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AMD has been making SoCs forever. Why does it take a kick in the teeth from Apple for both Intel and AMD suddenly to wake up and give us performance SoCs, 5 yea

AMD has been making SoCs forever. Why does it take a kick in the teeth from Apple for both Intel and AMD suddenly to wake up and give us performance SoCs, 5 years later? They've been coasting on the stone-age motherboard+cards arch because essentially Nvidia gave you a big, fat, modern coprocessor in the form of an [g/r]tx card that hid the underlying problems. They could have done what AAPL did ages ago but they have no ability to innovate properly. They've been leaning on their x86 duopoly and if it's now on its last legs, it's their fault.

sofixa 2y ago
> AMD has been making SoCs forever. Why does it take a kick in the teeth from Apple for both Intel and AMD suddenly to wake up and give us performance SoCs, 5 years later What do you mean? AMD has been the market leader in performance SoCs for specialised use cases (like consoles) for many years.
- ac29 2y ago
  There are only two high performance consoles on the market, and AMD happens to make both the chips. I guess you could say they are the "market leader", but that is in part because there are so few consoles out there. Nvidia or Intel could certainly make a console focused SoC at least as performant as AMD.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > Nvidia or Intel could certainly make a console focused SoC at least as performant as AMD. They certainly cannot, or they would have. Do you think that Sony and Microsoft stay with AMD because they like them or because AMD can deliver what they want? > There are only two high performance consoles on the market I'd throw the Steam Deck on that list too. High performance for its size more than high performance in general, but still. It's no coincidence that all the gaming handheld consoles, full blown consoles, and lots of gaming devices in general all use AMD.
mmaniac 2y ago
This question is almost rhetorical. Yes, competition drives innovation. When Ryzen APUs only had Intel to worry about, they rested on their laurels with stagnating but still superior performance. Intel did the same thing with 4c/8t desktop CPUs during the Bulldozer dark age. SoCs are good for the segments they target but they're by no means the be-all-end-all of personal computing. The performance of discrete graphics cards simply can't be beaten, and desktop users want modularity and competitive perf/$. Framing the distinction between a highly integrated SoC-based computer and a traditional motherboard+AIB arrangement as a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference is an error. Both Intel and AMD have already received Apple's wakeup call and have adjusted their strategies. I also think it's unfair to say that nothing has changed until just now. I consider Ryzen 6000 to be an understated milestone in this competition with a big uplift in iGP performance and a focus on efficiency. There's a wide gap to close, sure, but AMD and Intel have certainly not been standing still. Apple's vertical integration and volume made them uniquely suited to produce products like the Mx line, so it makes sense that they were able to deliver a product like this first.
- vegabook 2y ago
  as soon as someone puts 16GB of VRAM next to an SoC (Nvidia, soon), the gaming pc is dead. These hot 'n slow discrete components are fun to decorate with RGB but they're yesterday for _all_ segments.
  - ChoGGi 2y ago
    > they're yesterday for _all_ segments That implies to me that you expect an SOC to perform the same as or better than a 5090?
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Show me an SoC that can play Cyberpunk max settings at 4K with RTX features enabled, let alone 8K. dGPU aren't going anywhere for a long while.
    - vegabook 2y ago

sofixa 2y ago

> AMD has been making SoCs forever. Why does it take a kick in the teeth from Apple for both Intel and AMD suddenly to wake up and give us performance SoCs, 5 years later What do you mean? AMD has been the market leader in performance SoCs for specialised use cases (like consoles) for many years.

ac29 2y ago
There are only two high performance consoles on the market, and AMD happens to make both the chips. I guess you could say they are the "market leader", but that is in part because there are so few consoles out there. Nvidia or Intel could certainly make a console focused SoC at least as performant as AMD.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Nvidia or Intel could certainly make a console focused SoC at least as performant as AMD. They certainly cannot, or they would have. Do you think that Sony and Microsoft stay with AMD because they like them or because AMD can deliver what they want? > There are only two high performance consoles on the market I'd throw the Steam Deck on that list too. High performance for its size more than high performance in general, but still. It's no coincidence that all the gaming handheld consoles, full blown consoles, and lots of gaming devices in general all use AMD.

mmaniac 2y ago

This question is almost rhetorical. Yes, competition drives innovation. When Ryzen APUs only had Intel to worry about, they rested on their laurels with stagnating but still superior performance. Intel did the same thing with 4c/8t desktop CPUs during the Bulldozer dark age. SoCs are good for the segments they target but they're by no means the be-all-end-all of personal computing. The performance of discrete graphics cards simply can't be beaten, and desktop users want modularity and competitive perf/$. Framing the distinction between a highly integrated SoC-based computer and a traditional motherboard+AIB arrangement as a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference is an error. Both Intel and AMD have already received Apple's wakeup call and have adjusted their strategies. I also think it's unfair to say that nothing has changed until just now. I consider Ryzen 6000 to be an understated milestone in this competition with a big uplift in iGP performance and a focus on efficiency. There's a wide gap to close, sure, but AMD and Intel have certainly not been standing still. Apple's vertical integration and volume made them uniquely suited to produce products like the Mx line, so it makes sense that they were able to deliver a product like this first.

vegabook 2y ago
as soon as someone puts 16GB of VRAM next to an SoC (Nvidia, soon), the gaming pc is dead. These hot 'n slow discrete components are fun to decorate with RGB but they're yesterday for _all_ segments.
- ChoGGi 2y ago
  > they're yesterday for _all_ segments That implies to me that you expect an SOC to perform the same as or better than a 5090?
- tracker1 2y ago
  Show me an SoC that can play Cyberpunk max settings at 4K with RTX features enabled, let alone 8K. dGPU aren't going anywhere for a long while.
  - vegabook 2y ago