How/why did Amd/ATI fall behind Nvidia?

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AnandThenMan

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2004
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What would ATI have brought to Nvidia? The two companies have very similar tech so I'm not sure I see much of an advantage in a merger beyond securing a monopoly. Now Intel buying AMD this is a much better proposition.
 

Genx87

Lifer
Apr 8, 2002
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I'd still think that an AMD/nVIDIA merger would've been better. And Id still think that if ATi was around, they would have been far more competitive.

It could had worked. But the major sticking point was Jen-Hsun Huang wanted to run both companies. Ruiz couldnt have that. He still had several years of imploding AMD left in him.

If Ruiz steps aside and Jen-Hsun Huang runs the joint company. It would have a lot better chance than they had.
 

Genx87

Lifer
Apr 8, 2002
41,091
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What would ATI have brought to Nvidia? The two companies have very similar tech so I'm not sure I see much of an advantage in a merger beyond securing a monopoly. Now Intel buying AMD this is a much better proposition.

Before the ATI debacle AMD wanted to merge with Nvidia. But the major issue was Jen-Hsun Huang wanted to run the new company. Ruiz wouldnt let him. So AMD went on with plan B and bought ATI by overpaying for it. Then taking what they got and pissing all that wealth away for the course of a decade.
 

Keysplayr

Elite Member
Jan 16, 2003
21,219
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It could had worked. But the major sticking point was Jen-Hsun Huang wanted to run both companies. Ruiz couldnt have that. He still had several years of imploding AMD left in him.

If Ruiz steps aside and Jen-Hsun Huang runs the joint company. It would have a lot better chance than they had.

They should have agreed to JHH head up the proposed merged companies. We'd be seeing a whole different AMD today. Or whatever it would have been called.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
5,154
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Tech wise, yes. Seeing as how nVidia doesn't have the same tech until next year. How else can you take it?

I'd think the actual end result in performance would determine who is ahead or behind. There are lots of different techs involved in a GPU. Picking 1 of them as the one that determines who is ahead or not, seems short sighted.
 

SolMiester

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2004
5,330
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Tech wise, yes. Seeing as how nVidia doesn't have the same tech until next year. How else can you take it?

I dont think NV was interested due to 4GB limit. Besides which, AMD havent released it yet, and its value has yet to be determined!
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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I dont think NV was interested due to 4GB limit. Besides which, AMD havent released it yet, and its value has yet to be determined!

4GB, direct cost, volume and implementation cost.

When you already use 7Ghz GDDR5 the benefits of 1Ghz HBM1 is miniscule.

It was a big mistake to make a HBM1 product and not wait for HBM2. And the alarm bells was ringing long ago after HBM1 got downgraded twice in speed and density. Hynix gave up on all further HBM1 development long time ago and focus everything on HBM2 sometime next year(That product already got a downgrade of its own.). In short, even Hynix gave up on HBM1 as a viable product.
 
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bowler484

Member
Jan 5, 2014
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AMD needs to lose the stigma of being an economy brand. Concentrating on price/performance has done nothing but cost them market share.

The very, very first thing toward doing this would be to forget that Nvidia exists. Concentrate on promoting your own brand and get people like Roy Taylor off Twitter to keep them from embarrassing the company.

Where is this marketing thing people keep talking about as being the only reason Nvidia is winning? For the vast majority of users, they look at review sites for the card then read user feedback on forums like this and make a decision. The fact is when most non-enthusiasts buy a card, they are likely to return to the same brand provided they have a good experience. But if Nvidia keeps doing stupid things like the 970 memory fiasco and not optimizing Kepler for newer games, they are giving AMD a very good chance to get back in the game.
 

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
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You know, I think it had to do with those little animations displayed when starting up a game that was TWIMTBP sponsored starting in the mid 2000s. That stylish swoosh and alluring voice saying "Nvidia". That planted brand awareness of Nvidia in a lot of PC gamers' minds, brand awareness that endures to this day. AMD eventually came up with the Gaming Evolved program, but it's an uphill battle to try to build the brand awareness that Nvidia enjoys now.

