AMD 6000 reviews thread

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BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
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Wow, even the number 3 card has 16GB VRAM and is faster than the 2080TI. And the $1000 6900XT matches the $1500 3090 in performance.

The 3000 parts don't look so hot now.

Post reviews edit:
It's astonishing what AMD have managed to achieve with both the Ryzen 5000 and the Radeon 6000, especially given the absolutely minuscule R&D budget and resources compared to nVidia/Intel. Lisa Su is definitely the "Steve Jobs" of AMD with such a remarkable turnaround.

6900XT:
(It's absolutely amazing to see AMD compete with the 3090)


 
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Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
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What if i tell you a genius marketing strategy where you announce a graphics card for let's say $299 and make a total of 10 such cards to sell for that price but rest of the AIB cards will however cost $999. Technically they did make and sell 10 cards for $299 so it is real but out of stock. What do you think?

That you should lay off the glue. This is conspiracy level nonsense. Do you honestly believe that either AMD or Nvidia would intentionally do something like this?

Did you consider that all of this is naturally explained by supply shortages. AIBs aren't competing with MSRP because there isn't enough product there and a lot of what gets purchased at the price is resold at markup.

So if you're an AIB do you make a card that goes for MSRP and gets scalped for an extra $200, or do you make a premium card that maybe costs you an extra $50, but can be sold for the same $200 over MSRP? The SRMP (Scalper Required Markup Price) is the market price right now.

Drop the nonsense about AMD doing any of this intentionally. If they cared about making more money, why even release RDNA cards at all when they could put more wafers to Zen 3 chiplets. A 5950X costs less to make and has just as much demand.

Prices will return to MSRP when the supply exceeds the demand. Same with every other product in history.
 

DJinPrime

Member
Sep 9, 2020
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Prices will return to MSRP when the supply exceeds the demand. Same with every other product in history.
The problem is that the MSRP of the AIB cards have gone up. AMD is not going to make more cards (confirmed?rumor?), so the MSRP (m = manufacturer) is no longer 650. Only way you're going to get a 6800xt at $650 in the future is if they don't sell and the AIB/retailers have to offer discount to clear stock. That's not happening. Look at the price of 2080ti.
 
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linkgoron

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Mar 9, 2005
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The problem is that the MSRP of the AIB cards have gone up. AMD is not going to make more cards (confirmed?rumor?), so the MSRP (m = manufacturer) is no longer 650. Only way you're going to get a 6800xt at $650 in the future is if they don't sell and the AIB/retailers have to offer discount to clear stock. That's not happening. Look at the price of 2080ti.
AMD have already stated that they'll continue selling cards through early 2021.

 

DJinPrime

Member
Sep 9, 2020
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AMD have already stated that they'll continue selling cards through early 2021.

Early 2021 is not far away and based on the launch numbers, your chance of getting one is going to be slim to none. That doesn't change what I'm saying about the MSRP of the AIBs are way higher. After "early 2021" there wouldn't be any 6800xt at 650, it's much higher. Hopefully with the negative feedbacks, the AIBs will release less premium version at a lower cost.
 
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uzzi38

Platinum Member
Oct 16, 2019
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The problem is that the MSRP of the AIB cards have gone up. AMD is not going to make more cards (confirmed?rumor?), so the MSRP (m = manufacturer) is no longer 650. Only way you're going to get a 6800xt at $650 in the future is if they don't sell and the AIB/retailers have to offer discount to clear stock. That's not happening. Look at the price of 2080ti.
HWU spoke to AMD afterwards who clarified that AIB cards at MSRP should launch in the next 4-8 weeks.

Pull out the pitchforks if AMD fails to meet that deadline.
 

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
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The problem is that the MSRP of the AIB cards have gone up. AMD is not going to make more cards (confirmed?rumor?), so the MSRP (m = manufacturer) is no longer 650. Only way you're going to get a 6800xt at $650 in the future is if they don't sell and the AIB/retailers have to offer discount to clear stock. That's not happening. Look at the price of 2080ti.

