What will be AMD'S next Move?

[f1sherman]

AMD will do what AMD does. I see no reason for panic.
But far from that 970/980 debut was just another day at AMD. They need to be shaken, come up with a great product and stop blaming just about everyone but themselves.
It's CPU division, it's scheming Nvidia, it's lazy game devs, it's DX...

For all those saying they are doing "fine", they have weathered storms previously...
AMD also used to have R&D several times higher than NV. Nowadays NV has bigger R&D than AMD.
And NV (mostly) does just GPUs!

The question is how should they fight Intel and NV, and how will they come up with great products in the future with continually dwindling (R&D) resources.
R&D is like education, you gain some by cutting it, but inevitably lose in the long run.
Rory did his job by restructuring and cutting, now is the time to bring someone with the vision.

 

[f1sherman]

Sorry but $300+ GPU market is 10-15% only, you can make a profit without even engage in that segment and stay bellow the $300 mark.

This is a claim that every so often is mentioned here.

I assume you are talking about desktop cards, and Nvidia making 85-90% of their income on sub $300 cards.
Sometime ppl will mention $200 or $250 mark. You are going with safer number, props for that, but its still a number pulled out of a thin air.

I suppose there was much truth to that claim in olden times when there was no SoCs, with huge OEMs shipments and only select few rocking high-end gaming setups.
But also I'm pretty sure this is not the case today, where high-end gaming is a viable money generator. Matter of fact this is how NV differentiates itself from PC slumber.
During last 2-3 years there were no other catalyst for them, so it HAS TO BE the rise of high-margin PC gaming which insulates them from PC downfall.


Funny fact: Nvidia's most popular chip on Steam is GK104, not GK106/7/8.
And this is going by pure chip VOLUME, and not by profit from your statement, which is several times bigger on more expensive cards.

 

[SlickR12345]

Rapping out the 290X and adding cost, as you say, is not a good way to compete with the very efficient 980. The 290 Ultra would be nearly 300W, 512-bit bus, with high quality parts trying to compete with a GK204 part. It won't end well, the costs are so incredibly different between those two parts that AMD will pretty much be breaking even on each sale where Nvidia is feeding its R&D engine.

AMD's approach of strapping an AIO to a power hungry chip doesn't work well, look at the FX9590...

LOL. The 290 series are very cheap to develop. They could easily sell the 290x for $250 and have small profit.

But if they were to use quality parts they can actually reduce the power consumption and temperature at the same time, with a better cooler as well, which won't add more than $40 to the card, they can come up with a really high quality design at about $450 to compete with the GTX 980.

After all the 980 is same performance as the 780TI with a bit lower power consumption, its not hard to compete with that and beat it on value.

As far as features, who cares, those are so insignificant, I mean you look at performance and price for GPU's, you don't look at features. Those are all background stuff that pretty much worthless and 99.9% of the users have never ever heard about it.

 

[Vesku]

but it will consume more power though.Even know i am seeing in forums that AMD user are also demanding for efficiency and lower power consumption.People who have mid range rigs wont even look at R9 290X or R9 290 because it consume a lot power and not enough efficient like GTX 970.

I sure that everyone will agree that right now GTX 970 is the best choice for any Mid range or high end user.

R9 290 power is not as good as Nvidia but it's only an extra ~$16 a year power costs in the US (22 hours gaming a week) and might mean you get a 650W power supply instead of a 550W power supply for single GPU. $280 would make it price competitive and afaik they are still running decent game bundles which can be nice if they have any titles that the person would be buying anyway. I'd like to see AMD push 290 down to $250 but I'm doubtful they'd want to go that low.

If AMD doesn't have their 300 series ready for November or earlier release I really hope their 1H15 GPUs are 20nm. Otherwise this downward push on the 2nd to the top GPUs might end with the 970.

 

[Abwx]

R9 290 power is not as good as Nvidia but it's only an extra ~$16 a year power costs in the US (22 hours gaming a week) and might mean you get a 650W power supply instead of a 550W power supply for single GPU.

The $ delta is smaller than your generous estimation...and that is compared to reference designs that consume substancialy more than OEM designs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,3941-13.html

 

[Silverforce11]

Also, for 6 months NVIDIA was struggling to release GF100 Fermi and when they did, lots and lots of people bought the GPU no matter if it was 300W because it was 10-15% faster than HD5870.

