Originally posted by Datawarlock Meh. I've seen a couple posts almost bragging that AMD has caused others to bring prices down. Big deal? AMD never could compete with the big dogs at the higher prices, they HAVE to try to get all the prices down. Seriously, as of me writing this share prices for AMD are at $3.69, $60m in shares held.... while Nvidia is at $18.81 and has $92m in shares held. So really, who cares what fanboy says what about which vendor? The market data tells all.
Apple Inc. probably costs more than HTC/Sony and few more others combined. Is Apple the best hardware/software company ever? You do realize shares are all about perceived value right? You also have got to find it funny that a 6 times more expensive company can't build a GPU that is at least twice as performing as the competitor's top line.
Originally posted by Datawarlock Just remember ATI's roots as a business oriented video card maker. It's spent decades playing catch up to Diamond, 3DFX, nVidia, etc. when it comes to the gaming world. Also take a look at AMD since acquiring ATI.... Steady downhill decline with it's CPU market, which is all it ever really had going for it at one time. ATI will be the death of AMD.
Yup, that's why the new Xbox One and the new Playstation 4 are using AMD parts. AMD is playing, er, catchup.
Wait ....
Oh yeah... and IBM made it's highly anticipated comeback helping out with that crap cell processor in playstations too.... I forget history >.>
Are you talknig about those crap cell processors in the PS3? the ones the military now use in stacked units because they are so good ?
There is nothing wrong with the processors its just the architecture is so different game designers found it hard to write games for and it would also make it even harder to port to other platforms.
Originally posted by Datawarlock Meh. I've seen a couple posts almost bragging that AMD has caused others to bring prices down. Big deal? AMD never could compete with the big dogs at the higher prices, they HAVE to try to get all the prices down. Seriously, as of me writing this share prices for AMD are at $3.69, $60m in shares held.... while Nvidia is at $18.81 and has $92m in shares held. So really, who cares what fanboy says what about which vendor? The market data tells all.
There's a lot more to that financial data than just a niche gamer/GPU segment. Both businesses have a lot of other revenue streams than just gamers buying discrete video cards.
Really it says very little about the quality or performance of a companies product.
It still stands to show that AMD can't compete on the same level as Nvidia price-wise, thus they have to keep praying to drag the others down to their level. Nvidia can afford to take a hit on something, AMD really can't.
Wait, you're saying the price per share and the overall size of the company determines how much profit a company is making and thus the type of 'hit' they can take? Sony has been losing money for years, why do they even have a stock price?
AMD has been competing with Nvidia for years. They've been competing with Intel for years too. Are you sure the words you are typing mean what you think they mean?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by Datawarlock Meh. I've seen a couple posts almost bragging that AMD has caused others to bring prices down. Big deal? AMD never could compete with the big dogs at the higher prices, they HAVE to try to get all the prices down. Seriously, as of me writing this share prices for AMD are at $3.69, $60m in shares held.... while Nvidia is at $18.81 and has $92m in shares held. So really, who cares what fanboy says what about which vendor? The market data tells all.
Suppose that there are only two companies that produce widgets, and they produce effectively identical products. For company A, it costs $10 to produce a widget. For company B, it costs $20. Which of the two companies do you think is going to start a price war and force prices downward?
Which video card vendor would you expect to push prices down? The one with the more efficient chip. For about four years, from the launch of the Radeon HD 4870 until the launch of the GeForce GTX 670, that was very clearly AMD. Today at the high end, it's Nvidia, though it's not at all clear for how long.
AMD has had the more efficient chip since the HD3870. That was the last GPU I have seen to be overclockable by a notable amount stock. But it was not a top end chip and did not match the performance of the 8800 GT. Its also when AMD started the price wars with nVidia.
I think of the GTX 680 like the AMD HD3870. Main issue is the proprietary tools, much like the unused tesselator take up space that could be used for something else. Thats why to me the GTX980 is not like the HD6970, it keeps all the baggage.
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Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Just to kind of bump this and bring up something now that we've had these guys out in the wild for a bit:
Newegg is out of stock perpetually. Amazon has a small handful (selling for $100+ over MSRP), but mostly out of stock.