AMD has stated the opposite, so unless you believe they're lying I think it refutes any rumors. MSRP doesn't matter one way or the other because the market is what sets the actual price. We just don't complain when there's more supply than demand and retailers have to drop prices or manufacturers need to offer rebates or game bundles.

Guys, AMD is finally getting on board the whole founders edition bait-n-switch game.

Classic AMD, copies NV a generation or two late and gets to invite all the same cynicism and scrutiny without the shield of brand image and rabid fanboys :p

Nah, it's really just a misapplication of DLSS technology. It upscaled the prices!

I think they're calling it Deep Pocket Sucker Sampling.
 

DeathReborn

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 2005
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Who in AMD dared to think 4-5 years ago that they are producing as much as they could and people will be still mad at them, because it isn't enough (consoles, CPUs, GPUs etc).

The pressure will ease off at some point, but until then, I'm afraid, we'll have to accept the higher prices and scarcer availability than usual.

Also is TSMC planning to expand the production or are they going to continue as is?

I think TSMC is fine, it is AMD's launch schedule that has put too much pressure on supply. Apple vacated 7nm and AMD got a big chunk of those wafers but launching both the consoles, CPU's & GPU's all within a few weeks is just bad scheduling imo. Delaying RDNA2 & Zen3 to Q1 21 would probably have been a safer bet. TSMC is increasing 7nm wafers but are more focused on ramping 5nm & moving to 3nm in 2022.
 
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Leeea

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2020
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Delaying RDNA2 & Zen3 to Q1 21 would probably have been a safer bet.

To be fair, the same could be said about the RTX 3000 series. Nvidia has indicated they did not expect to have supply until mid first quarter 2021.


I have been trying for both now, and the 3080's at <$750 are just as rare as the 6800xt's at <$700. I think both companies are pushing for the Halo effect. Same with Ryzen, the halo of Ryzen 5000 has sold a lot of Ryzen 3000 and mobile processors.
 

Elfear

Diamond Member
May 30, 2004
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Hardware Unboxed gave us the information we need, @mohit9206 is just running with the conclusion without being interested in explaining the cause.

According to Hardware Unboxed the current situation is a combination of two factors, one of which is AMD's fault:
  1. Limited initial supply. This is to be expected with most GPU launches (they gave RX 480 and Vega as example), but obviously now everything is exacerbated by very high demand. Nothing new here, discussed to death in the forums, not something AMD can control except shutting the heck up on social media when discussing availability prior to launch.
  2. Historically low margins for AIBs when aiming for MSRP. This is the worthy news item they got from discussing with AIBs such as Powercolor and maybe Sapphire, and it explains why AIBs will prioritize making and selling premium cards (with better cooling, lazors, pompoms) in an attempt to capitalize on high demand and sell higher margin products. (it's also the first time in a long while that AMD has a strong flagship product)
This explains to me the stark contrast between prices and availability of Zen 3 and RDNA2 in my local shops:
  • I can buy Zen 3 - 5600X and 5800X whenever I feel like it, there's decent availability and prices are close to MSRP (after including VAT and other taxes)
  • I have ZERO chance of getting a single RDNA2 card, shops listed the cards as out of stock from day one. The only thing that changed since then is pricing, as it went up every few days.
For now I'm inclined to believe HWU reporting, that AMD got greedy but at the same time they wanted to look good in terms of pricing at launch. The result is compounded price increase on the shelves: AIBs aiming for healthier margins and everyone scalping because crazy demand.

That makes more sense. So it looks like a combination of AMD doing what corporations do (increasing profits) and crazy demand. Hopefully AMD follows through with what they've stated (reference will be produced thru early 2021 and AIB cards at close to MSRP incoming).
 

lightmanek

Senior member
Feb 19, 2017
387
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What are you going on about? MSRP for the reference cards is still $650, you just can't find them in stock. AMD has said they'll continue to sell reference cards through the first part of 2021.

