks and the general consensus seems to be that latest Radeon and Nvidia cards are quite similar in performance. Nvidia seems to lead in raytracing and upscaling but in my opinion only the upscaling part is really important. And I bet that all GPU makers will have a decent solution available for that soon.
- triknomeister 4y ago
  You are also forgetting another market: HPC. AMD MI200 GPUs are the boss cards to have if you want to do HPC right now.
  - chronogram 4y ago
    That's the first time I heard about that, do you have any examples? Google shows me one example of Microsoft using them but that's all I can find.
    - meshenna 4y ago
zepppotemkin 4y ago
Aren't all the game consoles running amd?
- qball 4y ago
  Yes, and I'm absolutely certain they're kicking themselves for having agreed to do so. As far as I know, console manufacture comes with supply agreements- you agree to supply X number of processors at Y cost... even if the price of those processors, when fitted to a PCI Express card instead of a PS5 motherboard, would net 3 times the profit. It's also a nice way to get out of having bad drivers- if developers are making games to the PS5 standard, then any errata becomes their problem more than strictly AMD's...
  - zaptrem 4y ago
    I doubt they were kicking themselves considering they knew what was coming based on their experience with the last gen consoles.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    It's far more nuanced than this, really. Much like Apple funds a lot of TSMC's early R&D for those nodes - it's not just that they're willing to bid more, they are a risk partner in the development of the technology itself - console companies fund a lot of AMD's early-stage graphics development. Without their funding, the Polaris/Vega era of GCN would have seen even less iteration from AMD. And they often also fund custom variations on the general architectures, which helps keep hardware engineers employed. And they also contribute to AMD's wafer purchases, which lets AMD get better deals on the rest of its stuff because they're buying 2x as many wafers as they could use themselves. The situation with TSMC being super super limited during the pandemic is unusual, and it was significantly amplified by the crypto boom happening at the same time. Normally it's actually a pretty good deal for AMD in a lot of ways. The console companies tend to be very very conservative in their designs though and letting the console companies set the direction has left AMD significantly behind on many task-specific accelerators like tensor and RT. And tensor is no longer a niche thing, neural accelerators have been everywhere in phones for ages, Intel's laptop chips have had neural accelerators since 10th gen, intel desktop 11th gen had it, AMD's own 7000-series CPUs have neural accelerators, Intel GPUs have it, etc. Different product segments are finding different uses for it, and AMD has been not just left out of the rain but actually is slowing the development of the whole field because of how tardy to market they are. And beyond that they've taken a strongly anti-consumer position against open APIs that allow other brands to utilize hardware accelerators or closed-source libraries. https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 Similar problem with RT... AMD's implementation is very lackluster and has been slowing the whole industry down. It's about half the performance of NVIDIA's first-gen implementation. A lot of times it just seems like AMD automatically assumes that NVIDIA is incompetent and wasteful, and there's some big savings to be had, so they'll take whatever NVIDIA does and cut it in half or a third or whatever (which is what they're rumored to do with tensors next generation - it has "accelerator instructions" but less powerful than the full dedicated units on CDNA, and presumably weaker than NVIDIA's dedicated units as well). Not sure if it's that, or if they're just cheap on silicon, especially with the console market's influence...
Nursie 4y ago
> their cards use enormous amounts of power People on enthusiast forums are now talking about buying 1.2kW+ power supplies for the new generation of nvidia cards. I don't think you can point at one or the other as bad here.
- paulmd 4y ago
  people on enthusiast forums have been sold a bill of goods by a couple attention-seeking twitter stars like kopite7kimi. remember his rumors about 4090 having a 800-900W TGP? That got wacked way down in recent months by more reputable leakers, and now the number is rumored to be around 450W TBP (more like 375-400W TGP), which is plausible given the size of the die (and much more comparable to the rumored 400W of the dual-die AMD products). So, off by basically double. https://hothardware.com/news/geforce-rtx-4090-ti-allegedly-an-800w-beast-gpu https://hothardware.com/news/geforce-rtx-4090-ti-allegedly-a... Similarly he had 4080 at 600W and other Shit That Ain't Gonna Happen. Stupid partner boards pushing everything to 2x the official spec? maybe, but as a reference TGP? lol no. if you believed that 800W was ever a plausible configuration for a consumer product, then I have a bridge to sell you. It was most likely some kind of engineering test bios that turned everything up to 11 at max clocks and he heard about that number and just didn't apply any common sense. Which, why would he when he could get months of attention off it from twitter? People just race to buy into anything negative that is rumored about NVIDIA products and it's taken as absolute gospel as soon as anyone hears it. And the leakers have realized that and play into it.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    I think that the fact it was even plausible to people who are fans of nvidia, and that it is discussed on said forums, means that customers don't have any expectations of nvidia keeping a lid on the power requirements. Both big manufacturers are recommending at least 750W supplies for their current flagships. As such I still don't think it's fair to characterise just AMD as wasteful power hogs here, the post I was responding to seems to me to be unnecessarily partisan.
philliphaydon 4y ago
> AMD is properly fucked in the GPU market now AMD GPUs are in XBox and Playstation. > AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives When they changed to RDNA they had teething issues. But their drivers are stable now. > their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards Is this a joke? The 6800 XT draws less power than a 3080 12gb while having similar FPS. Ignoring FSR2 or DLSS. Disclaimer. I've only ever had 1 AMD card (5700XT) and it was rock solid. Currently using a 3070 and 3050Ti.
throwaway67743 4y ago
citation needed. I've had zero problems with AMD hardware on Windows (Linux kernel, on the other hand ootb still won't boot with this Vega as the amdgpu driver is a disgrace) and other than windows 11 being a complete failure, nobody has reported serious problems. re benchmarks/power, they scale dynamically and do not have as tight power envelopes as other vendors, so obviously it will use more power [citation needed also]. Their generic GPUs are very fast, but why do they even care when they own the console market, the higher end in car infotainment market, etc?
LtdJorge 4y ago
What? Did you go out of the loop at least 4 years ago?
brokenmachine 4y ago
>AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives I have an AMD GPU in my Windows PC and it works fine. It's stable. n=1 of course. The reason I bought it is because I have a linux machine that currently has an Nvidia card. Fuck Nvidia and their linux drivers. >their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards Don't think this is true at all. Eg first link I came across https://www.tomshardware.com/features/graphics-card-power-consumption-tested https://www.tomshardware.com/features/graphics-card-power-co...
spookie 4y ago
Holy shit, is this guy being paid by nVidia?