Are we dealing with another extremely limited release (like when the 680 was announced, and wasn't available in quantity for months), or is this just an initial surge of pent-up demand for a newer technology (we've had Kepler for a long while now), or did nVidia nail it on the price/performance? Or some combination thereof?
Originally posted by Datawarlock Just remember ATI's roots as a business oriented video card maker. It's spent decades playing catch up to Diamond, 3DFX, nVidia, etc. when it comes to the gaming world. Also take a look at AMD since acquiring ATI.... Steady downhill decline with it's CPU market, which is all it ever really had going for it at one time. ATI will be the death of AMD.
Yup, that's why the new Xbox One and the new Playstation 4 are using AMD parts. AMD is playing, er, catchup.
Wait ....
Yes, cus the PS4 and Xbone are such paradigm's of computing and graphical prowess... Clearly something to be in awe of.
uh...think we're talking about money and not what they can do. of course a 800 dollar card will be better than a 200 dollar one.
But the point stand for the OP, they are making plenty of money with just the consoles, not including their other ventures
We've already had this discussion. They're BARELY a good deal. At the time they released you could build a PC for about $600 that would have been roughly as powerful.
When you account for the fact that console games rarely if ever go on sale, whereas you can generally get PC games for reduced costs a few months after, over the lifetime you're going to come out way ahead on a PC, and you can upgrade it to play newer games better.
So no, still not in awe. Make them $200-$250 and then maybe there will be a valid argument there.
it does'nt matter if the pc you built for $600 was as powerful, any software you run on it still has to stumble its way through windows or whatever OS you place on it, which is FAR less resource efficient than the OS used in the consoles which is developed solely to run the games designed specifically for the hardware. You can not and never will be able to compare consoles to PC's based on purely hardware.....what a laugh.
"Well let me just quote the late-great Colonel Sanders, who said…’I’m too drunk to taste this chicken." - Ricky Bobby
Originally posted by Torcip So with how crazy low priced Nvidia's new flagship Maxwell cards are, how is AMD going to respond?
Same as always. AMD is the one who made Nvidia start going lower on prices.
Thats all AMD are good for these days. I totally regret building an AMD rig. Complete waste of money. I have MAXED cards (7950s running maxed clock speeds I can use through CCC) and theyre still struggling to keep up with low-mid range stock clock 700 series. AMD should just stick with their APUs and leave the CPUS and GPUS to the big boiz
AMD and Intel have very high "GPU Sales" numbers because they count the GPU in each APU as a sale. I don't even think Intel makes a discrete GPU any longer.
While AMD and Intel may sell a lot of GPUs in APUs, they are not nearly as profitable as the discrete GPUs. nVidia can get a very healthy margin on every discrete GPU, particularly those meant for Commercial and Industrial use (Quadro, Tesla, Grid).
I think the fact that AMD is in nearly every console now is significant - but not so much so as to drive developers to really go hardware level. That's why they develop to APIs, and the console manufacturers have gone to great lengths to support particular APIs. That more or less eliminates the need to write "AMD First" code - and even if you did choose to drive down to the hardware level (farther down than Mantle, which is technically possible), you would find that there are enough differences in all the console and PC architectures that you wouldn't want to. GCN may be GCN, but you have different memory structures, different cache schemes, and it would make it a nightmare to develop anything cross-platform at that low of a level.
Cars - meh. That's a marketing point, but I don't think it will be enough volume/margin to write home about. Kinda like the entire Tegra line - meh. I agree with you there - hardly really pertinent, but maybe in 5-10 years it could be something. All the big boys are x86 now, but I could see a not-to-distant future where ARM comes into it's own.
Not that I'm an nVidia or AMD lover, but gotta keep some perspective.
In a couple of months it's nvidia who will be "dead" once hbm comes out and it won't be available to nvidia for a while since amd is the one who made it.
No one is killing anyone. No one would make any money if they kept releasing the highest quality products all at once for no nonsense prices at the same exact time.
They dont need to out sell nvidia or intel by lowering their price if they can create a new market for themselves.
A cpu that works more effeciently with their cards, and having cpus that are unique as well allowing for gpus to take advantage of the new architecture of cpus will give them a unique edge over intel and other video card manufactures.
