AMD to introduce its Radeon R9 300-series lineup at Computex

[StinkyPinky]

Witcher 3 is coming out in May, I want a new card by then. Booo

 

[96Firebird]

If this is true, Gibbo was right about no new AMD products until May-July this year...

 

[Riceninja]

intentionally holding back just to clear inventory and missing out on a crucial market timing by 3 months is the worst thing AMD can do at this point. they're not in intel or nvidia's comfy position and can't afford another passive quarter.

 

[DiogoDX]

intentionally holding back just to clear inventory and missing out on a crucial market timing by 3 months is the worst thing AMD can do at this point. they're not in intel or nvidia's comfy position and can't afford another passive quarter.

Calling 16~18% marketshare on Q2 JPR if launch on June.

 

[Revolution 11]

Brand agnostic and price/performance. They need to stop worrying about market share all that nonsense. Just make profitable products that are good for the intended market. Once Mercedes realized to stop catering to non-sense demands of BMW drivers, they gave us the amazing S and C class cars. AMD needs to stop caring about NV's customers and just focus on what they do best. When Mercedes finally realized who gives 2 ****s about BMW drivers is when they embraced who they are and made the best cars they ever made! The end result is BMW drivers keep buying BMW and Mercedes made far superior products for their intended market. Customers of both brands are happy.

I agree with you that AMD should stop wasting time and money trying to lure Nvidia fans towards their camp. It just won't happen.

The problem with sticking with brand agnostic, price/performance sensitive customers is that they tend to be lower-margin, not loyal at all, and easy to lure away with the right incentives. Companies like large slugs of loyal, high-spending customers and AMD lacks this group entirely. Doesn't leave much wiggle room.

 

[3DVagabond]

I agree with you that AMD should stop wasting time and money trying to lure Nvidia fans towards their camp. It just won't happen.

The problem with sticking with brand agnostic, price/performance sensitive customers is that they tend to be lower-margin, not loyal at all, and easy to lure away with the right incentives. Companies like large slugs of loyal, high-spending customers and AMD lacks this group entirely. Doesn't leave much wiggle room.

Agree that does seem to be their problem.

I think their biggest problem is that they haven't really catered to that market 100% since Tahiti came out. That and half baked releases.

 

[boozzer]

I agree with you that AMD should stop wasting time and money trying to lure Nvidia fans towards their camp. It just won't happen.

The problem with sticking with brand agnostic, price/performance sensitive customers is that they tend to be lower-margin, not loyal at all, and easy to lure away with the right incentives. Companies like large slugs of loyal, high-spending customers and AMD lacks this group entirely. Doesn't leave much wiggle room.

have you visited big fan forums dedicated to popular games with their own tech help sub forums? most of those recommend 970(the trash) or 960(the super trash) without any reservation or reason.

PR is 100% the future if amd wants to stay alive. AMD needs to drive their brand name into the consciousness of those players. the best way is by repetition.

 

[JDG1980]

I'm thinking the AIBs basically revolted and said they won't sell the top tier card unless they get decent replacements for the bread and butter categories $150-350. In other words they won't sell the flagship until AMD gives them enough full tonga (960 competitor) and cut down flagship (970 competitor) chips. Such a situation would nicely explain a ~3 month delay as the time needed to test, package and deliver the larger quantity SKUs.

This is letting the tail wag the dog. AIBs shouldn't be given that much power; if AMD has the R9 390X ready and these vendors refuse to produce it unless their demands are met, they should have their own dedicated AIB (Sapphire) produce the cards. They make all the FirePros, and adding one more low-volume part isn't going to overwhelm them. Time to market is extremely important, and it's one area where AMD has dropped the ball far too often.

 

[tviceman]

Article is stupid. AMD isn't worried about Fiji cannibalizing Hawaii because they won't be in the same price bracket.

 

[soccerballtux]

ah yes. 5k resolution. yeah I've heard of that

 

[Silverforce11]

Frankly nothing AMD did since HD4870 worked for them. I think AMD should just focus on 2 main consumers only:

Brand agnostic and price/performance. They need to stop worrying about market share all that nonsense. Just make profitable products that are good for the intended market.

