How/why did Amd/ATI fall behind Nvidia?

[desura]

A while ago with the 9700 ATI leapfrogged Nvidia. Since then Nvidia has taken the lead.

They are both "fabless" and so are using the same TSMC foundries, no? So unlike Amd/Intel there isn't a manufacturing advantage. How/why did this happen?

 

[bystander36]

I'll leave that to AMD to figure out. It is up to them to turn it around and ultimately, anything I say it just a guess. And I may take advantage of their price incentives as a result of their situation.

 

[TaintedSquirrel]

You could write a PHD dissertation on this topic.

 

[jpiniero]

The dGPU share has been pretty stable for some time (roughly 60-40 in favor of nVidia, and this goes back to 2007). It's only gotten real bad for AMD recently because Maxwell is so much more efficient which has led to AMD getting wiped out for the most part in mobile.

 

[boozzer]

A while ago with the 9700 ATI leapfrogged Nvidia. Since then Nvidia has taken the lead.

They are both "fabless" and so are using the same TSMC foundries, no? So unlike Amd/Intel there isn't a manufacturing advantage. How/why did this happen?

marketing. and that amd used alot of RnD on apus. I am pretty confident in my guess that apus would give us high setting 1080p gaming within 2 years/cpu release cycles. when that happens gpu market will shrink to nothing but high end/enthusiast only.

The dGPU share has been pretty stable for some time (roughly 60-40 in favor of nVidia, and this goes back to 2007). It's only gotten real bad for AMD recently because Maxwell is so much more efficient which has led to AMD getting wiped out for the most part in mobile.

it was due to mining jacking up the price of amd gpus, at least get that right. and used mining cards cannibalizing more sales.

 

[therealnickdanger]

More than anything it's marketing. Timing, audience, etc. Both companies have had tremendous examples of excellence and complete crap, but NVIDIA's marketing and exploitation of key audiences has been better. As the recognized leaders, they have the luxury of setting the narrative for what constitutes a good product, whether it's heat, noise, performance per watt, compute, etc. Not unlike the influence an incumbent politician has.

 

[AnandThenMan]

A while ago with the 9700 ATI leapfrogged Nvidia. Since then Nvidia has taken the lead.

Funny how people actually believe this.

 

[Azix]

In the lead in terms of sale I guess. In terms of engineering and technology I would but be so sure

 

[Udgnim]

Nvidia spends more R&D on GPUs than AMD and doesn't have to split R&D money between CPUs & GPUs

despite that, AMD isn't that far behind in tech

Nvidia lead has more to do with marketing

 

[flopper]

AMD have and is the industry leader in the world with GPU. ALL Nvidia is doing is locking down tech and copy AMD. Nvidia cant even make cards without a sli bridge. Their development of memory was a epic fail and have to buy from amd Hynix.
The 290 still are leaders in the market and a new version 390 covers all the midrange and soon the most advanced tech in a GPU ever is about to be presented called the Fury.

Mantle was developed to allow developers more control over hardware offering more fps and better games and is now an industry standard with DX12, Vulkan, Metal.

What did nvidia do?
Locked down physX, Gsync all stuff adding cost and then arising more cost to high end GPU all using old tech like GDDr5.

The world leader is AMD and Fury is the mark

 

[JDG1980]

Hector Ruiz began the trashing of both companies, and Dirk Meyer basically finished the job. Ruiz had AMD buy ATi at an inflated price, which AMD could barely afford; AMD then had to spin off its fabs into Global Foundries in order to cover the costs, and this put AMD at a disadvantage in the CPU business. Then Dirk Meyer oversaw the release of Bulldozer, an epic failure which torpedoed AMD's CPU division, preventing them from having a competitive product in the mid to high end for years. All these financial impacts caused AMD's R&D budget to be hit hard, and we're seeing the results (or lack thereof) now.

Lisa Su has basically said that she's betting the company on the success of Zen. Unfortunately, it looks like the GPU division has been as a result starved of what little funds AMD has available.

 

[monstercameron]

Depends on how you define behind, do you mean technologically or market share? If the latter, then I posit to you this...has amd/ati ever had a larger market share than nvidia in recent memory?