NV fans are "special" as we all know. They are more willing to wait and see what NV has to offer, even if the wait is long. They also don't mind high power use if the performance is there.

The same cannot be said for AMD fans, I wouldn't even call them fans because they aren't as loyal as proven by the sharp marketshare loss for AMD over the years. I can only speak for myself ultimately, but I have no loyalties to a brand, I go for the best GPU for my hard earned money.

Honestly do you think a lot of AMD users who wanted to upgrade now, would wait and see what AMD has to offer next year? I don't think so, I think they will go right for the 970.

Either way this is short term. AMD will survive fine in the short term.

But they show signs of going down the stupid path of "moar cores! moar TDP!!" in their GPU division, which has proven disastrous for their CPU over many generations already.

So for long term, I hope GCN 2 focus on efficiency. They need it to compete on notebooks, ultrabooks. They need it for their APUs too, because it wont matter that their iGPU is faster than Intel, when Intel can out perform them vastly at a given low TDP that notebooks require. What they don't need and its a guarantee death, is to chase after the halo discrete performance crown at the expense of 2X the power use as their competition.

NV can turn it around from Fermi, I'm sure AMD can too, if their directive is to go down that efficiency route. The problem is they show no signs of such, or even acknowledging spiraling TDP is a problem. No, LC is not a correct solution.

 

[monstercameron]

lol, its funny that when AMD focuses on features they get called out, when they release based on efficiency they get called out when they do absolute perf they also get called out. There is no victory for the underdog.

 

[Creig]

.People who have mid range rigs wont even look at R9 290X or R9 290 because it consume a lot power and not enough efficient like GTX 970.

Wrong.

Power efficiency is nice to have, but it's not a deal killer for people looking at R9 290/290X or GTX 970 levels of performance. The price/performance ratio has always been the defining metric that people place the most emphasis on when choosing a new high end video card.

 

[tviceman]

I don't think some people realize the gravity of AMD's situation now. Hawaii might not cost all that much more to build at TSMC (after all, it's only 10% larger), but factor in that it is larger, yields will be slightly lower due to it's higher density, the PCB components cost more because of the higher power consumption, and the fact that it will have to be priced below at or below gtx 970 to realistically have decent sales is really, really, really, bad news.

And what does that do to Tonga? Because the r9 290x at ~$330-350 is going to push the R9 290 down to $249. A fully functional Tonga is going to have to go for $199 while the current Tonga is going to drop down to $149.

Those are staggering price drops across the board for what was already considered value-oriented prices 3 days ago. But new products are coming soon! People say. Then why was Tonga released a three weeks ago? It demonstrated no real performance improvement over Tahiti aside from additional features (Mantle compatibility, XDMA, true audio). It's bigger, it's not faster, and it's not more efficient. AMD did not build a 5 billion transistor chip with the intention of it having a 6 month life span.

I think GCN 2.0 is a solid 9 months away, and I think the hybrid air/water cooler leaked is going to be a super clocked 290x used to compete with gtx980. But will people honestly hold out for a factory water cooled 290x with probably little headroom left to be clocked further (meaning it will still be slower than an overclocked gtx980), while consuming 200 more watts than GTX980? The answer is quite simply no. There will be no meaningful amount of people that would buy that card.

 

[SantaAna12]

Quote:
Originally Posted by desprado View Post
but it will consume more power though.Even know i am seeing in forums that AMD user are also demanding for efficiency and lower power consumption.People who have mid range rigs wont even look at R9 290X or R9 290 because it consume a lot power and not enough efficient like GTX 970.

I sure that everyone will agree that right now GTX 970 is the best choice for any Mid range or high end user.

You ask for no flames and start a thread to ask what people think AMD's next move is, but you can't resist turning it into an nVidia sales pitch.

I'm out until you decide you want to be the least bit open.

^+1.

I for one want AMD around and strong. Especially after watching their recent pricing schemes.
Count me in for pure HP.
Bring it on AMD!

 

[f1sherman]

lol, its funny that when AMD focuses on features they get called out, when they release based on efficiency they get called out when they do absolute perf they also get called out. There is no victory for the underdog.