I found one ... this week :D
https://www.3dmark.com/pr/555333
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/24148496
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/15662815

After short time spent OC'ing I'm starting to get a feel for how undervolting works, as it does 'work' till about 2500MHz to voltages I set, and also work but limits are breached above 2500MHz and it adds more volts above the limit. I think It's more like the new PBO2 will work, where GPU knows better how low it can go and will limit itself to the voltage you set, till it thinks that it can't and will increases voltages above limit set by user ;)

BTW 2800MHz on my card is slightly artifacting at 1.15V, but 2720MHz real GPU clock in engine is fine ... on air ... when engine is not too taxing, like Unigine Heaven as in most heavy scenes, power is the limiting factor and GPU goes down to anywhere from 2400 to 2650MHz :D
Very happy with the performance and how quiet this card is even under load.
 
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Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
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That makes more sense. So it looks like a combination of AMD doing what corporations do (increasing profits) and crazy demand. Hopefully AMD follows through with what they've stated (reference will be produced thru early 2021 and AIB cards at close to MSRP incoming).

Unless AMD increased the price they're charging the AIBs then they (AMD) don't see any of the additional profit for sales above MSRP. Either the AIBs are the ones creating a premium product that they mark up above MSRP, the store who has the cards puts them on the shelf at above MSRP, or the scalper that has bought the card and resisted the card on eBay above MSRP are the ones who reap any additional profit. All of the increased cost is introduced after AMD has sold the dies to the AIB partners.

I don't think any of the rumors have said anything about AMD or Nvidia increasing the prices for AIBs, merely that what they're selling the chips and memory to them for leaves very little room for a profit on their end. Add in a shortage and it's little wonder why all of the AIBs want to sell premium models. Their own costs likely don't increase more than $50 for the extra materials for those premium products, but they can easily charge well over $100 more than the MSRP and consumers will gladly pay it because it's less than what the scalpers are asking.

Funnily enough, the only way AMD theoretically makes more of a profit in this scenario is if they keep more chips to make reference cards that they can sell for more than building the card themselves costs. So the very activity that they're being praised for is actually the one that nets them the most profit. Unless they charge the AIBs more, AMD doesn't realize any additional revenue regardless of who is responsible for the increased costs of MSRP.

If AMD really wanted to maximize the amount of product production while ensuring that most customers who wanted a card would be able to get one they should just switch to an auction system. That naturally let's the price reach what the market is willing to pay and removes incentive for scalping the products since there's no gap between the original sale price and what the actual market price is. Extra profit over what would normally have been charged can go towards purchasing wafers off of someone else who can't sell their own chips for as much. Of course no one wants to hear that because they think it's fundamentally unfair for some foolish reason.
 

lightmanek

Senior member
Feb 19, 2017
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Watched newest Q&A from HardwareUnboxed and AMD promised that they are working with AIB's to enable them to hit MSRP, but it can take 4-8 weeks before end users will see these prices.

It is my opinion that the whole pricing issue is a complex one and cannot be simply blamed on AMD or AIB's. AIB's costs went up as I think they have to pay premiums on components and also on fast shipping via Air. These are currently even 3x more expensive than prior to COVID.

 

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
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One other thing to consider that most people probably haven't. Although there's been a lot of fuss over Apple's new custom silicon for their computers, they're still a ways out from being able to move their entire stack off of x86 and some customers will need to wait until their mission critical software has been ported to run natively on the M1, particularly if it's the kind of software the used specific x86 instructions that aren't going to emulate well.

This means that Apple still needs GPUs for their MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro line of computers. We've already seen all of the new Navi cards appear in the latest Big Sur OS updates and Apple hasn't done business with Nvidia in over a decade so it's unlikely to suspect that anyone other than AMD will be supplying GPUs to Apple for their x86 Macs. Granted, the number of Macs that Apple sells with discrete GPUs isn't the largest product category, but it's one that AMD has exclusive access to.