 

[aaksheytalwar]

9700 Pro vs 4800 Ti - > ATI

9800 Pro vs -> ATI

X800 series. ATI had better directx performance. Nivedita had better features. So ATI won

1900xtx ATI won

2900xt nVidia won

3850 nVidia won

4870 close but ATI won

5870 - 285 amd won

5870 - 480 nVidia won but amd won vfm

6970 - 570. The closest ever. Amd won vfm. NVidia had 580 the single fastest card but wasn't vfm. Amd had the fastest dual card. Probably a tie overall with amd being better value

7970 - 680 amd won

290x - 780 / 780 Ti
Comparable performance with amd being much cheaper. So amd won.

290x - 970
980 is the single fastest single card
295x2 is the single fastest dual card
290x and 970 are comparable but I'd bet 290x will beat it by a long shot in due course
But overall this generation is a tie

As you can see, for pure performance both brands are usually close with nVidia often being better but sometimes the other way round.

For vfm amd is always better.

So I guess overall amd just needs to learn marketing.

 

[ShintaiDK]

They are both "fabless" and so are using the same TSMC foundries, no? So unlike Amd/Intel there isn't a manufacturing advantage. How/why did this happen?

R&D allocation. AMD is a CPU company before GPU company. And they are stubborn on making CPUs at all cost in segments they cant compete in.

Result is what you see today.

 

[DownTheSky]

Yes but even when ATi lost it had bigger market share than when AMD won.

 

[gdansk]

It's definitely some sort of reality distortion field. Whenever Nvidia has a hot card people ignore the side effects, when AMD has a hot card it is a deadly flaw. For a rational consumer, where halo products have no impact, AMD has been a very reliable option in price performance.

But you're right, in halo products AMD has been often been behind. I suppose AMD doesn't understand the psychology of people. They tried to cut costs by developing simpler chips that could be designed, fabricated and sold at a lower price while still delivering the majority of performance (say 90%) of the competitor. Unfortunately, people don't react well to second bests or value.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Yes but even when ATi lost it had bigger market share than when AMD won.

It was bound to happen when AMD bought ATI unfortunately. A sealed destiny. Because ATI actually ended up competiting against Intel as well as nVidia, since AMD is a CPU company before GPU. And when pressed, AMD spends everything on CPUs. So a healthy and well performing GPU division got starved to death.

 

[myocardia]

The world leader is AMD and Fury is the mark

Cool, please link me to where I can buy this magical GPU, made out of pixie dust and unicorns.

 

[Serandur]

AMD bought ATi for an amount they couldn't afford ($5.4 billion), had to ditch their fabs (Global Foundries) because they couldn't afford them anymore, released a failure with Bulldozer, and subsequently starved ATi of R&D funds. The end-result, only really visible in the past few years, is AMD's GPU division/ATi have little funding to compete with Nvidia's architectural development and instead are stuck on a slowly-progressing GCN architecture reliant on smaller process nodes (which obviously didn't happen with 20nm).

Remember how the 7970 was matched by Nvidia's mid-range chip at the time? That was a red flag and the disparity has just grown worse now with AMD/ATi basically being a no-show in the fight against Maxwell as a lineup, hence why Nvidia have been able to charge $550 for a mid-range chip for the past 9 months. They also don't even have the money necessary to tape out new chips based on the few architectural improvements they have made, hence all the non-GCN 1.2 rebrands.

TLDR: Poor management and business decisions led to this outcome. Some marketing issues, too (ATi now perceived as part of AMD, hence AMD's declining brand image from Bulldozer didn't help GPU reception). It's sad, I miss ATi. :/

 

[boozzer]

9700 Pro vs 4800 Ti - > ATI

9800 Pro vs -> ATI

X800 series. ATI had better directx performance. Nivedita had better features. So ATI won

1900xtx ATI won

2900xt nVidia won

3850 nVidia won

4870 close but ATI won

5870 - 285 amd won

5870 - 480 nVidia won but amd won vfm

6970 - 570. The closest ever. Amd won vfm. NVidia had 580 the single fastest card but wasn't vfm. Amd had the fastest dual card. Probably a tie overall with amd being better value

7970 - 680 amd won

290x - 780 / 780 Ti
Comparable performance with amd being much cheaper. So amd won.

