Why AMD can't keep up with Nvidia?

[mr moose]

On 5/30/2019 at 9:22 PM, valdyrgramr said:

 This left them to have a very small R&D budget.

 

On 5/30/2019 at 9:34 PM, Sauron said:

They have less money, hence a lower R&D budget. It's a chicken and egg problem, people don't buy AMD cards which means AMD makes less money and can't afford to spend much on R&D. It's also worth noting that nVidia hasn't exactly played fair with marketing in the past.

 

 

On 5/31/2019 at 4:29 AM, comander said:

The secret formula is HUGE PILES OF CASH for R&D and non-idiotic management. 

nVidia vastly outspends AMD. It's a near miracle that AMD is as close as they currently are given their cash crunch and, for a long time, their awful morale and brain drain. 

 

AMD's R+D budget only went down in 2009 and bottomed out in 2015. Since then it has been climbing.  Nvidia's R+D budget has been less than AMD's nearly the whole time with the exception of the lead up to RTX, Nvidia doubled their R+D budget in the last 2 years.

 

This means AMD's R+D budget has little to do with their performance.  A the end of the day they just lucked out with GCN in gaming and came to the end of the road with their FX lineup.    As far as financials go their last CEO was a bit of a poor performer and Lisa Su has been the bomb diggity. 

 

 

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, comander said:

So basically the moment their R&D dropped to its lowest... is when they became less competitive in the GPU space. 

Also note that AMD's budget includes CPUs (unless your data was split out). 

some light googling.. 

 

AMD essentially made 2 product categories with competitors who spend collectively around 14x as much on R&D. It's not a perfect comparison (third parties started doing manufacturing) but it is something to note. 

Yes,  their R+D was slowly going down when the released the 7970.   So they were very competitive with a decent R+D budget, the issue was every iteration of GCN took longer and provided less performance gains. So as the years wound on they were investing more and getting less out of it,  combined with dropping income from CPU's they where stuck on GCN (it's costly to start from scratch when you haven't planned for it).   AMD also spent more than twice on R+D than Nvidia and it wasn't until 2012 that nvidia caught them. 

 

The issue with people claiming AMD's products suffered because of the lack of R+D budget is that it's wrong, their R+D budget went downhill after the fact (as you noted).  I suspect had GCN been significantly better long term (especially in the gaming world), their R+D budget wouldn't have dropped towards the end.

 

With regard to the CPU, AMD developed Ryzen in it's lowest state of R+D budget.  With the R+D budget rising sharply afterward.   My assumption is AMD knew exactly what they were dealing with when improving GCN and realised there was no point in spending more money on it, so likely most of the R+D budget probably went into zen.

 

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, comander said:

Your reasoning has some flaws. AMD total r&D includes CPU development which is generally a much bigger slice than GPU. If you check, you can normalize against their pre-ati aquisition r&d. 

I have taken that into account. 

 

1 minute ago, comander said:

There also an autoregressive aspect to this. GCN came out in 2012. Most of the spending for it would have been from 2007-2011, basically the years with peak spending. 

Exactly my point, R+D is not responsible for failed products.  Failed products caused the drop in R+D.  (if I can put it so crassly)

1 minute ago, comander said:

AMD then cut corners and released refreshes for the next 7 years. Their GPU division ran with a very very minimal budget. 

Not because of R+D but because the GCN architecture just cound't be refined as well as they had intended.

 

1 minute ago, comander said:

Also... They still were outspent 14:1... That's the big factor. It's admittedly not a like-for-like number(Intel has fabs) and there are diminishing returns as funds are spent, but that's a huge gap to make up. 

Yeah, I'd try hard not to make direct comparisons on that.

1 minute ago, comander said:

All in all, its amazing how well GCN scaled and how cost effective AMD's efforts were. They were in a death spiral financially. 

This is where we disagree, the longer they pushed GCN the harder it was to get a timely and competitive product out.   At the start it was release for release, now they are release sub par almost 2 years later than Nvidia.