Its similar to how consoles work better with a certain range of hardware than a desktop using a bulky operating system with the same amount of hardware.
AMD is making a new CPU and hopefully it works out, since it means we have better technology all together. Which then can lead to new possibilities.
edit; seems like i was already beaten to the punch
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
The consoles have a similar OS footprint now. XBone pretty much uses a Windows 8 OS with some interaction features specifically for controller input. Its also part of Microsoft's unified look approach. The PlayStation 4 probably has a more barebones OS. Both consoles now act as media centers for a variety of things the PC used to do exclusively like browse the net, listen to music, record video, play game, and so on... At the same time the OS footprint of Windows based systems has been continuously decreased with Windows 7 and 8.
The difference comes from supporting modern tech. Many companies revert there games back to a 32-bit Windows XP compatible game. If they would just finally let go of Windows XP, single core, and 32-bit we would see very similar numbers.
Let's have a quick flashback. In September 2009, AMD launched the Radeon HD 5850. It was faster than Nvidia's flagship, the GeForce GTX 285, in basically everything. It had vastly better API compatibility, including DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4, both of which the GTX 285 lacked. It used vastly less power and had a massively smaller die. It only needed four memory channels rather than eight and could run on bottom bin GDDR5 memory rather than having to pay a premium for the highest clock speeds available. It offered new features that Nvidia couldn't match, including Eyefinity and angle-independent anisotropic filtering. It was better than Nvidia's flagship in pretty much every way that one could hope for.
Sound like the launch of the GeForce GTX 980 today? As compared to a Radeon R9 290X, the new GeForce GTX 980 is faster and uses less power. It gets that extra speed from fewer memory channels, though it doesn't really have a feature set advantage. If anything, the advantage of the GTX 980 over the Radeon R9 290X is smaller than the advantage of the Radeon HD 5850 over the GTX 285.
Oh, but there's one huge difference that I conveniently left out. The GTX 980 costs $550. That leaves a lot of room for AMD to undercut in prices. The Radeon HD 5850 cost $260, less than half what the GTX 980 costs today. For Nvidia to cut GTX 285 prices below that would have meant losing money on every card sold, so instead, Nvidia discontinued their flagship long before a replacement was ready. Nvidia wouldn't be able to respond until April 2010, and when they finally did, it was with the most disastrously awful GPU die since at least 2007 and likely further back than that.
Basically, Nvidia was in a much worse competitive spot than AMD is today. Did that kill Nvidia? I think the title of this thread answers that.
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The GTX 980 is an impressive card, certainly. I'm curious how much of that is due to process node advancements as opposed to architectural improvements. While still on 28 nm, there are a lot of 28 nm process nodes, and there are options available today that weren't in early 2012. Furthermore, the process node will give much better yields for a given die mask, and is much better understood so that you can optimize a chip for exactly what the process node does well rather than having to guess--and sometimes guessing wrong.
Do I think AMD will be able to offer a card that is just as good as the GTX 980 before moving to a new process node? No. But I do expect them to narrow the gap somewhat.
Traditionally, AMD has been better than Nvidia at getting a decent chip out on a new process node quickly. Nvidia has been better than AMD at building highly refined cards on older, well understood process nodes. Now that we have a situation where the industry will be stuck at 28 nm for about four years or so, why wouldn't that be comparatively favorable to Nvidia?
I'd be surprised if AMD isn't able to reclaim the lead when they move to 14 or 16 nm, though that could easily be a year away or more. And that, of course, doesn't preclude Nvidia reclaiming the lead when they make the same jump, especially if AMD isn't able to pull out some architectural magic to compete with Maxwell.
Best post I've read from you, and that says something.
Let's have a quick flashback. In September 2009, AMD launched the Radeon HD 5850. It was faster than Nvidia's flagship, the GeForce GTX 285, in basically everything. It had vastly better API compatibility, including DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4, both of which the GTX 285 lacked. It used vastly less power and had a massively smaller die. It only needed four memory channels rather than eight and could run on bottom bin GDDR5 memory rather than having to pay a premium for the highest clock speeds available. It offered new features that Nvidia couldn't match, including Eyefinity and angle-independent anisotropic filtering. It was better than Nvidia's flagship in pretty much every way that one could hope for.
