Discussion Radeon 6500XT and 6400

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GodisanAtheist

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Nov 16, 2006
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Just getting a thread up for this. Navi 24 will ride... Q1 2022... ish.


I fugure the 6500XT lands ~5500XT territory for ~$200.
 
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Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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The 6500XT will be the perfect snapshot, of this era. An era when the potato 710&730 series, the also largely pointless 1030, and1050ti, were somehow, still being manufactured.

It seems even 710 stock is drying up here. 730's are easier to find currently. 1030's are just expensive. Worse most commonly available are DDR4 versions.
 

VirtualLarry

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The 6500XT will be the perfect snapshot, of this era. An era when the potato 710&730 series, the also largely pointless 1030, and1050ti, were somehow, still being manufactured.
Yep. Seems to me that these were heavily botted at Newegg on opening day. Rarely saw one in stock, and then it was gone. Usually the "1 per customer" deals, last long enough for me to manually purchase one of them. Surely, the scalpers saw the initial low price, and said to themselves, "$400-500 on ebay, EASY."
 
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Heartbreaker

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Apr 3, 2006
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I just don't get this fat margin thing. AMD is launching a card in 2022 to hit a $200 MSRP which the chip shortage and global logistics woes are all but making impossible. Should they have built a card to $250? $300? It's likely this bastardized card was nearly solely aimed at the OEM market (like the cut down 5500 derived OEM parts, which we aren't mentioning) and due to the logistics/road map issues we all get the OEM special.

View attachment 56251

That's from this very thread.

If true at all, this card has the lowest percentage markup of those shown, and terrible $$$ per unit margins. It's a terrible margin card and likely by far the least profitable per unit that AMD will be selling.

An 8GB card would increase the price by a minimum of $60 right now if that BoM is to be believed? And another $40 (lol, probably way too low) for the miner premium that entails? So $300 MSRP for a card with basically the same performance in a PCIe4 system? It seems like that would just be worse...

The lowest end cards tend to ride the tightest margins, it's just how merchandising works.

Should AMD sell this at a huge loss? If they had invested more, it's MSRP would have been the same as a 6600 which is a joke too. Seems like a no-win situation, but OEMS probably pressed them for something to sell as right now AMD has essentially nothing.

So we get "this". Which is very meh but has a shot to be purchasable.

It will be funny to see how nvidia dances around the "MSRP" of a 3050 being the same as a "MSRP" of a 3060 if really is that much better than the 6500XT - or will it be another card launched without an MSRP?

In any case, vote with your dollars.

Totally made UP BS. This is the type of card that was made to sell for about $100 (at tiny profit) in sane times. Now they are selling for double that. It's going to have 50%+ profit margin split between AMD and OEM if it sold at "MSRP".
 
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eek2121

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Aug 2, 2005
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Yep. Seems to me that these were heavily botted at Newegg on opening day. Rarely saw one in stock, and then it was gone. Usually the "1 per customer" deals, last long enough for me to manually purchase one of them. Surely, the scalpers saw the initial low price, and said to themselves, "$400-500 on ebay, EASY."

NewEgg has at least 1 model in stock. Yes, it is $269, but hey, it's got the smallest markup of any GPU so far, so that's good news. Oh and it's also designed for ITX builds.


Now do XBOX Series S. Not the retail price, just the BOM.

The numbers are fabricated anyway. AMD actually pays significantly less than $10,000 per wafer, and the chip is 6nm, not 7nm or 8nm.
 

eek2121

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Aug 2, 2005
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Totally made UP BS. This is the type of card that was made to sell for about $100 (at tiny profit) in sane times. Now they are selling for double that. It's going to have 50%+ profit margin.

AMD doesn't control the prices of the majority of the components on this graphics card. They do NOT have a 50% margin on this product.
 

Stuka87

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Dec 10, 2010
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Totally made UP BS. This is the type of card that was made to sell for about $100 (at tiny profit) in sane times. Now they are selling for double that. It's going to have 50%+ profit margin split between AMD and OEM if it sold at "MSRP".

That's not how this works.

You are assuming (incorrectly) that this price increase came with zero change to the cost of the BoM. But the price of raw materials and components are up across the board. While I think they easily could have sold this for $100 in normal times, that is by no means the case now. Even at $200, this card is going to have a thin profit margin.
 
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DeathReborn

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Oct 11, 2005
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I do chuckle slightly when I think that some people were saying this would be 1660S-2060 performance, some including under 75W. Nvidia should release a 3030, 1536-1792 Core, 6GB GPU at 70W for $200 or less just to really hammer home how bad the 6500XT really is.
 
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Heartbreaker

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Apr 3, 2006
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That's not how this works.