290x - 970
980 is the single fastest single card
295x2 is the single fastest dual card
290x and 970 are comparable but I'd bet 290x will beat it by a long shot in due course
But overall this generation is a tie

As you can see, for pure performance both brands are usually close with nVidia often being better but sometimes the other way round.

For vfm amd is always better.

So I guess overall amd just needs to learn marketing.

this needs to be quoted some more.

 

[AnandThenMan]

So what was the viable business strategy for AMD, not buy ATI and go head to head with Intel in processors only? Where would they graphics tech from? Just sell niche processors forget graphics? Intel has spent billions trying to make a decent GPU and are now just starting to get respectable. But people wanted AMD to do the same thing with 1/100th the budget.

I have not seen one single person EVER come up with a better scenario than what AMD went with.

 

[ShintaiDK]

So what was the viable business strategy for AMD, not buy ATI and go head to head with Intel in processors only? Where would they graphics tech from? Just sell niche processors forget graphics? Intel has spent billions trying to make a decent GPU and are now just starting to get respectable. But people wanted AMD to do the same thing with 1/100th the budget.

I have not seen one single person EVER come up with a better scenario than what AMD went with.

License it like ARM makers. Or develop their own. Would have saved them billions nomatter what. Billions they desperately needed.

Advocating for 2 dying companies and rich ex shareholders of ATI being a right decision didnt work out in reality. The ATI purchase was nothing but board/CEO arrogance at AMD that the sky was the limit.

 

[AtenRa]

9700 Pro vs 4800 Ti - > ATI

9800 Pro vs -> ATI

X800 series. ATI had better directx performance. Nivedita had better features. So ATI won

1900xtx ATI won

2900xt nVidia won

3850 nVidia won

4870 close but ATI won

5870 - 285 amd won

5870 - 480 nVidia won but amd won vfm

6970 - 570. The closest ever. Amd won vfm. NVidia had 580 the single fastest card but wasn't vfm. Amd had the fastest dual card. Probably a tie overall with amd being better value

7970 - 680 amd won

290x - 780 / 780 Ti
Comparable performance with amd being much cheaper. So amd won.

290x - 970
980 is the single fastest single card
295x2 is the single fastest dual card
290x and 970 are comparable but I'd bet 290x will beat it by a long shot in due course
But overall this generation is a tie

As you can see, for pure performance both brands are usually close with nVidia often being better but sometimes the other way round.

For vfm amd is always better.

So I guess overall amd just needs to learn marketing.

Performance wise, HD4870 was not faster than GTX280.

 

[svenge]

So what was the viable business strategy for AMD, not buy ATI and go head to head with Intel in processors only? Where would they graphics tech from? Just sell niche processors forget graphics? Intel has spent billions trying to make a decent GPU and are now just starting to get respectable. But people wanted AMD to do the same thing with 1/100th the budget.

I have not seen one single person EVER come up with a better scenario than what AMD went with.

There has to have been a better route than paying more than triple AMD's current market cap ($5.6B for ATI purchase vs. 1.8B current market cap) back in 2006 to end up selling fewer discrete GPUs and APUs combined than NVIDIA sells in discrete GPUs alone in 2015.

 

[Serandur]

So what was the viable business strategy for AMD, not buy ATI and go head to head with Intel in processors only? Where would they graphics tech from? Just sell niche processors forget graphics? Intel has spent billions trying to make a decent GPU and are now just starting to get respectable. But people wanted AMD to do the same thing with 1/100th the budget.

I have not seen one single person EVER come up with a better scenario than what AMD went with.

In hindsight? AMD did overpay for ATi, their CPU section is so relatively poor that Radeon iGPUs aren't saving them, maintaining their own fabs would have been more conducive to their CPU development, Intel's process node and R&D advantages are giving Broadwell the headroom to clobber AMD's APUs even in graphics, and a better scenario would be to let ATi continue being ATi since AMD clearly can't afford to healthily manage both divisions. The ATi purchase isn't saving them especially not when they starve that division of R&D funds. I would have rather seen AMD try and compete on their own or die trying than see them drag ATi down with them.

This is the worst scenario we see unfolding before our eyes. Unless Zen is a success, AMD will be responsible for the death of competition in two microprocessor markets rather than what could have been just one or maybe neither.