ascagnel_ 4y ago

> There are only two markets for AMD cards that I see: Hackintoshes (increasingly irrelevant with the shift to the new Apple Silicon and inevitable phase-out of Intel-supporting MacOS releases), Linux systems, and AMD fanboys. All pretty small markets. You're forgetting two more, one of which is massive: consoles and high-performance embedded gaming systems (basically, the Steam Deck and other high-end handhelds). Consoles aren't going to be super profitable on a per-unit basis, but AMD is making the chips both Microsoft and Sony are using in their boxes, and they're selling a lot of those boxes (right now, about 36MM since they debuted a little under two years ago). Similarly, the Steam Deck is a pretty damn good first attempt at a cohesive handheld that runs PC titles, and I could see that extending past Valve and into a generalized marketplace (and the fact you can plug in a USB-C cable into a dock and get a real Linux desktop is really, really cool).

cptcobalt 4y ago
and Teslas. Seems like AMD’s play is high performance (somewhat) custom silicon as a service.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
I was very specifically speaking about the market for AMD's GPU cards, in the context of a discussion about GPU cards. I'm not being pedantic here. AMD's embedded GPU unit may do fine, and it would be smart for them to shift their development priority to retain that market share. They lost the desktop/laptop discreet GPU battle years ago.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Replace GPU with CPU and you sound like someone who was very wrong after 2018 came around. Never say never.
- Jnr 4y ago
  I just looked at different benchmarks and the general consensus seems to be that latest Radeon and Nvidia cards are quite similar in performance. Nvidia seems to lead in raytracing and upscaling but in my opinion only the upscaling part is really important. And I bet that all GPU makers will have a decent solution available for that soon.
triknomeister 4y ago
You are also forgetting another market: HPC. AMD MI200 GPUs are the boss cards to have if you want to do HPC right now.
- chronogram 4y ago
  That's the first time I heard about that, do you have any examples? Google shows me one example of Microsoft using them but that's all I can find.
  - meshenna 4y ago

zepppotemkin 4y ago

Aren't all the game consoles running amd?

