Microsoft to buy AMD?! [updated]

[TheMcSame]

 they want to kill AMD and become a monopoly ASAP.

No they don't. US anti trust laws prohibit the creation of a monopoly, I'm sure Nvidia doesn't want a bunch of legal bother.

[Khvarrioiren]

A full-blown acquisition of AMD won't ever happen anyway, so why even create these threads.

[MageTank]

That's the thing. They don't need to compete with AMD in price:performance. There's no reason for them pricing the 980 Ti where they did, since it dealt a huge blow both to the value of the 980 and the Titan X. They did it to hurt AMD's margins on the Fury line, which are likely very small. I highly doubt that AMD planned for the Fury X to be $650 originally. It went against rumors, leaks, and logic. Fury X is probably right up against BOM really. Then there's the fact that Nvidia is going nuts with GameWorks as of late, going as far as sabotaging their own older cards to make the new ones look leaps and bounds ahead. You can believe what you want, but they're going for the throat in my eyes.

Actually, there is plenty of reasons for them to price the 980 Ti where they did. 

 

Reason #1: The Titan X was overpriced for its performance. It was a card sold on bragging rights alone. 

 

Reason #2. The GTX 780 Ti launched at $700. Every new generation of cards tend to launch slightly cheaper than the previous generation, with a performance boost added in as well. Pricing the GTX 980 Ti at $650 was exactly as expected by a ton of people, and did not come as a surprise. The only surprise was the $1000 Titan that failed to do what the original Titan class cards could do. 

 

Going off the pattern of pricing, it all makes perfect sense. The 780 launched at $650, 980 launched at $550 ($100 off). The 770 launched at $400, the 970 launched at $330 ($70 off). GTX 760 launched at $250, GTX 960 launched at $200 ($50 off). The original Titan launched at $1000, but its DP performance was not nerfed to the ground like the current titan. The current Titan is just an overpriced "Gaming" card with 12gb of Vram, and Titan slapped on it. 

 

Nvidia is not being aggressive, they are sitting comfortably doing as little as they can. They rushed the 980 Ti out early possibly to soak up as much of the potential sales as they could, before people went out and bought AMD's high end gaming card. It was a smart move, because most gamers would not buy a Titan X due to its terrible price:performance. If Nvidia would have waited to answer the Fury X with the 980 Ti, they would not have sold as much, that is for sure. After all, AMD could have priced the Fury X at $700, and it would have still been a more appealing option than paying $300 more for the Titan X. But with Nvidia cutting their own hand off, and offering a cheaper, yet just as viable performance option beforehand (get it? cutting off their own hand? beforehand? okay, i'll stop) it allowed them to maximize potential profits before AMD hit that price point in the market.

 

Aside from that one bold move, nothing else was aggressive. Had the Titan X still had amazing DP performance, one would still say its price is worth it. Sadly, it does not. Nvidia hurting the sales of the Titan X was inevitable in my eyes, but they did so at the perfect time. Not only did they manage to do so before AMD, so they got that high end gaming market under control, they did so with a card that is STILL comparable with AMD's flagship, without even knowing what it would be. AMD had the advantage of knowing what they were up against before releasing it, and still fell short. Now, we do not know if drivers will help, or if unlocking the voltage will help bridge the gap, so i won't go into an Nvidia vs AMD debate on performance. Just looking at the benchmarks we have available to us, its easy to see Nvidia still has the upper hand.

 

If you can provide more evidence to support your claim of an aggressive Nvidia, i would be more inclined to believe you. However, gameworks itself is not aggressive so much as it is just them wanting to get in bed with game developers. My theory is that Nvidia is wanting to slowly make GRID and Shield more mainstream, and having dev's in your pocket makes this far easier. They already got the developers of borderlands to port their game over to the Shield "console", so playing nice with more dev's will help accomplish that goal even more. Will it make their desktop GPU's look better? Probably. But i would not attribute this to some maniacal plan for market domination. They are not making the software with the sole intention of harming AMD, they are doing it to inflate their own products even more.

[Techhog]

You might want to take off your tinfoil hat and look at things objectively for a moment. I don't see Nvidia doing anything aggressive to kill AMD as soon as they can.

[Citation Needed] That Nvidia are so desperate to make AMD cards look bad they are even making their own cards perform badly.

 

Nothing you say make any sense. Again, if Nvidia wanted to kill AMD they could do so very easily with more aggressive pricing, but that's not what we are seeing. Why would Nvidia hurt their own performance when they could just kill off AMD with a graceful price cut across the board, completely dominating AMD with price:performance? What you are saying makes absolutely no sense from any angle. Why would Nvidia do so many complicated things and harming themselves when there is such a simple solution compared to your tinfoil-hat level assumption?

You say they want to do it ASAP, but then you propose a plan that is quite slow, and ignore the very quick plan.

