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AMD announces that they will make some announcements in October.
They're going to announce something or other about Zen 3 (next gen CPUs) on October 8, and then something about RDNA 2 (next gen GPUs) on October 28. They've also announced that the latter will be marketed as the Radeon RX 6000 series.
It's not clear exactly what they'll announce. These likely won't be actual product launches. It could easily be something analogous to Nvidia's Ampere announcements from last week.
On the CPU side, AMD is pretty much the market leader already. Zen 3 will probably extend their advantage, and may finally erase Intel's edge in strictly single-threaded performance if you buy their top end chips. I expect that Zen 3 will offer increased performance at about the same price points as before.
On the GPU side, AMD is promising a 50% increase in performance per watt as compared to RDNA. It's not clear how that will compare to Ampere, but it's likely that they'll be competitive. AMD has also promised that there will be a big Navi chip, which they didn't do for their previous generation, so it's likely that AMD will have something competitive higher up the chain than they have in recent generations.
I think there are some clues in Nvidia's Ampere pricing. Nvidia is charging $1500 for a GeForce RTX 3090, but $700 for an RTX 3080. To have the cut-down version cost less than half of the price of the top GeForce card is very unusual, and I can't think of any previous generation that did anything remotely similar. There are two obvious explanations:
1) Yields are terrible and Nvidia will hardly be able to build any RTX 3090s, so they have to charge an enormous price to keep them in stock, or
2) Nvidia expects to have monopoly pricing power on the RTX 3090 but not the RTX 3080. That is, they expect AMD to have a GPU that is competitive with the RTX 3080 but nothing that can touch the RTX 3090 anytime soon.
It's not clear how big of a lineup AMD will launch with RDNA 2. There will be the consoles, of course. But it might just be a single, large chip that is their new flagship, while they continue to sell (and possibly rebrand) older cards for their lower end parts. Similarly, it's not clear how much of a lineup Nvidia will offer with Ampere. I'm halfway expecting them to keep the GeForce GTX 1600 series around for quite some time and not have an Ampere replacement in that price or performance range.
A big Navi chip, like any other big chip, won't be cheap, of course. Or at least, not unless AMD is forced to sell it for much less than they intended because the chip isn't competitive. If it's competitive with an RTX 3080 on performance, it probably will be on, price, too. Meaning, expect to pay about $700 or so for the top card, not $400.
It's not clear exactly what they'll announce. These likely won't be actual product launches. It could easily be something analogous to Nvidia's Ampere announcements from last week.
On the CPU side, AMD is pretty much the market leader already. Zen 3 will probably extend their advantage, and may finally erase Intel's edge in strictly single-threaded performance if you buy their top end chips. I expect that Zen 3 will offer increased performance at about the same price points as before.
On the GPU side, AMD is promising a 50% increase in performance per watt as compared to RDNA. It's not clear how that will compare to Ampere, but it's likely that they'll be competitive. AMD has also promised that there will be a big Navi chip, which they didn't do for their previous generation, so it's likely that AMD will have something competitive higher up the chain than they have in recent generations.
I think there are some clues in Nvidia's Ampere pricing. Nvidia is charging $1500 for a GeForce RTX 3090, but $700 for an RTX 3080. To have the cut-down version cost less than half of the price of the top GeForce card is very unusual, and I can't think of any previous generation that did anything remotely similar. There are two obvious explanations:
1) Yields are terrible and Nvidia will hardly be able to build any RTX 3090s, so they have to charge an enormous price to keep them in stock, or
2) Nvidia expects to have monopoly pricing power on the RTX 3090 but not the RTX 3080. That is, they expect AMD to have a GPU that is competitive with the RTX 3080 but nothing that can touch the RTX 3090 anytime soon.
It's not clear how big of a lineup AMD will launch with RDNA 2. There will be the consoles, of course. But it might just be a single, large chip that is their new flagship, while they continue to sell (and possibly rebrand) older cards for their lower end parts. Similarly, it's not clear how much of a lineup Nvidia will offer with Ampere. I'm halfway expecting them to keep the GeForce GTX 1600 series around for quite some time and not have an Ampere replacement in that price or performance range.
A big Navi chip, like any other big chip, won't be cheap, of course. Or at least, not unless AMD is forced to sell it for much less than they intended because the chip isn't competitive. If it's competitive with an RTX 3080 on performance, it probably will be on, price, too. Meaning, expect to pay about $700 or so for the top card, not $400.
Comments
Right now AMDs major issue will be getting development support. Over the past decade the big issue has been developers receiving support from NVidia and it artificially impacting the performance of AMD. Now NVidia's market share is so high in the PC market that it will be difficult for AMD to get support unless they actively push for it. They need people at Unreal and Unity to get optimizations specific for AMD. This will help them reach a larger developer base as most developers use what the engine provides. They also need to people doing the same support for titles that are typically benchmarked.
We know what happens when developers optimize for AMD like in the console market with games that are ported to PC using minimal changes. I suspect most PC games have nVidia provided shaders that make specific nVidia calls and if it isn't a nVidia GPU it calls the CPU.
You'd have to think the 24GB of GDDR6 would bump up the price, too. It must be expensive if they are hellbent on sticking with 8GB on the 3070.
Amazon says it updates hourly, but as of this writing, 11 of the top 12 CPUs are AMD.
https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-5500-xt-rx5500xt-pgd-8go/p/N82E16814930027
The GeForce RTX 3090 and 3080 don't use GDDR6, though. They use GDDR6X. And that probably is extremely expensive right now, considering that it isn't even in mass production yet. It will get cheaper once you can actually buy it in large volumes.
No idea why anyone takes you seriously.
When it comes to their graphic card division. NVidia has them totally cornered and by the balls sadly.
Back in the early days, NVidia and AMD were neck in neck with eachother, but now NVidia has been dominating the GFX market for the last decade.
AMD's terrible GFX drivers only make matters worse.
Granted It's only one seller in one country, but the tide is shifting slowly. It's gonna take a while for AMD to really become a market leader, and any progress from Intel can stop this, but for now, it's apparent Intel mindshare is eroding, even within the casual demographic.
Top Tech YouTubers are a powerful new tool for influencing purchasing habits, that's the key difference from previous years.
Claiming that Intel is the market leader in CPUs is kind of like claiming that they're the market leader in GPUs (at least for Windows). By raw number of GPUs sold, including integrated, they are. But for gaming desktops, they're a very, very distant third, behind Nvidia and AMD.
Am I mistaken in remembering the first couple gens of Titans being Quadro cards with non-gaming related features removed?
Thanks! It must have been the comparisons in the double precision performance between Titan GTX and 7xx series and the former being closer to quadro performance that had me confused. Thanks for clearing it up!
On the GPU side of things, I think there is some degree of AMD trying to say, "Don't buy Ampere yet, but wait to see what we've got." That would explain giving out the date over a month and a half ahead of time.
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Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
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Hard to quantify "gaming" computer, since a 1660 i3 setup could be a gaming PC for someone. I still believe that as long as single thread speed rules AAA PC gaming, Intel will maintain it's lead in the enthusiast builds shooting for max frame rates - although the lack of PCIe4 and higher memory timing support might change that real soon. I would wager AMD has new mid-range builds on lock down at the moment.
Keep in mind the Steam charts are going to show a lot of laptops playing games. Intel absolutely has that market.
That is the best headline I have ever seen on this site. lol
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