moinmoin
Diamond Member
- Jun 1, 2017
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Because in semi custom business AMD is not the one making the decisions, AMD's customer is. With semi custom business AMD is essentially doing project work for Sony and Microsoft, being paid for the necessary R&D as well as the production of chips. It's essentially risk free money for AMD, Sony and Microsoft pay for all the necessary work and expenses and will have to worry about allocation and sales, whereas AMD essentially just does as being told and gets money for doing so.If they really cared about having the best profit per wafer, then why produce SoCs for the consoles?
AMD's own APU product line is completely irrelevant to all that. Both Raven Ridge and Picasso have been low end chips within AMD's Zen product portfolio, and Renoir is a successor within that line. For its own products AMD has been very conservative in many areas, be it ordering wafer capacity in advance, be it allocation for high end chips (leading to the prolonged scarcity of the popular 3900X), be it being completely unprepared for the popularity that Renoir turned out to have. Cezanne, fully in line with how AMD handled its APUs so far, seems to be little more than an upgrade of Renoir to Zen 3.
I fully expect AMD to eventually sell high end premium APUs as part of its product portfolio. But that will take some more years as the current output (result of several years of planning and execution) is still that of the more conservative cash strapped financial risks averse AMD of the recent past.