You are assuming (incorrectly) that this price increase came with zero change to the cost of the BoM. But the price of raw materials and components are up across the board. While I think they easily could have sold this for $100 in normal times, that is by no means the case now. Even at $200, this card is going to have a thin profit margin.

Material component cost have gone up marginally, the price increase on retail side, is just 100% greed, because we can...
 

Asterox

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May 15, 2012
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RX 6500XT, it should never have come to the Desktop.


"Moving on to video encoding and decoding capabilities. AMD also launched Navi 24 GPUs under its workstation cards: PRO W6400, W6500M, and W6300M. All these cards will lack H264/265/AV1 encoding. The reason why is simple, this GPU was primarily to be used in laptops alongside AMD Rembrandt APU (Ryzen 6000). This processor features both PCIe Gen4 as well has encoding support (it even supports AV1 decoding)."
 

Shivansps

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Sep 11, 2013
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RX 6500XT, it should never have come to the Desktop.


"Moving on to video encoding and decoding capabilities. AMD also launched Navi 24 GPUs under its workstation cards: PRO W6400, W6500M, and W6300M. All these cards will lack H264/265/AV1 encoding. The reason why is simple, this GPU was primarily to be used in laptops alongside AMD Rembrandt APU (Ryzen 6000). This processor features both PCIe Gen4 as well has encoding support (it even supports AV1 decoding)."

So they designed a GPU that is meant to be paired with a RMB APU, a RMB apu that would already provide around 70-80% its performance?... ok.
 

Stuka87

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So they designed a GPU that is meant to be paired with a RMB APU, a RMB apu that would already provide around 70-80% its performance?... ok.

For workstation tasks both GPU's would be used together. Not for gaming obviously, but workstation tasks are fine with using multiple GPUs.


Material component cost have gone up marginally, the price increase on retail side, is just 100% greed, because we can...

Components are certainly up more than "marginally". Literally everything is more, which is why we are in a time of hyper inflation. Materials, components, labor, shipping, everything is up. Sure, they may be making a bit more profit than normal. But it is by no means double as you are trying to insinuate.


EDIT: I should add that I think it was definitely a marketing mistake to make a desktop version of this card. Or if they did, it should have been 8GB only where the PCIE x4 would have made a smaller impact. As I am going to guess it using only 4 PCIE lanes has to do with a requirement for the mobile machines these are mostly going into. And they arent going to respin another version of the chip to support 8 PCIE lanes.
 
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GodisanAtheist

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Nov 16, 2006
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RX 6500XT, it should never have come to the Desktop.


"Moving on to video encoding and decoding capabilities. AMD also launched Navi 24 GPUs under its workstation cards: PRO W6400, W6500M, and W6300M. All these cards will lack H264/265/AV1 encoding. The reason why is simple, this GPU was primarily to be used in laptops alongside AMD Rembrandt APU (Ryzen 6000). This processor features both PCIe Gen4 as well has encoding support (it even supports AV1 decoding)."

- Guess AMD isn't getting the laptop design wins they were hoping for?

Or they figured we're in a market environment where pairing a GPU with an ok iGPU is just throwing money away, might as well separate them and double the profits...
 

Stuka87

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Dec 10, 2010
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- Guess AMD isn't getting the laptop design wins they were hoping for?

Or they figured we're in a market environment where pairing a GPU with an ok iGPU is just throwing money away, might as well separate them and double the profits...

How does selling a GPU to an AIB double their profits compared to selling a GPU to a laptop OEM? I would be surprised if AIBs pay more for a chip than an OEM does.
 
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AtenRa

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- Guess AMD isn't getting the laptop design wins they were hoping for?

Or they figured we're in a market environment where pairing a GPU with an ok iGPU is just throwing money away, might as well separate them and double the profits...

AMD also has AIB partners that need to have GPUs to sell, and although the high-end GPUs are making a lot of money now days , AIBs also need lower end GPUs.
NAVI 24 on the RX 6400/6500XT is only 107mm2, so production should be high enough to justify splitting the chips for both Mobile and Desktop/client
 

GodisanAtheist

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AMD also has AIB partners that need to have GPUs to sell, and although the high-end GPUs are making a lot of money now days , AIBs also need lower end GPUs.
NAVI 24 on the RX 6400/6500XT is only 107mm2, so production should be high enough to justify splitting the chips for both Mobile and Desktop/client

- That would suggest that this was the plan all along (bring N24 to desktops), while wafer allocation for these chips likely happened ages ago.

If AMD has more chips than they have laptops to put them into by a significant margin, it would make sense for them to then repurpose the chips for AIBs rather late in the game.

Hence the "not getting the design wins they expected to".

I guess alternatively you could say the reason it took so damn long for N24 to launch was because AMD was heavily retargeting where and how it would launch, perhaps even porting it down to 6nm in the meantime.