Another factor is mobile. Gaming laptops have become more and more prevalent. GCN is not as power efficient as Kepler and Maxwell. On desktops that's not as big of a deal, but on laptops power efficiency is king. And on a software level, I heard that AMD really screwed up with their Enduro power management system for the 7000 series. So Nvidia got a lot of design wins from the various laptop manufacturers. AMD is virtually nonexistent in the laptop space right now, and it's really hurting them.
 

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
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Edit: Duplicate got posted, not sure how. Mods delete this, please.
 
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3DVagabond

Lifer
Aug 10, 2009
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Does 290\x Hawaii even respond to faster memory?.....Didnt see much scaling on memory OC?

It's not just bandwidth and power that HBM improves. It also improves latenct and how the RAM is actually accessed. I don't know how much of a difference it's going to make, but don't believe that GDDR5 is the same thing except for increased bandwidth.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
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It's not just bandwidth and power that HBM improves. It also improves latenct and how the RAM is actually accessed. I don't know how much of a difference it's going to make, but don't believe that GDDR5 is the same thing except for increased bandwidth.

Wishful dreams.

And latency is the same:
skhynix-hbm1-vs-hbm2.jpg
 

PrincessFrosty

Platinum Member
Feb 13, 2008
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www.frostyhacks.blogspot.com
Most recently I believe it's because AMD has focused on the consoles and winning over what seem to be low margin contracts there, from what I've read, Nvidia rejected those contracts because there simply wasn't a lot of profit there.

That started a huge push by them on the PC front, that's when we started seeing all the graphs of PC GPUs being 2,3,4x faster than consoles and a lot more marketing in the PC space.

AMD has always really targeted the medium range cards with good price to performance ratio and really only a few times unambiguously held the performance title, and I think that goes a long way in the PC space for reputation.

I can only speak from personal experience but over the years I've had GPUs from both camps and found the drivers for AMD lacking, more buggy, way more problems with multi-gpu both dual GPU cards and normal crossfire. Nvidia have bundled together lots of added extras, PhysX, Vision 2.0 was a great feature with light boost, TWIMTBP continues to offer good optimization for their supported games, gsync, etc.

Overall I just feel Nvidia are the higher quality product, AMD have done some great open source equivalents but they just seem to lack that involvement with the developers and really making games work well for launch. Although I've not used an AMD card since my 7970 so maybe things have changed?

All this swings me more towards Nvidia as a consumer and I expect it does the same for a lot of other people. AMD seem to be stuck largely making sales to people with a tight budget who need to squeeze as much performance out for as little money. I tend to see that divide with my friends, those on a budget will make AMD CPU and AMD GPU gaming machines. Those with some cash to spend to get something really good will always tend to go Intel for CPUs and Nvidia for GPUs.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
14,387
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All this swings me more towards Nvidia as a consumer and I expect it does the same for a lot of other people. AMD seem to be stuck largely making sales to people with a tight budget who need to squeeze as much performance out for as little money. I tend to see that divide with my friends, those on a budget will make AMD CPU and AMD GPU gaming machines. Those with some cash to spend to get something really good will always tend to go Intel for CPUs and Nvidia for GPUs.

ANd what the old saying..........?

"You get what you pay for".
 

JDG1980

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2013
1,663
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For all the people saying that AMD is still competitive: look at the GPU sizes. Traditionally, AMD was able to compete with Nvidia using similar die sizes, sometimes even smaller. That's very important from a business perspective, because larger dice cost more money, use more power, and usually also have wider memory buses (which increases the cost of the PCB and auxiliary components).