 

Also, lol a graphics card does not cost 650 dollars to make. You can get 8GB of GDDR5 for like 90 dollars (possibly even less). Even if we assume that HBM costs 3 times as much per GB that's only ~135 dollars for the memory. The PCI is next to nothing (like 10 dollars). The water cooler might be ~35 dollars and then the GPU itself is maybe 100 dollars. Throw in some stuff I might have missed (packaging, assembly, a bit of generosity on my part to cover and possibility of underestimate) and you end up at about 400 dollars.

It's pretty expensive, but I really really doubt that they are selling it at near BOM at 650 dollars, unless AMD really fucked up with some of their supplier or design (like HBM being super expensive and completely not worth it at all).

We're going to have to agree to disagree. You can't convince me that Nvidia's pricing isn't more aggressive than it needs to be considering where they stand in the public eye. (Considering the fact that you're one of the "lol drivers" guys, you should know what I mean.) I can't think of a logical reason to price the 980 Ti at $650 other than to force AMD's pricing down. I guess I shouldn't have said "ASAP;" it's more like as soon as they can reasonably afford to.

 

PS - Don't use "citation needed" when you don't cite your own claims.

[MageTank]

We're going to have to agree to disagree. You can't convince me that Nvidia's pricing isn't more aggressive than it needs to be considering where they stand in the public eye. (Considering the fact that you're one of the "lol drivers" guys, you should know what I mean.) I can't think of a logical reason to price the 980 Ti at $650 other than to force AMD's pricing down. I guess I shouldn't have said "ASAP;" it's more like as soon as they can reasonably afford to.

 

PS - Don't use "citation needed" when you don't cite your own claims.

The logical reason was already stated by myself right above your post. Its $50 cheaper than the previous Ti card. Nvidia has been making it a recent trend to price their newer generation cards slightly lower than previous generation cards, while still giving more performance. That kind of marketing is what entices people to upgrade. It makes people think "Hey, if i was willing to pay $700 for the performance of the 780 Ti, surely $650 for more performance with a 980 Ti is a good deal!". 

 

Pricing it higher would have gone against that practice, which they have yet to do since Kepler was launched. It makes perfect sense given their history.

[Techhog]

Actually, there is plenty of reasons for them to price the 980 Ti where they did. 

 

Reason #1: The Titan X was overpriced for its performance. It was a card sold on bragging rights alone. 

 

Reason #2. The GTX 780 Ti launched at $700. Every new generation of cards tend to launch slightly cheaper than the previous generation, with a performance boost added in as well. Pricing the GTX 980 Ti at $650 was exactly as expected by a ton of people, and did not come as a surprise. The only surprise was the $1000 Titan that failed to do what the original Titan class cards could do. 

 

Going off the pattern of pricing, it all makes perfect sense. The 780 launched at $650, 980 launched at $550 ($100 off). The 770 launched at $400, the 970 launched at $330 ($70 off). GTX 760 launched at $250, GTX 960 launched at $200 ($50 off). The original Titan launched at $1000, but its DP performance was not nerfed to the ground like the current titan. The current Titan is just an overpriced "Gaming" card with 12gb of Vram, and Titan slapped on it. 

 

Nvidia is not being aggressive, they are sitting comfortably doing as little as they can. They rushed the 980 Ti out early possibly to soak up as much of the potential sales as they could, before people went out and bought AMD's high end gaming card. It was a smart move, because most gamers would not buy a Titan X due to its terrible price:performance. If Nvidia would have waited to answer the Fury X with the 980 Ti, they would not have sold as much, that is for sure. After all, AMD could have priced the Fury X at $700, and it would have still been a more appealing option than paying $300 more for the Titan X. But with Nvidia cutting their own hand off, and offering a cheaper, yet just as viable performance option beforehand (get it? cutting off their own hand? beforehand? okay, i'll stop) it allowed them to maximize potential profits before AMD hit that price point in the market.

 

Aside from that one bold move, nothing else was aggressive. Had the Titan X still had amazing DP performance, one would still say its price is worth it. Sadly, it does not. Nvidia hurting the sales of the Titan X was inevitable in my eyes, but they did so at the perfect time. Not only did they manage to do so before AMD, so they got that high end gaming market under control, they did so with a card that is STILL comparable with AMD's flagship, without even knowing what it would be. AMD had the advantage of knowing what they were up against before releasing it, and still fell short. Now, we do not know if drivers will help, or if unlocking the voltage will help bridge the gap, so i won't go into an Nvidia vs AMD debate on performance. Just looking at the benchmarks we have available to us, its easy to see Nvidia still has the upper hand.

