And I am actually really disappointed, as a tech business enthusiast, that AMD is slashing prices. That way they would earn more money.
I’ve got two hypotheses about what’s going on here.
The facts are AMD publicly provided expected MSRP for each 57XX card and a pretty detailed comparative performance breakdown against their NV competitor.
NV then responded by releasing improved Turing cards to match up against that public price/performance data on the new AMD cards ostensibly to put AMD one the backfoot at launch.
Hypothesis 1 is AMD shot themselves in the foot by taking so long with NAVI that new Turing cards were designed and manufactured in time for Navi’s release and announcing price/performance so early that NV had time to price their new cards to take the wind out of AMDs launch.
This assumes that the originally announced prices of $450/$380 were the estimated peak of the demand / cost curve and now AMD will have to lose profit to keep their meager marketshare. What a screw up.
Hypothesis 2 is knowing they were already way behind NV there was no way to launch Navi without NV making a counter move around that launch. By very publicly making the 57XX price/performance data available they caused NV to make their move now.
By announcing pricing of the 57XX series more in line with the 20XX series than expected they could partially control the pricing of NVs response. With no pressure to drop prices NV didn’t, they just provided more performance at the same price. Quite frankly I think NV was actually sandbagging with the Turing launch of the 2060 and 2070 due to the 2060 being a cut down TU106 and the 2070 NOT being a cut down TU104
Moving on, with the NV response out of the way AMD cans drop the proposed prices to $400/$350. Which allows AMD to sell a faster, smaller, non-HBM GPU
at the same price they launched the RX Vega 56 at. In this hypothesis these are likely the prices they were looking to sell at in the first place.
I also think they are playing the performance of the 57XX series conservatively based on the noise normalized blower cooler. If you are willing to deal with more noise or aftermarket coolers there’s probably a bit more performance available.
So the end result is AMD gets the price/performance crown in those segments with a health profit margin per GPU.
In support of this is Lisa Su has shown her self to be a savy CEO and this Forbes article which suggests they were leading NV on.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fo...ia-super-radeon-rx-5700-navi-price-drops/amp/
With this tweet from the head of the Radeon Unit (and formerly of NV).