Against Kepler, AMD was pretty competitive. Tahiti (352 sq.mm., 4.3 billion transistors) was a bit bigger and more power-hungry than GK104 (294 sq.mm., 3.5 billion transistors), but it wasn't a huge difference and was partially justified by Tahiti's better compute performance (especially in Double Precision). These chips were at least in the same basic class. On the extra-large dice, AMD came out ahead; 438 sq.mm. Hawaii (6.2 billion transistors) was a better gaming chip than the 561 sq.mm. GK110 (7.1 billion transistors) and was competitive in GPGPU (including Double Precision performance) as well. That said, even though AMD had the technical advantage on this battle, Nvidia won the business competition by a mile; they made far more on GK110 Tesla than AMD could dream of doing on FirePro Hawaii, and on the consumer side, they first milked the high-end market for $999 Titan sales, and then beat AMD on the midrange in large part simply by providing a stock cooler that didn't totally suck. AMD really botched the Hawaii release badly, and it hurt them a lot. IMO, it should have been a pure "virtual" release (no reference cards), and the R9 290 should have had a lower power limit for more energy efficiency since unlike the R9 290X it didn't need to win the performance crown outright. Another example of AMD's competent engineers being let down by their abysmal marketing team.

Against Maxwell, though... AMD simply can't compete at all if you look at what kind of chips they have to price against Nvidia's offerings to retain even what little market share they have. Consider the following: Pitcairn is a 212mm^2 chip with 2.8 billion transistors. GM206 is a 227mm^2 chip with 2.9 billion transistors. These chips should be in roughly the same performance and price bracket - but they're not even close, since AMD is still using an obsolete 2012 design. AMD is lucky to get $130-$150 for a Pitcairn card, while Nvidia's GM206-based GTX 960 is selling like hotcakes at $200-$240 (depending on RAM, featureset, etc.) And it's even worse than that, because the GM206 only has a 128-bit bus while Pitcairn has a 256-bit bus. So the AMD boards are more expensive to produce: more traces and more RAM chips are required. To compete with GM206 in terms of performance, AMD has to use Tonga - a much larger chip (359 mm^2, 5.0 billion transistors) with higher power requirements. They therefore sell fewer cards at the same price point, and make less profit on those they do sell. And that means fewer R&D dollars for the next generation (if it ever comes).

Likewise, we've heard people say that Hawaii can compete with GM204 (GTX 970/GTX 980) in terms of performance. Sure, if the only thing you're concerned about is raw framerates in today's AAA games, it can. But in every other metric (except Double Precision, where it still competes with Kepler), Hawaii falls way behind. GM204 is a 398 sq.mm. chip with 5.2 billion transistors: not much bigger than Tonga. Yet the Tonga-based R9 285 has less than 65% of the GM204-based GTX 970's performance. To get that performance level, AMD has to resort to Hawaii, with a 438 sq.mm. chip that contains 6.2 billion transistors - and they have to push it far beyond its optimal performance per watt, which hurts sales. Hawaii has a massive 512-bit memory bus, and it needs a very robust power stage, which makes boards expensive to design. Profits on Hawaii must be tiny compared to profits on GM204. Again, this means less money to sustain AMD's development for newer graphics chips.
 

crisium

Platinum Member
Aug 19, 2001
2,643
615
136
ANd what the old saying..........?

"You get what you pay for".

Those who paid more money for a 680 and 770 over 7970/280X or 780 over 290 sure didn't.

My biggest disappointment with humanity in so far as GPUs goes is when people disappointed in Kepler performance just upgrade to Maxwell instead of trying to change. Actually, I take that back. Those that taught Nvidia a lesson by returning their 970s and buying a 980 when they found out about its true config. That learned 'em.
 
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Cookie Monster

Diamond Member
May 7, 2005
5,161
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What would ATI have brought to Nvidia? The two companies have very similar tech so I'm not sure I see much of an advantage in a merger beyond securing a monopoly. Now Intel buying AMD this is a much better proposition.

I bet alot more without the AMD baggage? ATi wasn't really in financial trouble. Sure the R600 didn't turn out to be great but atleast they wouldn't have been set back from the CPU division bringing the entire company to its knees along with mis-management and direction from its upper management.

Actually, I wouldn't say both companies have similar tech. Quite the contrary imho. They do things totally differently. The end result is somewhat similar but don't let that fool you.
 
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