 

If you can provide more evidence to support your claim of an aggressive Nvidia, i would be more inclined to believe you. However, gameworks itself is not aggressive so much as it is just them wanting to get in bed with game developers. My theory is that Nvidia is wanting to slowly make GRID and Shield more mainstream, and having dev's in your pocket makes this far easier. They already got the developers of borderlands to port their game over to the Shield "console", so playing nice with more dev's will help accomplish that goal even more. Will it make their desktop GPU's look better? Probably. But i would not attribute this to some maniacal plan for market domination. They are not making the software with the sole intention of harming AMD, they are doing it to inflate their own products even more.

Your "pattern" is based on the 900 series, which is what I'm calling aggressive. The entire series is aggressively priced compared to the past. The 980 Ti was just one example. From a financial standpoint, $750 makes more sense for the 980 Ti. It doesn't make sense to price it at $650 unless they want to be competitive and take the price-performance crown, which isn't something that Nvidia has cared about for quite some time before the 900 series.

[Techhog]

No they don't. US anti trust laws prohibit the creation of a monopoly, I'm sure Nvidia doesn't want a bunch of legal bother.

They'll just name Intel and Qualcomm as competitors to avoid that.

[TheMcSame]

They'll just name Intel and Qualcomm as competitors to avoid that.

 

I... I can't even... How did you?...  You've quite literally left me speechless. 

 

*sigh* 

 

Looking forward to the graphics cards coming from Intel and Qualcomm! /sarcasm

[MageTank]

Your "pattern" is based on the 900 series, which is what I'm calling aggressive. The entire series is aggressively priced compared to the past. The 980 Ti was just one example. From a financial standpoint, $750 makes more sense for the 980 Ti. It doesn't make sense to price it at $650 unless they want to be competitive and take the price-performance crown, which isn't something that Nvidia has cared about for quite some time before the 900 series.

It was the same with the kepler cards though, which is why i called it a pattern. The GTX 780 debuted at $650, which shocked people because the 480, 580, and 680 all debuted at $500. It remained $650 until the 780 Ti came out, which shot the 780 down to a flat $500. This was because at the time, the 780 was unrivaled by AMD. The R9 290x was not released until October 24, 2013. Almost 5 months to the day AFTER the 780 was launched. Nvidia knew they could charge more for that card, because competition was non-existent. However, less than 2 weeks after AMD drops the R9 290X, Nvidia drops the GTX 780 Ti, cuts the price of the 780 down, and puts a strangehold on AMD that would last for quite a while.

 

I admit, my pattern theory does not hold up well when you go back further, but it could be seen as a new market strategy that came out of the 600 series. I also admit that the timing of the 980 Ti was aggressive. Nvidia normally waits until AMD makes a move, before they respond to it. However, the 980 Ti was very preemptive. There was already no real competition to the 980, yet they pushed the 980 Ti out the moment the Fury X rumors started. I think this was done to get as many sales of the card before the fury launched, as a way to hinder the amount of money AMD would make off people looking to get Titan X-Like performance, without spending $1000 on a GPU. So i will give you that.

 

I just do not count gameworks as an aggressive strategy against AMD, as it feels like its more about getting games to work on their other platforms. Nvidia really wants Shield to work. They themselves referred to it as "the future of gaming". They started with the portable, went to a tablet, and then that TV console. Geforce Experience was designed around the Shield, and was originally conceived as a way to make the shield and PC cooperate with Nvidia hardware. They are dumping all these resources into making Shield work, why wouldn't they try to get the game developers on board to make that happen? Gearbox already worked on running Borderlands The Pre-Sequel on that shield console, so we know part of the reason why Nvidia is helping developers stems from that endeavor. After AMD did their latest driver update, performance in Witcher 3 looked a lot better for AMD. http://www.hardocp.com/images/articles/1434612549l1GBQzJE5q_3_4_l.gif

 

Either way, AMD won't be going anywhere just yet. They are going all in on Zen. Until we see their hand, nobody touches the pot.

[Ivo]

Just wait for Facebook the get them.

[Techhog]

 

I... I can't even... How did you?...  You've quite literally left me speechless. 

 

*sigh* 

 

Looking forward to the graphics cards coming from Intel and Qualcomm! /sarcasm

They both make GPUs. They'll convince courts that the IGPs they make compete with dedicated graphics cards. Any half-decent lawyer would be able to get away with that unless the judge is a PC gamer.

[Mo5]

Maybe next month Panasonic might want AMD. Who knows

[marldorthegreat]

Maybe next month Panasonic might want AMD. Who knows

Or maybe apple???

[LAwLz]

We're going to have to agree to disagree. You can't convince me that Nvidia's pricing isn't more aggressive than it needs to be considering where they stand in the public eye.

I don't understand what you mean, sorry. Can you please explain it to me?