Price/Perf didn't work for them with the 4800 & 5800 series. They sold heaps and even had majority marketshare, but they weren't very profitable, only enough to be in the black.

That is not a good business result, when they execute fully and with early launches & their competitor stumble, they could only be in the black & not swimming in $.

What works for them?

ATI was profitable. It wasn't because they aimed low, giving up the performance crown.
NV has always been profitable. It was because they always aimed at having the fastest GPU, beating out the rest.
AMD failed big time when they acquire ATI and decide to go "value" oriented, making smaller GPUs and giving up going for the crown. Now people associate their products, CPU & GPU as being inferior, value parts, something to consider only if $ was super tight.

 

[SimianR]

I agree with Silverforce here. I think they need to go for the single card single GPU performance crown and aim for that perception of having the fatest cards around. Focus also on driver quality and stomping out bugs. That brand recognition of fast and stable is what you want and need. Once you have that halo card and word gets around you tend to sell more mid range cards off that fact as well - because people assume that your cards are better all the way down to the midrange ones, whether it's a fact or not. If 390X holds the performance crown for a long time and NVIDIA can't top it with a single GPU solution, AMD will probably sell more 360/370/380's based off of having that lead in the high end. It will be interesting to see how things play out for sure 🙂

 

[Vesku]

This is letting the tail wag the dog. AIBs shouldn't be given that much power; if AMD has the R9 390X ready and these vendors refuse to produce it unless their demands are met, they should have their own dedicated AIB (Sapphire) produce the cards. They make all the FirePros, and adding one more low-volume part isn't going to overwhelm them. Time to market is extremely important, and it's one area where AMD has dropped the ball far too often.

AMD isn't the kind of company that can tell its partners how high to jump. Can they really afford to lose AIB partners especially when those partners have valid demands? Most of them also sell Nvidia cards.

 

[dangerman1337]

Regardless this whole scenario has scary implications in the future; if AMD withdraws from the discrete market I think we are going to see Nvidia having performance range cards (G*104) be the same price as they are or higher without lowering through their lifetime and the top-tend (G*100) stay as Titan cards and be $1000+. Heck even in the UK most 980s are £450+ and I do not want to buy the 970 either, I feel it would encourage Nvidia to do more bad behavior.

Then we'd see US and EU regulatory bodies breaking them up with Nvidia turning into multiple AMDs with crippled R&D budgets. That's not healthy prospects for the market overall. But then again the whales of the social world are where the money is made these days and content creation tools aren't having a breakthrough at the moment that will reduce cost and only super-computational-expensive effects are the only way to increase fidelity without much monetary cost.

AMD isn't the kind of company that can tell its partners how high to jump. Can they really afford to lose AIB partners especially when those partners have valid demands? Most of them also sell Nvidia cards.

I dobut those AIBs are selling much 290s at all. They need to accept some loss as well and get those 300 series out there; I'd willingly accept a 380(X) with a Hawaii core upgraded with GCN 1.2+ and 28nm SHP. Better than waiting until June when GTA V PC, Witcher 3 and Batman Akrham Knight are coming out and anything else I forgot. People are becoming impatient at this point and AMD blew it with the 970 controversy by not being proactive enough and just ordering more 290s to be sold.

 

[Silverforce11]

I'm of the opinion that if there's any delays its due to the Asetek made, Cooler Master modified water cooler. Asetek makes them for many brands (pretty much every AIO CPU coolers). They also had a massive order for data centers and a big order from AMD would definitely take time to reach good inventory.

 

[RussianSensation]

@ Silverforce11,

Right now AMD's market share looks very bad but this is not only because of R9 200 desktop cards. Literally 3 years of missing out ona competitve line-up of laptop GPUs has finally caught up to them. Someone who got a Kepler-based laptop in 2012 is hitting his upgrade cycle in 2015. This gamer's only reasonable choice? NV mobile cards, most likely 95%+ of the time today. Essentially AMD's laptop market share for discrete cards is approaching 0% the longer this continues. Since laptop cards are > 50% of the entire GPU market, getting nearly 0% market share in laptops means even if AMD's desktop market share were a hypothetical 50%, their overall market share would be below 25%. Since we know that AMD doesn't have 50% desktop market share, it was simply a matter of time and mathematics until their overall market share fell below 25%. In another 3 months, nearly 0% AMD-powered gaming laptops will have been sold and 960/970/980 will continue to take away desktop market share, which means AMD's overall market share should dip below 20%.