Anyway, the point is that Apple probably has a sizable order for GPUs that AMD needs to fulfill which depending on when Apple intends to launch their updated computers may mean that AMD is already allocating wafers to Apple. It's not going to be nearly as many as Sony and Microsoft are taking up at the moment, but it's just that many more that aren't coming to market.

On a side note, I don't know what kind of agreement Apple has with Intel regarding CPUs, but unless it were some contract that were set in stone, AMD really should be doing everything it can to get their CPUs into Apple's products, even if it's just a Threadripper in a new Mac Pro. It's not only a perfect way to spit in Intel's face, but a good way to increase brand mindshare as well.
 

Sonikku

Lifer
Jun 23, 2005
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What are you going on about? MSRP for the reference cards is still $650, you just can't find them in stock. AMD has said they'll continue to sell reference cards through the first part of 2021.
Reference cards are magical unicorns at this point. And something tells me that very few will be made available even in 2021. Simply no reason to not make bigger margins off CPUs or sell inflated board prices to AIB. They've met the bare minimum of their promise by shipping a product at $650. Now that that's done, expect them to disappear and never be seen in the wild again.
 
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Mopetar

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Another possibility we haven't considered or discussed yet is what percentage of dies are being allocated to 6900XT cards as opposed to 6800/XT models. The yields on TSMC 7nm have been reported as being exceptionally good so there's a fair chance that most of the dies are coming back good. The 6800 having the full Infinity Cache and all of the memory controllers also lends some support to this.

Of course this doesn't mean that they don't get binned for a variety of other reasons such as hitting target clock speeds and economic factors, but in this case the only thing that matters right now is whether those full dies can hit the required clocks. Results with the 6800/XT shows that most chips can be pushed well beyond the reference limits, so it's not hard to imagine a majority of the full dies don't need to the weakest performing hardware disabled.

Normally you still might bin your chips simply because you don't expect you'll be able to sell that many of your flagship card at the price you want and lowering the price doesn't increase sales enough to make up for the loss of additional profit on each sale at the higher price. However, we're not operating under normal circumstances at the moment, so there's no reason to disable any shaders on any but the worst performing full dies.

There was the other rumor that AMD wasn't going to have AIB 6900XT cards at launch. I don't know if it's another case of those being delayed or by how much if they are, but there is an article from earlier this week on a few sites about an ASRock 6900XT so there are some AIB cards in the works for sure. However, if you do believe that AMD is being greedy or playing dirty tricks, the best move (the ultimate bait and switch) is to devote as many dies as possible to the 6900XT and ideally keep as many of those for yourself.

The actual market price for the 6800XT (and everything else in its class) is so inflated that you'll be able to sell any amount of 6900XT cards at launch even if the $1,000 MSRP normally wouldn't be that good of a value. AIB 6800XT cards on eBay are getting bids up to $1,050 so anyone willing to spend $900 or more would gladly get a 6900XT at $1,000.

Even people who would not normally buy one probably might simply due to perceived lack of supply and uncertainty of when they can buy a 6800XT/3080 at MSRP. There are so many 3090 backorders that you can probably pick up some of those people as well even if you somehow manage to exceed your normal customer base's demand. Given the frenzy of the past month the scalpers will certainly buy up every last card that doesn't go to anyone in the former groups.

All of this still makes perfect business sense even if AMD isn't malicious, but if you want to be one of those people that believe they're up to no good then this is also exactly what would allow them to profit the most. I don't know if the material costs for the reference 6900XT are substantially higher than the other Navi 21 cards, but assuming they aren't, every reference 6900XT sold is $350 more in AMD's pocket.

There's a recent Tom's article that puts AMDs wafers that aren't dedicated to Sony or Microsoft at about 10,000 per month. Most of this obviously goes to Zen 3 production since it's the most profitable, but they also need to dedicate some to supplying existing product lines that use TSCM 7nm assuming they don't have any inventory on hand that can be used to free up wafers. It's hard to say how much is being used for those other products, but it probably isn't zero.

