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AMD deprioritizing flagship gaming GPUs: Jack Hyunh on New Strategy vs. Nvidia

22 points by pella 2y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
This sounds like MBA think vs reality. A lot of the people who are buying mid-range GPUs are asking their hardcore gamer friends with high-end GPUs for advice about what to buy. If AMD isn’t competing at the high end, they are missing out on a very valuable funnel for mid-range GPUs
- hypothesis 2y ago
  I’m not so sure, his comments about PlayStation 5 do sound like practical reality.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  Agreed. Gaming is very halo-product driven. AMD has no 4090-killer, so their entire range is always seen as second-best, even for the customers who should be asking "what's the best choice AT MY SPECIFIC BUDGET". I suspect that's half the reason Intel runs their top-spec SKUs at such absurd wattages-- they've got to own the top slot for the enthusiast-gamers, even if it's a tiny shard of the total market. I'm sort of intrigued how this will work out for Intel's GPUs long-term. They have no claims of trying to chase the top market, and people were buying the A-series cards in significant part because they were what was available during Covid/Crypto GPU crushes.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Maybe but the bulk of cards sold are the *060 series cards. If you have a solid performer that you can bundle in oem systems you have a real winner. But amd absolutely has to compete on price and possibly sell at near a loss to make it happen.
Farfignoggen 2y ago
The Majority of the gaming market's TAM is in mainstream GPUs and not Flagship GPUs! And all of Nvidia's Large Monolithic Graphics oriented GPU die Tape-Outs are for the Professional Graphics Workstation market first and foremost with some limited number of those Large GPU die samples not making the binning grade for Pro Workstation market usage and so that gets binned down for Flagship Consumer gaming! And both AMD and Intel lack much of any larger Professional Graphics Workstation Market presence and the Pro Markups to justify that kind of investment for giant monolithic GPU Die Tape-Outs for Pro Graphics Workstations! Take Nvidia's GP102 tape-out from the past as an example and that Giant tape-out had more Quadro Branded SKUs and only one consumer branded binning, the GTX 1080Ti! And it's the same for Nvidia's later generations where that's for Quadro/A-series branded Pro Graphics workstation GPUs where Nvidia "__102" Tape-Outs are mostly Quadro/A series(The A series branding has supplanted Quadro branding for Nvidia Pro Graphics Workstation GPUs).
- kcb 2y ago
  I don't know about that. It wasn't long ago that gaming dominated Nvidia's revenue. Professional non-datacenter GPUs were never really on top. No doubt in my mind the 1080ti, as it was basically a legendary gaming GPU, sold many multiple more units than all those Quadro SKUs combined. So I would say the truth is the opposite, the majority of the GP102s were binned as 1080ti with the exceptional few as Quadros. Example: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/NVIDIA-Q3-FY2020-Financial-Earnings.png https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/NVIDIA-Q...
  - Farfignoggen 2y ago
    GP102 had more Quadro/Pro Branded SKUs/Binnings and one consumer SKU for the runt die samples that did not make the binning grade to get branded Quadro and so that became the 1080Ti. And the more than one 1080Ti variant was because that was VRAM capacity and memory clocks related for market segmentation reasons! And then Nvidia created Volta for the Data Center and AI as that had the first generation Tensor cores in a GPU. TU102 was the same and for Quadro at the high end with some consumer binning as well and even the top end TU104 was initially reserved for Quadro until the Turing generation cards were getting ready to be replaced by the Ampere cards. And the Top end TU104 binning eventually was released for gaming usage(under the Super or Ti Branding). Nvidia's Pro Graphics Workstation market domination has given Nvidia the funding to create those Giant Monolithic Tape-Outs and Billions for the mask-sets for that every generation. And maybe the gaming revenues were large relative to non gaming at one time but not any longer and most all of Nvidia's later acquisitions of other companies were for the Data Center Market and not consumer/gaming! Gamers have some sort of collective Myopia with regards to Nvidia's focus on gaming only and gamers! And Nvidia's/Tech Press's marketing focus helped establish the appearance of Nvidia as a gaming only company. But look at Jensen's Keynotes over the last many years and even at consumer/gaming focused events and Jensen's Keynotes were/are mostly AI/Enterprise and cloud services focused, much to the chagrin of gamers!
nothercastle 2y ago
They should absolutely be pushing the OEM gaming market. Every low end 600-900$ pc should be bundled with a Radeon and not a 4060. If they can hit that for a couple years they will be king of the hill eventually because all developers will have to test and optimize for amd. Then it’s just a matter of rolling out a high end card to take advantage. The problem for AMD is that the 4060 mobile is an absolute killer laptop card. AMD needs a low power consumption high power apu to compete.
- kolinko 2y ago
  Not if the rest of the PC market goes the way of Apple - where with M chips you dob’t need a separate card to do decent gaming
  - luyu_wu 2y ago
    Because you won't be gaming at all on a Mac? Surely this is satire.
    - simfree 2y ago
      Yeah, kolinko really missed the whole "competitive APU" part of OP's comment. AMD has been pushing "The future is Fusion" and shipping CPU/GPU combined chips that fit in your normal CPU socket (or BGA soldered to a board) since 2011. It did take from basically 2007 to 2011 to do the design and many dev runs through what is now Global Foundaries as the way GPUs are produced when manufactured into silicon by a foundry is fairly different than CPUs, so finding a working medium between those two processes took many failed attempts, pretty surprising they were able to do it in less than half a decade!
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      There is a very healthy Mac gaming community. There are many ways to get even a lot of quadruple A games to run on osx. Also soon the asahi graphics driver will run vulkan and fex has seen great improvements recently. It wouldn't surprise me you can get steamdeck levels of compatibility with games.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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22 points by pella 2y ago