GTX 750/Ti/970/980 and the entire Maxwell's mobile stack is in whole another league from anything that AMD has to offer.
Yes, feature wise also.
Halving MSAA performance hit. One button supersampling in EVERY GAME, EVERY API.

You are not really trying to pry out a "victory" out of all this?

I certainly hope AMD has something better in the making, other than words and endless debates they have been initiating lately

Nvidia has spoken clearly and loudly, and it's NOT THROUGH THEIR PR.

 

[monstercameron]

I don't think some people realize the gravity of AMD's situation now. Hawaii might not cost all that much more to build at TSMC (after all, it's only 10% larger), but factor in that it is larger, yields will be slightly lower due to it's higher density, the PCB components cost more because of the higher power consumption, and the fact that it will have to be priced below at or below gtx 970 to realistically have decent sales is really, really, really, bad news.

And what does that do to Tonga? Because the r9 290x at ~$330-350 is going to push the R9 290 down to $249. A fully functional Tonga is going to have to go for $199 while the current Tonga is going to drop down to $149.

Those are staggering price drops across the board for what was already considered value-oriented prices 3 days ago. But new products are coming soon! People say. Then why was Tonga released a three weeks ago? It demonstrated no real performance improvement over Tahiti aside from additional features (Mantle compatibility, XDMA, true audio). It's bigger, it's not faster, and it's not more efficient. AMD did not build a 5 billion transistor chip with the intention of it having a 6 month life span.

I think GCN 2.0 is a solid 9 months away, and I think the hybrid air/water cooler leaked is going to be a super clocked 290x used to compete with gtx980. But will people honestly hold out for a factory water cooled 290x with probably little headroom left to be clocked further (meaning it will still be slower than an overclocked gtx980), while consuming 200 more watts than GTX980? The answer is quite simply no. There will be no meaningful amount of people that would buy that card.

dude the doom and gloom crap is wearing thin. None of the above matters, AMD will have a new product out soon. that's really the most of it.

 

[tviceman]

dude the doom and gloom crap is wearing thin. None of the above matters, AMD will have a new product out soon. that's really the most of it.

SOON. IT'S COMING SOON. Just like the competitor to conroe, errr sandy bridge, errr ivy bridge, errr haswell, errrrr crap. NONE OF IT MATTERS.

 

[monstercameron]

GTX 750/Ti/970/980 and the entire Maxwell's mobile stack is in whole another league from anything that AMD has to offer.
Yes, feature wise also.
Halving MSAA performance hit. One button supersampling in EVERY GAME, EVERY API.

You are not really trying to pry out a "victory" out of all this?

I certainly hope AMD has something better in the making, other than words and endless debates they have been initiating lately

Nvidia has spoken clearly and loudly, and it's NOT THROUGH THEIR PR.

I question what you mean by "whole another league" and by that you mean ~20% more perf/W then...ok? The card looks good and I wont deny that but the constant doom and gloom and fanboyism isnt very entertaining[for lack of a better word]. Besides in a year or so when we start getting more badass games that run great on dx12 I can bet you wont be complaining.

 

[monstercameron]

SOON. IT'S COMING SOON. NONE OF IT MATTERS. Just like the competitor to conroe, errr sandy bridge, errr ivy bridge, errr haswell, errrrr crap.

So you are saying that AMD wont have a new GPU out soon? also you could say the same thing of every unreleased technology. Could've said the same thing about maxwell before launch.

 

[tviceman]

So you are saying that AMD wont have a new GPU out soon? also you could say the same thing of every unreleased technology. Could've said the same thing about maxwell before launch.

What is soon? Share the rumors with us please.

 

[Silverforce11]

I question what you mean by "whole another league" and by that you mean ~20% more perf/W then...ok? The card looks good and I wont deny that but the constant doom and gloom and fanboyism isnt very entertaining[for lack of a better word]. Besides in a year when we start getting more badass game that run great on dx12 I van bet you wont be complaining.

It's not 20% more.

You have a 165W card matching or beating a 250W card.

But this is short term, sure, AMD will release something competitive... soon. Probably mid 2015 soon. Big 550mm2 Tonga is not a competitive solution, because it only occupies the high end. AMD needs to compete with Maxwell from notebooks to mid-range to high-end discrete. GCN 2.0 needs to be a major improvement for this to happen.

 

[el etro]

The thread is good.