Sound like the launch of the GeForce GTX 980 today? As compared to a Radeon R9 290X, the new GeForce GTX 980 is faster and uses less power. It gets that extra speed from fewer memory channels, though it doesn't really have a feature set advantage. If anything, the advantage of the GTX 980 over the Radeon R9 290X is smaller than the advantage of the Radeon HD 5850 over the GTX 285.
Oh, but there's one huge difference that I conveniently left out. The GTX 980 costs $550. That leaves a lot of room for AMD to undercut in prices. The Radeon HD 5850 cost $260, less than half what the GTX 980 costs today. For Nvidia to cut GTX 285 prices below that would have meant losing money on every card sold, so instead, Nvidia discontinued their flagship long before a replacement was ready. Nvidia wouldn't be able to respond until April 2010, and when they finally did, it was with the most disastrously awful GPU die since at least 2007 and likely further back than that.
Basically, Nvidia was in a much worse competitive spot than AMD is today. Did that kill Nvidia? I think the title of this thread answers that.
-----
The GTX 980 is an impressive card, certainly. I'm curious how much of that is due to process node advancements as opposed to architectural improvements. While still on 28 nm, there are a lot of 28 nm process nodes, and there are options available today that weren't in early 2012. Furthermore, the process node will give much better yields for a given die mask, and is much better understood so that you can optimize a chip for exactly what the process node does well rather than having to guess--and sometimes guessing wrong.
Do I think AMD will be able to offer a card that is just as good as the GTX 980 before moving to a new process node? No. But I do expect them to narrow the gap somewhat.
Traditionally, AMD has been better than Nvidia at getting a decent chip out on a new process node quickly. Nvidia has been better than AMD at building highly refined cards on older, well understood process nodes. Now that we have a situation where the industry will be stuck at 28 nm for about four years or so, why wouldn't that be comparatively favorable to Nvidia?
I'd be surprised if AMD isn't able to reclaim the lead when they move to 14 or 16 nm, though that could easily be a year away or more. And that, of course, doesn't preclude Nvidia reclaiming the lead when they make the same jump, especially if AMD isn't able to pull out some architectural magic to compete with Maxwell.
Best post I've read from you, and that says something.
Eh i dunno, all of Quiz's posts are pretty good. At least when pertaining to computers and their individual parts.
Comments
Apple Inc. probably costs more than HTC/Sony and few more others combined. Is Apple the best hardware/software company ever? You do realize shares are all about perceived value right? You also have got to find it funny that a 6 times more expensive company can't build a GPU that is at least twice as performing as the competitor's top line.
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
Are you talknig about those crap cell processors in the PS3? the ones the military now use in stacked units because they are so good ?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/105767-U-S-Air-Force-Finishes-PS3-Supercomputer-of-Epic-Proportions
There is nothing wrong with the processors its just the architecture is so different game designers found it hard to write games for and it would also make it even harder to port to other platforms.
Wait, you're saying the price per share and the overall size of the company determines how much profit a company is making and thus the type of 'hit' they can take? Sony has been losing money for years, why do they even have a stock price?
AMD has been competing with Nvidia for years. They've been competing with Intel for years too. Are you sure the words you are typing mean what you think they mean?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Suppose that there are only two companies that produce widgets, and they produce effectively identical products. For company A, it costs $10 to produce a widget. For company B, it costs $20. Which of the two companies do you think is going to start a price war and force prices downward?
Which video card vendor would you expect to push prices down? The one with the more efficient chip. For about four years, from the launch of the Radeon HD 4870 until the launch of the GeForce GTX 670, that was very clearly AMD. Today at the high end, it's Nvidia, though it's not at all clear for how long.
AMD has had the more efficient chip since the HD3870. That was the last GPU I have seen to be overclockable by a notable amount stock. But it was not a top end chip and did not match the performance of the 8800 GT. Its also when AMD started the price wars with nVidia.
I think of the GTX 680 like the AMD HD3870. Main issue is the proprietary tools, much like the unused tesselator take up space that could be used for something else. Thats why to me the GTX980 is not like the HD6970, it keeps all the baggage.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
They will do what they have done for years. They will release something as good or better and be competative if not lower in cost.