How does selling a GPU to an AIB double their profits compared to selling a GPU to a laptop OEM? I would be surprised if AIBs pay more for a chip than an OEM does.

- Was being a bit hyperbolic about doubling profit, but given what standalone cards are going for nowadays vs what a whole laptop in the market range that these chips slot into would go for (AIB card would sell for $300+ while the whole laptop might go for $600-800), I have no doubt AMD is able to sell these to AIBs for much more than what they can sell them to laptop manufacturers for.
 

Heartbreaker

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Apr 3, 2006
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. As I am going to guess it using only 4 PCIE lanes has to do with a requirement for the mobile machines these are mostly going into. And they arent going to respin another version of the chip to support 8 PCIE lanes.

You may need to use only 4 PCIe Lanes in some low end laptop applications, but that doesn't mean you need to design the chip with only 4 PCIe Lanes, it could still have 8 or 16 lanes and just not use them where the aren't needed.

A lot of NVidia low end MX chips are used like this and some of them are also used in 16 PCIe lane desktop cards.

The same goes with disabled media elements. NVidia repurposes some of it's desktop chips for MX laptops and disables the media capability in that use case. Again no need to cripple the chip just because some use cases don't need the capability.

It really does seem like AMD designed the chip ONLY for low end laptops, certain it would never have any other use case, until after it was done, and some AMD exec, said: "Why don't we repurpose these super cheap laptop parts to take advantage of desperate people that will buy anything."
 
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TESKATLIPOKA

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I do chuckle slightly when I think that some people were saying this would be 1660S-2060 performance, some including under 75W. Nvidia should release a 3030, 1536-1792 Core, 6GB GPU at 70W for $200 or less just to really hammer home how bad the 6500XT really is.
Ampere with 1792 Cuda and 6GB Vram(96 bit bus) is precisely 1/2 of RTX 3060, which is 78% faster than RX 6500XT in Full HD(TPU), with 1536 Cuda It would be even weaker.
So this card won't be faster than RX 6500XT in Full HD, in higher resolution It will, but both of them don't really have enough performance for that.

RTX 3050 has 2560 Cuda, 128bit 8GB Vram and 130W TBP, so 70W is out of question for a 1792 Cuda GPU, unless clocks were lowered, but then performance would suffer.

Discussing a $200 price is pointless in the current market.

6500XT is a bad product, but what you wrote doesn't look so much better.;)
 

blckgrffn

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Now do XBOX Series S. Not the retail price, just the BOM.

Sigh.

The Series S is an appliance built from component contracts that stretch back a long ways, pre all the BS, a design that was finalized years ago, that MS is willing to eat losses on if necessary to get people into perpetual software subscriptions and build a stronger install base for their massive investment into software development and intellectual property. It can also be viewed as a investment from AMD to become a defacto refence platform for 3D graphics programs going forward as they are such a minority on the PC side.

AMD and it's AIBs profit once from the sale of a GPU, and the very fact there is an AIB partner taking their cut reduces the overall profitability.

But you already knew that, because you post smart and insightful stuff all the time.
 

Shivansps

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I would find very hard to belive they designed this GPU only for low end laptops, and low end RMB laptops at that due to the pcie x4 4.0 thats a very specific market to target. Considering that low end laptops are going to be using Barcelos/Cezanne with PCIe 3.0, that a very weird decision to make.

Nah, this is just a low end GPU, simple as that, they designed this as a replacement to the RX550 Polaris GPU, notebook, desktop, workstation, wharever. And if i consider as that, its not bad, even with the compromises it is still good.

But you just cant try to charge $200 for this and try to pass it as the RX 5500 XT replacement.
 
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blckgrffn

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I would find very hard to belive they designed this GPU only for low end laptops, and low end RMB laptops at that due to the pcie x4 4.0 thats a very specific market to target. Considering that low end laptops are going to be using Barcelos/Cezanne with PCIe 3.0, that a very weird decision to make.

Nah, this is just a low end GPU, simple as that, they designed this as a replacement to the RX550 Polaris GPU, notebook, desktop, workstation, wharever. And if i consider as that, its not bad, even with the compromises it is still good.

But you just cant try to charge $200 for this and try to pass it as the RX 5500 XT replacement.

But that's the thing, and you've surely noticed....

All GPUs are 2x to 2.5x the price they would have been two years ago.

$200 is the new $100 when it comes to GPUs.

And the RX550 and 450 were underperforming OEM specials too, in my view. At least it was usually trivial to jump to a RX470/570 which were solid back in the good ol' days.

The 5500XT existed for how long, really, as available at MSRP part? A handful of months as what was probably a painful small number of parts? Anyone considering one was generally guided to the GTX 1660 or 5600XT as huge upgrades for the price of a nice dinner. It might as well have never existed.