But this history of "AMD have no money and can't respond to Maxwell" is more of a assumption made by forums people(like the "AMD trades frametimes per Max FPS and will be not able to compete with Nvidia on 99th FPS meter") than reality. No one here knows what is the financial situation of AMD, and more, no one of us here knows what AMD roadmaps plans now to deliver in the GPU landscape.

 

[desprado]

It's not 20% more.

You have a 165W card matching or beating a 250W card.

But this is short term, sure, AMD will release something competitive... soon. Probably mid 2015 soon. Big 550mm2 Tonga is not a competitive solution, because it only occupies the high end. AMD needs to compete with Maxwell from notebooks to mid-range to high-end discrete. GCN 2.0 needs to be a major improvement for this to happen.

Yes and people are not getting it that performance is not only they key and Nvidia has showed that there 170w gpu is beating AMDs best 350w gpu that is problem with much cheaper price.

 

[monstercameron]

It's not 20% more.

You have a 165W card matching or beating a 250W card.

But this is short term, sure, AMD will release something competitive... soon. Probably mid 2015 soon. Big 550mm2 Tonga is not a competitive solution, because it only occupies the high end. AMD needs to compete with Maxwell from notebooks to mid-range to high-end discrete. GCN 2.0 needs to be a major improvement for this to happen.

1) TDP != power consumption
2) why probably mid 2015, the 290x was release nov-oct 2013 why keep the product for so long?
3) AMD has little to n relevance in mobile dgpus, I dont see that chaning even with maxwell or without, if anything intel will just gobble up that share.
4] when did high end pc gaming get this lame? when did everything become power consumption as AMD started using more power? [puts on tinfoil hat]beautiful nvidia marketing at work.

 

[Paul98]

Drop price on current cards and then release a new cards.

It's not a big deal, you have new beating year old with more features. This is normal, it just seems people have short memories and think it's something special.

 

[f1sherman]

I question what you mean by "whole another league" and by that you mean ~20% more perf/W then...ok? The card looks good and I wont deny that but the constant doom and gloom and fanboyism isnt very entertaining[for lack of a better word]. Besides in a year or so when we start getting more badass games that run great on dx12 I can bet you wont be complaining.

I'll sure be jelly if DX12 HW compliant 970 suddenly demolishes my DX12 SW compliant 290
(atm im more then satisfied with its perf.)
And this is not an unrealistic proposition

Soon...you say.
Soon should have been half a year ago when 750/Ti had debuted and gave a glimpse of things to come.
But instead of that we've heard no-sense theories on this forum how 750/Ti is just a fluke, a stripped down perf/W chip, and no way NV can replicate it's metrics on bigger chip.

ATM AMD is full gen behind in every important aspect, save for perf. where they are only half gen behind.
How the hell is that just another day at AMD's office?
Oh yeah... soon.

 

[desprado]

Drop price on current cards and then release a new cards.

It's not a big deal, you have new beating year old with more features. This is normal, it just seems people have short memories and think it's something special.

AMD can make card with more horse power for sure but than what?It will require 400w alone to run and it will be much much hotter equal to Nvidia GPus.AMD really need an efficient and much lower power consumption gpus which will require time to release.

 

[monstercameron]

I'll sure be jelly if DX12 HW compliant 970 suddenly demolishes my DX12 SW compliant 290
(atm im more then satisfied with its perf.)
And this is not an unrealistic proposition

Soon...you say.
Soon should have been half a year ago when 750/Ti had debuted and gave a glimpse of things to come.
But instead of that we've heard no-sense theories on this forum how 750/Ti is just a fluke, a stripped down perf/W chip, and no way NV can replicate it's metrics on bigger chip.

ATM AMD is full gen behind in every important aspect, save for perf. where they are only half gen behind.
How the hell is that just another day at AMD's office?
Oh yeah... soon.

I'm confused, so what metric makes AMD "full gen. behind" ?

• API support?
• software/drivers?
• Display interface support?
• video codec support?
• effiency?
• performance? gaming/compute?
• process tech?
• memory?
• memory bandwidth?

 

[f1sherman]

Pretty much (most of) all that.

And the toys. You forgot the new Maxwell toys. DSR, MFAA and VR direct most notably.
Also they need to catch up with just a fragment of NV financial resources.