Just to kind of bump this and bring up something now that we've had these guys out in the wild for a bit:
Newegg is out of stock perpetually. Amazon has a small handful (selling for $100+ over MSRP), but mostly out of stock.
Are we dealing with another extremely limited release (like when the 680 was announced, and wasn't available in quantity for months), or is this just an initial surge of pent-up demand for a newer technology (we've had Kepler for a long while now), or did nVidia nail it on the price/performance? Or some combination thereof?
it does'nt matter if the pc you built for $600 was as powerful, any software you run on it still has to stumble its way through windows or whatever OS you place on it, which is FAR less resource efficient than the OS used in the consoles which is developed solely to run the games designed specifically for the hardware. You can not and never will be able to compare consoles to PC's based on purely hardware.....what a laugh.
Thats all AMD are good for these days. I totally regret building an AMD rig. Complete waste of money. I have MAXED cards (7950s running maxed clock speeds I can use through CCC) and theyre still struggling to keep up with low-mid range stock clock 700 series. AMD should just stick with their APUs and leave the CPUS and GPUS to the big boiz
A bit off topic, but I'll play.
AMD and Intel have very high "GPU Sales" numbers because they count the GPU in each APU as a sale. I don't even think Intel makes a discrete GPU any longer.
While AMD and Intel may sell a lot of GPUs in APUs, they are not nearly as profitable as the discrete GPUs. nVidia can get a very healthy margin on every discrete GPU, particularly those meant for Commercial and Industrial use (Quadro, Tesla, Grid).
I think the fact that AMD is in nearly every console now is significant - but not so much so as to drive developers to really go hardware level. That's why they develop to APIs, and the console manufacturers have gone to great lengths to support particular APIs. That more or less eliminates the need to write "AMD First" code - and even if you did choose to drive down to the hardware level (farther down than Mantle, which is technically possible), you would find that there are enough differences in all the console and PC architectures that you wouldn't want to. GCN may be GCN, but you have different memory structures, different cache schemes, and it would make it a nightmare to develop anything cross-platform at that low of a level.
Cars - meh. That's a marketing point, but I don't think it will be enough volume/margin to write home about. Kinda like the entire Tegra line - meh. I agree with you there - hardly really pertinent, but maybe in 5-10 years it could be something. All the big boys are x86 now, but I could see a not-to-distant future where ARM comes into it's own.
Not that I'm an nVidia or AMD lover, but gotta keep some perspective.
In a couple of months it's nvidia who will be "dead" once hbm comes out and it won't be available to nvidia for a while since amd is the one who made it.
No one is killing anyone. No one would make any money if they kept releasing the highest quality products all at once for no nonsense prices at the same exact time.
Amd develops CPUs and GPUs or video cards.
They dont need to out sell nvidia or intel by lowering their price if they can create a new market for themselves.
A cpu that works more effeciently with their cards, and having cpus that are unique as well allowing for gpus to take advantage of the new architecture of cpus will give them a unique edge over intel and other video card manufactures.
Its similar to how consoles work better with a certain range of hardware than a desktop using a bulky operating system with the same amount of hardware.
AMD is making a new CPU and hopefully it works out, since it means we have better technology all together. Which then can lead to new possibilities.
edit; seems like i was already beaten to the punch
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
The consoles have a similar OS footprint now. XBone pretty much uses a Windows 8 OS with some interaction features specifically for controller input. Its also part of Microsoft's unified look approach. The PlayStation 4 probably has a more barebones OS. Both consoles now act as media centers for a variety of things the PC used to do exclusively like browse the net, listen to music, record video, play game, and so on... At the same time the OS footprint of Windows based systems has been continuously decreased with Windows 7 and 8.
The difference comes from supporting modern tech. Many companies revert there games back to a 32-bit Windows XP compatible game. If they would just finally let go of Windows XP, single core, and 32-bit we would see very similar numbers.
Best post I've read from you, and that says something.
Eh i dunno, all of Quiz's posts are pretty good. At least when pertaining to computers and their individual parts.