qball 4y ago
Yes, and I'm absolutely certain they're kicking themselves for having agreed to do so. As far as I know, console manufacture comes with supply agreements- you agree to supply X number of processors at Y cost... even if the price of those processors, when fitted to a PCI Express card instead of a PS5 motherboard, would net 3 times the profit. It's also a nice way to get out of having bad drivers- if developers are making games to the PS5 standard, then any errata becomes their problem more than strictly AMD's...
- zaptrem 4y ago
  I doubt they were kicking themselves considering they knew what was coming based on their experience with the last gen consoles.
- paulmd 4y ago
  It's far more nuanced than this, really. Much like Apple funds a lot of TSMC's early R&D for those nodes - it's not just that they're willing to bid more, they are a risk partner in the development of the technology itself - console companies fund a lot of AMD's early-stage graphics development. Without their funding, the Polaris/Vega era of GCN would have seen even less iteration from AMD. And they often also fund custom variations on the general architectures, which helps keep hardware engineers employed. And they also contribute to AMD's wafer purchases, which lets AMD get better deals on the rest of its stuff because they're buying 2x as many wafers as they could use themselves. The situation with TSMC being super super limited during the pandemic is unusual, and it was significantly amplified by the crypto boom happening at the same time. Normally it's actually a pretty good deal for AMD in a lot of ways. The console companies tend to be very very conservative in their designs though and letting the console companies set the direction has left AMD significantly behind on many task-specific accelerators like tensor and RT. And tensor is no longer a niche thing, neural accelerators have been everywhere in phones for ages, Intel's laptop chips have had neural accelerators since 10th gen, intel desktop 11th gen had it, AMD's own 7000-series CPUs have neural accelerators, Intel GPUs have it, etc. Different product segments are finding different uses for it, and AMD has been not just left out of the rain but actually is slowing the development of the whole field because of how tardy to market they are. And beyond that they've taken a strongly anti-consumer position against open APIs that allow other brands to utilize hardware accelerators or closed-source libraries. https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974 Similar problem with RT... AMD's implementation is very lackluster and has been slowing the whole industry down. It's about half the performance of NVIDIA's first-gen implementation. A lot of times it just seems like AMD automatically assumes that NVIDIA is incompetent and wasteful, and there's some big savings to be had, so they'll take whatever NVIDIA does and cut it in half or a third or whatever (which is what they're rumored to do with tensors next generation - it has "accelerator instructions" but less powerful than the full dedicated units on CDNA, and presumably weaker than NVIDIA's dedicated units as well). Not sure if it's that, or if they're just cheap on silicon, especially with the console market's influence...

Nursie 4y ago

> their cards use enormous amounts of power People on enthusiast forums are now talking about buying 1.2kW+ power supplies for the new generation of nvidia cards. I don't think you can point at one or the other as bad here.

paulmd 4y ago
people on enthusiast forums have been sold a bill of goods by a couple attention-seeking twitter stars like kopite7kimi. remember his rumors about 4090 having a 800-900W TGP? That got wacked way down in recent months by more reputable leakers, and now the number is rumored to be around 450W TBP (more like 375-400W TGP), which is plausible given the size of the die (and much more comparable to the rumored 400W of the dual-die AMD products). So, off by basically double. https://hothardware.com/news/geforce-rtx-4090-ti-allegedly-an-800w-beast-gpu https://hothardware.com/news/geforce-rtx-4090-ti-allegedly-a... Similarly he had 4080 at 600W and other Shit That Ain't Gonna Happen. Stupid partner boards pushing everything to 2x the official spec? maybe, but as a reference TGP? lol no. if you believed that 800W was ever a plausible configuration for a consumer product, then I have a bridge to sell you. It was most likely some kind of engineering test bios that turned everything up to 11 at max clocks and he heard about that number and just didn't apply any common sense. Which, why would he when he could get months of attention off it from twitter? People just race to buy into anything negative that is rumored about NVIDIA products and it's taken as absolute gospel as soon as anyone hears it. And the leakers have realized that and play into it.
- Nursie 4y ago
  I think that the fact it was even plausible to people who are fans of nvidia, and that it is discussed on said forums, means that customers don't have any expectations of nvidia keeping a lid on the power requirements. Both big manufacturers are recommending at least 750W supplies for their current flagships. As such I still don't think it's fair to characterise just AMD as wasteful power hogs here, the post I was responding to seems to me to be unnecessarily partisan.

philliphaydon 4y ago

> AMD is properly fucked in the GPU market now AMD GPUs are in XBox and Playstation. > AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives When they changed to RDNA they had teething issues. But their drivers are stable now. > their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards Is this a joke? The 6800 XT draws less power than a 3080 12gb while having similar FPS. Ignoring FSR2 or DLSS. Disclaimer. I've only ever had 1 AMD card (5700XT) and it was rock solid. Currently using a 3070 and 3050Ti.

throwaway67743 4y ago

citation needed. I've had zero problems with AMD hardware on Windows (Linux kernel, on the other hand ootb still won't boot with this Vega as the amdgpu driver is a disgrace) and other than windows 11 being a complete failure, nobody has reported serious problems. re benchmarks/power, they scale dynamically and do not have as tight power envelopes as other vendors, so obviously it will use more power [citation needed also]. Their generic GPUs are very fast, but why do they even care when they own the console market, the higher end in car infotainment market, etc?

LtdJorge 4y ago

What? Did you go out of the loop at least 4 years ago?

brokenmachine 4y ago

>AMD can't write Windows graphics drivers that are stable and performant to save their lives I have an AMD GPU in my Windows PC and it works fine. It's stable. n=1 of course. The reason I bought it is because I have a linux machine that currently has an Nvidia card. Fuck Nvidia and their linux drivers. >their cards use enormous amounts of power compared to similarly performing NVIDIA cards Don't think this is true at all. Eg first link I came across https://www.tomshardware.com/features/graphics-card-power-consumption-tested https://www.tomshardware.com/features/graphics-card-power-co...

spookie 4y ago

Holy shit, is this guy being paid by nVidia?