This sounds like MBA think vs reality. A lot of the people who are buying mid-range GPUs are asking their hardcore gamer friends with high-end GPUs for advice about what to buy. If AMD isn’t competing at the high end, they are missing out on a very valuable funnel for mid-range GPUs

hypothesis 2y ago
I’m not so sure, his comments about PlayStation 5 do sound like practical reality.
hakfoo 2y ago
Agreed. Gaming is very halo-product driven. AMD has no 4090-killer, so their entire range is always seen as second-best, even for the customers who should be asking "what's the best choice AT MY SPECIFIC BUDGET". I suspect that's half the reason Intel runs their top-spec SKUs at such absurd wattages-- they've got to own the top slot for the enthusiast-gamers, even if it's a tiny shard of the total market. I'm sort of intrigued how this will work out for Intel's GPUs long-term. They have no claims of trying to chase the top market, and people were buying the A-series cards in significant part because they were what was available during Covid/Crypto GPU crushes.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Maybe but the bulk of cards sold are the *060 series cards. If you have a solid performer that you can bundle in oem systems you have a real winner. But amd absolutely has to compete on price and possibly sell at near a loss to make it happen.

Farfignoggen 2y ago

The Majority of the gaming market's TAM is in mainstream GPUs and not Flagship GPUs! And all of Nvidia's Large Monolithic Graphics oriented GPU die Tape-Outs are for the Professional Graphics Workstation market first and foremost with some limited number of those Large GPU die samples not making the binning grade for Pro Workstation market usage and so that gets binned down for Flagship Consumer gaming! And both AMD and Intel lack much of any larger Professional Graphics Workstation Market presence and the Pro Markups to justify that kind of investment for giant monolithic GPU Die Tape-Outs for Pro Graphics Workstations! Take Nvidia's GP102 tape-out from the past as an example and that Giant tape-out had more Quadro Branded SKUs and only one consumer branded binning, the GTX 1080Ti! And it's the same for Nvidia's later generations where that's for Quadro/A-series branded Pro Graphics workstation GPUs where Nvidia "__102" Tape-Outs are mostly Quadro/A series(The A series branding has supplanted Quadro branding for Nvidia Pro Graphics Workstation GPUs).

kcb 2y ago
I don't know about that. It wasn't long ago that gaming dominated Nvidia's revenue. Professional non-datacenter GPUs were never really on top. No doubt in my mind the 1080ti, as it was basically a legendary gaming GPU, sold many multiple more units than all those Quadro SKUs combined. So I would say the truth is the opposite, the majority of the GP102s were binned as 1080ti with the exceptional few as Quadros. Example: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/NVIDIA-Q3-FY2020-Financial-Earnings.png https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/NVIDIA-Q...
- Farfignoggen 2y ago
  GP102 had more Quadro/Pro Branded SKUs/Binnings and one consumer SKU for the runt die samples that did not make the binning grade to get branded Quadro and so that became the 1080Ti. And the more than one 1080Ti variant was because that was VRAM capacity and memory clocks related for market segmentation reasons! And then Nvidia created Volta for the Data Center and AI as that had the first generation Tensor cores in a GPU. TU102 was the same and for Quadro at the high end with some consumer binning as well and even the top end TU104 was initially reserved for Quadro until the Turing generation cards were getting ready to be replaced by the Ampere cards. And the Top end TU104 binning eventually was released for gaming usage(under the Super or Ti Branding). Nvidia's Pro Graphics Workstation market domination has given Nvidia the funding to create those Giant Monolithic Tape-Outs and Billions for the mask-sets for that every generation. And maybe the gaming revenues were large relative to non gaming at one time but not any longer and most all of Nvidia's later acquisitions of other companies were for the Data Center Market and not consumer/gaming! Gamers have some sort of collective Myopia with regards to Nvidia's focus on gaming only and gamers! And Nvidia's/Tech Press's marketing focus helped establish the appearance of Nvidia as a gaming only company. But look at Jensen's Keynotes over the last many years and even at consumer/gaming focused events and Jensen's Keynotes were/are mostly AI/Enterprise and cloud services focused, much to the chagrin of gamers!

nothercastle 2y ago

They should absolutely be pushing the OEM gaming market. Every low end 600-900$ pc should be bundled with a Radeon and not a 4060. If they can hit that for a couple years they will be king of the hill eventually because all developers will have to test and optimize for amd. Then it’s just a matter of rolling out a high end card to take advantage. The problem for AMD is that the 4060 mobile is an absolute killer laptop card. AMD needs a low power consumption high power apu to compete.

kolinko 2y ago
Not if the rest of the PC market goes the way of Apple - where with M chips you dob’t need a separate card to do decent gaming
- luyu_wu 2y ago
  Because you won't be gaming at all on a Mac? Surely this is satire.
  - simfree 2y ago
    Yeah, kolinko really missed the whole "competitive APU" part of OP's comment. AMD has been pushing "The future is Fusion" and shipping CPU/GPU combined chips that fit in your normal CPU socket (or BGA soldered to a board) since 2011. It did take from basically 2007 to 2011 to do the design and many dev runs through what is now Global Foundaries as the way GPUs are produced when manufactured into silicon by a foundry is fairly different than CPUs, so finding a working medium between those two processes took many failed attempts, pretty surprising they were able to do it in less than half a decade!
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    There is a very healthy Mac gaming community. There are many ways to get even a lot of quadruple A games to run on osx. Also soon the asahi graphics driver will run vulkan and fex has seen great improvements recently. It wouldn't surprise me you can get steamdeck levels of compatibility with games.
- 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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