Why did I spend an entire paragraph on this? Because I keep disagreeing with you where the focus should be for AMD. It should not be performance crown but laptops. Even if R9 390X beats GM200, it will mean little if AMD doesn't have good mobile 300M parts. Alternatively, if 300M is excellent, AMD will gain WAY more market share than it ever could with performance crown 390X.

The thing is almost all major laptop design wins are locked in for 1H of 2015. The next time AMD has a shot at going into a large wave of laptops is around Skylake/Windows 10 launch. By that point, NV can easily drop prices on all GM204 parts, get 10-20% faster clocked GM204/206 parts too. AMD made a critical mistake on the desktop of releasing nothing at all for 1.5 years since 290/290X, nothing worthwhile to replace 7850/7870/7950/7970 either for nearly 3 years (!) and almost nothing new in laptops for 3 years since HD7970M and below. Even today a $600 295X2 beats 980 by miles at high end gaming but gamers don't care. Sure it's dual card vs. single card but 295X2 smokes a 980 at 1440p and 4K overall. Who is buying it?
Not many people.

Performance crown is not the primary reason ATI was so much more successful. It's because ATI had good products in many price segments that launched on time or close to NV's new cards. Think about it, what would happen to ATI's graphics card business if they used 1.5-3 year old technology against NV's latest cards? What would happen if GeForce 5, 6, 7 had 7-9 months all to itself while ATI dragged its feet?

If you are AMD and you are constantly late to market and MIA in laptops, the performance crown should be the last thing on your mind. Every day you don't have new products against NV is more market share and profit losses not only at the $500+ price level of 390X, but in all mobile and desktop price segments. That's why your idea that performance crown could somehow save AMD is wishful thinking. Even if 390X beats GM200 in all metrics, you can't bring back 9 months of being late to market where NV took market share.

I guarantee that Lisa Su will change the GPU strategy after 300 series. ATI would have never allowed 1.5 years of stagnant time between a 290X and a 390X. They would much rather launch a 25% faster card in 9 months and then again a 25% faster card in 8-9 months rather than going for 50% at once but have nothing for 1.5 years IF they were in AMD's situation. ATI's management would never coast for 1.5 years with 1.5-3 year old lineup of chips made up of 2012 Pitcairn, Tahiti and 2013 Hawaii. ATI's management knew that launch timing was critical.


In other words, AMD's entire GPU strategy is wrong because the competitor launches new GPU architectures every 2 years. You either have to adopt a similar approach, or launch newer cards way faster to keep up. Otherwise you end up with a January 31, 2012 (!) HD7950 rebadged as an R9 280 competing with a January 2015 (3 years newer!!!) 960. Do you realize how ridiculous that would sound to an ATI engineer?

As I said, it's not about the performance crown. 7970Ghz had the official performance crown from June 2012 until the Titan launched. Look at almost any major reviews and 7970Ghz beat 680 and 7970Ghz OC beat 680 OC for at least 6 months. How did that work out?

The entire strategy and execution is all wrong. Even if 390X is 15% faster than GM200, but everything else in 300 lineup is unimpressive, it won't gain AMD meaningful market share or profits. What needs to happen is a competitive line-up top-to-bottom and launched on time. The next time AMD will have a shot of actually doing that is R9 400 series.

With R9 300 series, AMD lost the momentum completely. NV could easily price 970 at $249 and 980 at $329-349 and then what? That's why being late to market is devastating for AMD as its customers don't sit 6-12 months waiting like NV's do more often.

 

[Silverforce11]

AMD has shifted focus on notebooks to APUs. Pitcairn (GCN) was quite efficient compared to Kepler but they didn't have many (if any) notebook wins with that design and nothing since then.

But the hurt of late isn't notebooks, because that's been dead for years already. It's desktop dGPUs. Few is buying old rebadged hardware when they get shiny new NV toys.

If they want to sell R290, they'll have to put it at $225. R290X at $275 (similar to custom 970 performance, much worse power use, needs to be significantly cheaper to be attractive!). That leaves not much room for 280/285/X, $150-175? Hardly profitable.