1 minute ago, comander said:

---

there are certainly factors beyond R&D spending (you don't get any guarantees with the spending) such organizational structure, architecture and decisions on where to focus resources (Intel can afford to invest in areas that reduce unit costs whereas AMD doesn't do as much volume so it's harder to justify)

 

I agree with this.

[Kisai]

On 5/30/2019 at 5:38 PM, wasab said:

Not so much on Linux. Nvidia driver currently has a bad rep on Unix/Unix like systems while AMD open source drivers are doing quite well.

 

Interestingly, this was excat opposite a few years ago.  

I don't believe nVidia has ever had open source drivers. Likewise nVidia doesn't care about the Linux platform on anything other than their Shield (Nintendo Switch) hardware, which is glorified Android hardware. The people buying nVidia Shield hardware tend to be pirates who found it to be the most reliable android device ever. I've never seen anyone actually buy any software for it.

 

AMD has been doing more work with game consoles (their GPU hardware has been in the GC, Wii and WiiU, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and the PS4) Where as nVidia has the original Xbox, PS3 and the Switch.

 

Now if you look at the CPU side of things, a different story emerges. AMD's CPU's are in both the Xbox One and the PS4. Therefor the Xbox One and PS4 are glorified PC's.

 

Which means that porting a game from Xbox One or PS4 to PC should really require nothing more than targeting Vulkan/DX12. There's no CPU optimizations that won't work. If anything the only thing standing in the way of a virtualized Xbox One or PS4 on the PC is having an 8-core system just to meet feature parity. The desktop GPU's are certainly well past the performance of the AMD GPU cores on those.

 

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

IIRC AMD kept taking funding and people away from Raja to focus on Zen and is literally why Raja decided to join Intel since they gave him more money to complete the GPU crap. 

 

5 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

With regard to the CPU, AMD developed Ryzen in it's lowest state of R+D budget.  With the R+D budget rising sharply afterward.   My assumption is AMD knew exactly what they were dealing with when improving GCN and realised there was no point in spending more money on it, so likely most of the R+D budget probably went into zen.

 

 

 

 

 

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

If AMD had a larger R&D budget then they should have been able to rival the 1080 Ti, shouldn't they?  It wasn't because of GCN that they didn't target the 1080 Ti, but that wasn't what they were working on at the time.

 

If that were the case then it should matched 1080ti at least within a year.  but when you get to almost 2 years and your best efforts are still falling short then you can't ignore the architecture foundation as being problematic.

 

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

  They kept saying how it was targeting the 1080  Then Nvidia finally responded with the 1080 Ti.  And, according to Raja, there was a lack of funding.  So, I don't see how he financially could of responded to that card.

 

I don't think even with funding he would have, they have had all their R+D back since 2017.  That's a year before they release R7 and almost a year and half at full R+D budget before releasing little NAVI.   

 

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Maybe, but to be fair to AMD, Raja has made a lot of snarky comments about them.  So, not sure which is true and which is him just being disgruntled.  

 

I tend not to take the word of an ex employee to seriously.   Given I know nothing about the internal workings and can only judge from the outside,  I would rather give AMD the benefit and assume any of their failures aren't due to simple internal politics, especially given the clear and successful leadership Lisa has given them pulling them out of the financial poo.

[LordOfWinterfell]

On 5/30/2019 at 2:13 PM, Herberti said:

I wonder why nowadays AMD is struggling with their graphic cards, does Nvidia have a secret formula? How come AMD can't equal the performance of a GTX1080ti for example? Vega 64 has a TDP of 295W while the GTX1080ti its more powerful and consumes less, 250W

Why would you buy an high end gpu from AMD? like TBH high end gpu is Nvidia speciality. AMD provides gpu's like rx580 and cheaper than 1060 but has better performance than the 1060. Plus put into consideration that they work on CPUs too I think they don't have time for gpu's