So let's assume that AMD sets aside 500 wafers per month which is 5% of their supposed free wafers. With the size of Navi 21 you get right around 100 dies from each wafer. The good news is that with the suspected good yields, around 75% of those should be defect free. Assume that you only artificially bin about 10% of those to ensure performance. This leaves you with about 66 dies per wafer that could be sold as a 6900XT.

Normally you probably can't sell 66% of your dies as a flagship card, especially not at $350 over your value-oriented card. Under normal circumstances you might be happy to sell 25% of the die as the flagship model. I did some exceptionally casual analysis to arrive at this figure, but without a more thorough analysis I don't know how true it is today, but the products used to arrive at the result are similarly situated to the 6800XT and 6900XT in terms of price and performance difference. But remember, we're not in normal circumstances.

So if we assume that AMD is evil and is able to get 66 6900XT dies per wafer and that normally they couldn't expect to sell more than 25 of them at the $1,000 price they're asking, this means that 41 additional 6900XT per wafer will be sold due to some extremely diabolical planning and capitalizing on circumstances. Assuming 3 months of production at 500 WPM, that's a little over 60,000 extra cards and at an extra $350 each, another $21 million in the pockets of AMD.

Now there are a variety of ways in which this analysis could go wrong, but there are enough factors at play that it starts to turn into a Fermi problem. So if AMD were in fact utilizing this strategy (whether you think it's utterly dastardly or just good business sense) their extra profit is probably in that ballpark and not off by more than an order of magnitude in either direction and quite possibly constrained by a factor of two in either direction.
 

A///

Diamond Member
Feb 24, 2017
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No thanks to scalper bots
Having written scalper bots to sell years ago for shoe sales, you're giving them too much credit here. There is a high human demand for these devices for personal consumption. This has always been an issue in video game consoles. The mere fact there's a global pandemic raging with almost no end in sight except for vague claims a vaccine will be available in the spring doesn't help the problem at hand. More and more people have been getting into gaming or computer building. Prior to the pandemic, we saw both AMD and Intel having issues supplying the DIY and OEM markets. The problem is two-fold now.
 

Shamrock

Golden Member
Oct 11, 1999
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Did you hear what Steve said? Apparently after they called out AMD a few days ago, AMD gave them a call.

Watched newest Q&A from HardwareUnboxed and AMD promised that they are working with AIB's to enable them to hit MSRP, but it can take 4-8 weeks before end users will see these prices.

It is my opinion that the whole pricing issue is a complex one and cannot be simply blamed on AMD or AIB's. AIB's costs went up as I think they have to pay premiums on components and also on fast shipping via Air. These are currently even 3x more expensive than prior to COVID.

 

Mopetar

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Jan 31, 2011
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Reference cards are magical unicorns at this point. And something tells me that very few will be made available even in 2021. Simply no reason to not make bigger margins off CPUs or sell inflated board prices to AIB. They've met the bare minimum of their promise by shipping a product at $650. Now that that's done, expect them to disappear and never be seen in the wild again.

All cards are magical unicorns at this point. While your point about dedicating more wafers to CPUs is valid, there's no rumors that AMD has increased prices on the parts they're selling to AIBs. The story being told so far is that both AMD and Nvidia didn't leave the board partners a lot of margins, which could be in part due to higher prices that AMD/NV are charging, but may also be partially explained by increased cost for the materials that the AIB manufacturers need, which leaves them squeezed.

AMD has said they'll still ship reference cards in 2021 so either you believe that they're outright lying to all of our faces or you're statement is wrong. My theory about devoting a far greater mix of Navi 21 dies to 6900XT cards during the launch window makes far more sense and addresses problems related to relative profitability of making Zen 3 chiplets over Navi 21 dies.