That's the problem competing with outdated tech. Normally on the GPU front, they've been early or on-time and still have difficulty being profitable. Late? Bleeding $ every day its late.

Slot 390X (+50% perf) at $499, 390 (+40%) at $399 and you have extremely competitive products with performance to justify its power usage AND price. It doesn't affect current lineup prices, so there's no reason not to launch it IF they are ready.

This is why this Kitguru article is hogwash. They are late cos they aren't ready, simple as that.

 

[AtenRa]

For me the biggest wtf is going on is Tonga.
Why Tonga havent replaced Tahiti up until now ?? Why no full die Tonga release until now ???

 

[MeldarthX]

For me the biggest wtf is going on is Tonga.
Why Tonga havent replaced Tahiti up until now ?? Why no full die Tonga release until now ???

Dude you should know this; full die tongas all going to Apple.....literally

 

[Silverforce11]

For me the biggest wtf is going on is Tonga.
Why Tonga havent replaced Tahiti up until now ?? Why no full die Tonga release until now ???

What would that achieve? It'll be a bit faster than R280X but at that power usage level, its not gonna make any difference in the lineup.

M295X (Full Tonga) is in Macs, pretty sure that's enough demand for that chip as is.

They need the entire lineup with HBM advantage to increase perf & lower power usage.

 

[Enigmoid]

Dude you should know this; full die tongas all going to Apple.....literally

Read a couple threads on an Apple forum. Tonga in the imac is an incredible bust. Insanely hot temps (100+ degress C) and throttling.

Not saying that this would happen on the desktop but a lot of apple users are pissed at Apple for not going 9xxm series.

AMD has always treated mobile as the redheaded stepchild of its graphics division. Bonaire MIA for mobile (only in mobile firepro), pitcarin was never really present. Cape verde has gradually been dropped in favour of Oland. In general AMD's low end mobile chips haven't been going anywhere with the cape verde -> oland transition dropping performance.

As far as the desktop goes, unless the 390X Fiji uses, or can be cut down to use <125W of power don't expect any change in the mobile lineup.

 

[exar333]

Dude you should know this; full die tongas all going to Apple.....literally

And this is a good decision, why? Can they not make enough to sell to Apple and retail partners? If not, was this a good decision? I don't think anyone of us can know.

 

[exar333]

No. NV had 120,000 GTX570s to clear. The average going price at the time on Newegg was at least $300 or $36 million dollars. If AMD were to release a better card at $249, no one will want 290/290X.

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...-gtx570-overstock-delays-gtx660-until-august/

It also makes a lot of sense to build up supply/inventory, get AIB cards ready, get solid drivers out of the box. There a lot of factors to delay 300 series launch. Frankly nothing AMD did since HD4870 worked for them. I think AMD should just focus on 2 main consumers only:

Brand agnostic and price/performance. They need to stop worrying about market share all that nonsense. Just make profitable products that are good for the intended market. Once Mercedes realized to stop catering to non-sense demands of BMW drivers, they gave us the amazing S and C class cars. AMD needs to stop caring about NV's customers and just focus on what they do best. When Mercedes finally realized who gives 2 ****s about BMW drivers is when they embraced who they are and made the best cars they ever made! The end result is BMW drivers keep buying BMW and Mercedes made far superior products for their intended market. Customers of both brands are happy.

I don't dispute this, but I see this as more of a 'reaction' to things on the AMD CPU front, rather than relating directly to GPUs. AMD got ABSOLUTELY HAMMERED earlier this year due to supply glut issues on the CPU front. I am pretty sure the CEO and BoD are not going to want to repeat that with GPUs. Unless AMD is even more mismanaged than it traditionally has been, there must be a focus in 2015 to handle supply volumes with more care; not too lean, not too much. I see this as a reasonable response to that.

Overall, its good business to manage inventory. The short-term pain is problematic, but hopefully they can do a better job going-forward to be pro-active and forecast better for production and sales. That is key.

Edit: I think in the past releasing a 'pilot' GPU (halo product or two) made more sense when process node changes happened every 12-18 months. Recently, with 28nm being here for so long, that strategy has been turned on it's head somewhat and NV has been pretty successful releasing a top to bottom product set in a short time-period (Desktop and mobile) and this has worked well for them. AMD is smart to get more SKUs ready and less re-brands. Having a common arch will also help with streamlining their DX12 optimization as well, from a software perspective.

 

[Head1985]

@ Silverforce11,


I guarantee that Lisa Su will change the GPU strategy after 300 series. ATI would have never allowed 1.5 years of stagnant time between a 290X and a 390X. They would much rather launch a 25% faster card in 9 months and then again a 25% faster card in 8-9 months rather than going for 50% at once but have nothing for 1.5 years IF they were in AMD's situation. ATI's management would never coast for 1.5 years with 1.5-3 year old lineup of chips made up of 2012 Pitcairn, Tahiti and 2013 Hawaii. ATI's management knew that launch timing was critical.

In other words, AMD's entire GPU strategy is wrong because the competitor launches new GPU architectures every 2 years. You either have to adopt a similar approach, or launch newer cards way faster to keep up. Otherwise you end up with a January 31, 2012 (!) HD7950 rebadged as an R9 280 competing with a January 2015 (3 years newer!!!) 960. Do you realize how ridiculous that would sound to an ATI engineer?

Its all about Money.When AMD dont have money they cant keep up with Nvidia.
I think its worst thing what happened to GPU market ever when AMD buys ATI.
ATI have better cards than Nvidia 9700pro/9800pro/x800/x1800xt/x1900XT all much better than nvidia cards and look now where is AMD after they buys ATI.
They have 3 years old tahity and 1.5year old hawaii whos was 7 months late after big kepler and didnt even beat it.

 

[RussianSensation]

Slot 390X (+50% perf) at $499, 390 (+40%) at $399 and you have extremely competitive products with performance to justify its power usage AND price. It doesn't affect current lineup prices, so there's no reason not to launch it IF they are ready.

This is why this Kitguru article is hogwash. They are late cos they aren't ready, simple as that.

I agree here that R9 390/390X won't be priced at 290/290X current levels but what about R9 370/370X/380/380X? If AMD wants to launch the entire series in 1-2 weeks, it's not enough time to clear R9 200 series and then you will definitely have pricing overlap with 200 series cards.

"Digitimes report that AMD add-in board partners (AIBs) have reduced their orders of AMD GPUs to prevent inventory build-up. The second half of this year will be crucial for AMD since the company announced it will release new products during Q2 and H2 of 2015. A new graphics card line-up is expected to be an integral part of that strategy." Hexus reported 1 month ago.

It's not the first time we see information that AMD has a glut of inventory that AIBs want to sell in time for R9 300 series. The part in the article that hints AMD will redesign some more R9 300 series in a short amount of time seems like BS though.

Edit: I think in the past releasing a 'pilot' GPU (halo product or two) made more sense when process node changes happened every 12-18 months. Recently, with 28nm being here for so long, that strategy has been turned on it's head somewhat and NV has been pretty successful releasing a top to bottom product set in a short time-period (Desktop and mobile) and this has worked well for them. AMD is smart to get more SKUs ready and less re-brands. Having a common arch will also help with streamlining their DX12 optimization as well, from a software perspective.

You are right. It's not just nodes either but how the competitor has changed its strategy. A lot of members at AT predicted under reasonable assumptions that NV would repeat its Kepler launch strategy with bifurcating a generation because of how much $ it made for NV. I am surprised AMD did not see this coming. I wish someone worked at AMD and would tell us when AMD realized they couldn't do 390X on 20nm. By now AMD should reasonably guess that NV will do a repeat and mid-range Pascal GP204 (or w/e) will come out towards the later half 2016; and it will probably beat GM200 by 15-25%. AMD needs to be ready for that with R9 400 series and not twirl thumbs.

Since NV is likely to be doing:

$500-550 Next gen mid-range marketed as high-end (aka 680/980)
$700 Next gen high-end (aka 780Ti/GM200)
$300-400 mid-range gets a price drop/refresh (aka 770/refresh of 980)
$500-550 GP204

^AMD can't afford to have nothing again until 1H of 2017. AMD needs to have something 15-20% faster than 390X next year or GP204 could again have 6-9 months all to itself going against the aging 300 series.