AMD can fit about 6.6 Zen 3 chips in the same area as a Navi 21 die. It's hard to estimate how many are being binned as 6-core parts in order to ensure performance, but we could try to estimate based on the differences in the amount of the various 5000 series parts that are being stocked. I don't have any good numbers on those off hand, but we'll try a really messy approach using Newegg customer reviews.

Using this approach does require some assumptions. The first is that the stock Newegg received was in proportion to the actual amounts shipped by AMD. Further, we must also assume that customers who bought each processor are equally likely to leave a review. Obviously this bakes in a fair amount of uncertainty. My uninformed opinion is that people who buy the higher-end more expensive parts might be more inclined to leave a review, but given the product is new I think overall excitement keeps that close.

Looking at Newegg the 5950X, 5900X, 5800X, and 5600X received 9, 14, 78, and 146 reviews respectively. The ratios between both the 1 and 2 chipset products are suspiciously similar, but I may just be reading into a pattern that isn't real, but we'll just say that 33% are kept as 8-core chiplets and the other 66% are binned as 6-core chiplets. We'll assume that any other bin is negligible right now for the purposes of these calculations. We'll estimate that 20% of chiplets are dedicated to 2-core parts.

If we account for IO die costs and other materials, assembly, etc. amounting to about $75 fixed cost, which is probably high, but puts the average Zen 3 chiplet value at around $300 or ($3.70 per mm^2). Obviously GPUs are more expensive in terms of additional material cost, so we'll assume AMD can sell a 6800XT die to an AIB for $500 ($.93 per mm^2) or use most of that $150 difference to make their own reference card. It's probably even worse once memory costs are factored in, but I'm just looking for a ballpark estimate of value and the only cost figures I could fine for GDDR6 are almost 2 years old and probably no longer accurate, but it could put the value of a 6800XT Navi 21 die closer to $.80 per mm^2. If someone has a more accurate idea of costs I'd like to know so I an adjust the calculations.

Either way a Zen 3 chiplet is worth close to 4 times as much as a Navi 21 die if it's only being used for 6800XT cards. However, if we just add $350 to that, a 6900XT Navi 21 die is worth about $1.50 - $1.60 per mm^2, which is nearly double that of a 6800XT and therefore closer to about half that of a Zen chiplet. If you can devote as many dies as possible to 6900XT cards, using wafers for GPUs instead of CPUs becomes a much easier pill to swallow.

Couple this with my previous theory and it makes even more sense for AMD to go this route. There will still be 6800XT reference cards, but they'll trickle out until AMD can saturate the market with 6900XT cards. Only once the demand for that is met (and who knows what that really is anymore) does it make financial sense to start shifting production back towards a greater number of 6800XT cards. Depending on what Nvidia does it may even make more sense for AMD to discount the 6900XT (say in response to a $1,000 3080 Ti) if they can keep putting more of those into the market than 6800XTs until their wafer constraints aren't as bad.

Assuming it's possible to fully supply any part of the market right now, it makes the most sense to supply whatever has the best margins. AMD probably has some contractual obligations with OEMs that require them to devote wafers to GPU production so it's not a simple matter of not making any. That also ignores loss of mindshare or even eventual marketshare by not bringing a product to market in a similar time frame to any competition.

Once again, these calculations are probably off for a variety of reasons. Obviously it's necessary to include the retailers profit into the equation and there're likely other cost factors that have been left out, but I would have done that in both cases and I was interested in figuring out the relative value of Zen 3 CPUs to RDNA2 GPUs. Sure it's napkin math, but once again it's probably not wildly off in either direction.
 

Leeea

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Apr 3, 2020
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I think Mopetar's theory is interesting, but, we can see the yields:

100x 6800s delievered vs only 25x 6800XTs. That would seem to imply 6800s are yielding 4x the 6800XT.

This bears what I saw on Amazon on launch day, the 6800s stayed in stock a lot longer then the 6800XTs.


This does not discredit Mopetar's theory. It is possible defects are taking 6900XTs and converting them to 6800s, leaving the 6800xt as a hole in the line up.
 
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