Right now, Nvidia got very similar price:performance to AMD, and you think this doesn't make any sense because...? Is it because you see them as a premium brand and therefore expect them to be priced higher than AMD? That doesn't make any sense to me. I think you see Nvidia as the premium brand because they offer some additional value adds such as G-Sync, GeForce Experience and so on, but what you don't seem to realize is that they have those things so that they don't have to lower their prices to stay competitive.

 

In any market, you usually have to be a better alternative for your customer in order to stay competitive and entice customers to buy your products. Both Nvidia and AMD are pretty much the same in terms of price:performance right now, so in order to attract customers Nvidia has to either give their users a better experience with additional stuff (like GeForce Experience) or lower their prices. That's not "being aggressive", that's just regular business. If I understand you correctly, you think these additional things that aren't increasing the FPS makes Nvidia the premium brand, and should therefore increase their prices. Is that correct?

That would be like saying AMD should have raised their prices when they were running the "Never Settle" campaign.

 

 

(Considering the fact that you're one of the "lol drivers" guys, you should know what I mean.)

I think anyone rational and well read in the GPU space is a "lol drivers" guy, because AMD has been really far behind in that area for ages. They have gotten a lot better in the recent year or two though. I mean, the micro stuttering/frame rating issue plaguing AMD cards was pretty well known (at least on the forums I used to hang out on) several years before Ryan Shrout started actually testing it, which finally brought it to AMD's attention so they fixed it.

 

 

I can't think of a logical reason to price the 980 Ti at $650 other than to force AMD's pricing down. I guess I shouldn't have said "ASAP;" it's more like as soon as they can reasonably afford to.

What would you think the logical price for the 980 Ti would be then? 650 is only ~50 dollars lower than what I would have expected (the 780 Ti was 700 dollars), but a 50 dollar difference is hardly an indication that they want to kill AMD and become a monopoly ASAP. Especially not on a very high end and therefore niche graphics card, which probably makes up a fairly small amount of their profits.

 

 

PS - Don't use "citation needed" when you don't cite your own claims.

I am willing to offer citations if you want. I got lots of them but here is a BOM analysis from 2011 done by Mercury Research (same company responsible for the numbers in the "AMD vs Nvidia market share graph" circulating the Internet right now):

 

Since the numbers are quite old I also threw in a mix of for example iHS's teardown of the PS4 and some other teardowns and cost analysis I could find. My estimate of 400 dollars is pretty damn generous and high as you can see compared to for example the GTX 580. AMD is probably making a lot more than the 250 dollars per GPU I said, but I didn't want to overestimate it either.

 

 

 

The entire series is aggressively priced compared to the past.

Nvidia has released very competitive products in the past. Both the GTX 460 GTX 560 Ti 448 Core Edition were no-brainer recommendations because of the fantastic price:performance they offered for example.

[Guest Strangerbob]

You mean the same Microsoft that had us sitting on DirectX11 forever (and would have kept doing so if not forced otherwise), because they didnt want PC to be too competitive with their xbox garbage?

 

 

Also, how fucked up is it that you need a license to make processors?

Ye, ye - "specific architecture"... but EVERYONE uses this architecture, you cant really enter the same market with something else.

[vm'N]

You mean the same Microsoft that had us sitting on DirectX11 forever (and would have kept doing so if not forced otherwise), because they didnt want PC to be too competitive with their xbox garbage?

 

 

Also, how fucked up is it that you need a license to make processors?

Ye, ye - "specific architecture"... but EVERYONE uses this architecture, you cant really enter the same market with something else.

Because DX12 just popped out of the blue..

You dont need a license to make a processor.

You do need a license to make special kinds of processors or use specific features. This is common in almost EVERY industry.

[Guest Strangerbob]

Because DX12 just popped out of the blue..

 

Did you not read my post?

 

Or you are so naive to think MS would make DX12 without the threat of Mantle before?

[vm'N]

Did you not read my post?

 

Or you are so naive to think MS would make DX12 without the threat of Mantle before?

Do you really not believe DX12 was under development before they officially announce they were developing it?

The rest is simply marketing. Mantle was announced, of course microsoft will announce they also are developing a new API.

How naive are you?

I most say, your kind of perspective of how a company is ran, is quite hilarious to be honest.

[Ekpyrosis]

I'd rather have some else buy AMD, for if Microsoft bought them, that would mean RIP driver support for Linux.

[MageTank]

I'd rather have some else buy AMD, for if Microsoft bought them, that would mean RIP driver support for Linux.

Not really. MS would buy them and still want them to be as profitable as physically possible. If they remove existing support, it could hurt sales, which would be negative for them. MS offers office for android even though android is a direct competitor to Windows Phone. They want to make money, they are not as stupid as everyone makes them out to be.

 

Still, this deal is not going to happen any time soon, if ever.

[dalekphalm]

You mean the same Microsoft that had us sitting on DirectX11 forever (and would have kept doing so if not forced otherwise), because they didnt want PC to be too competitive with their xbox garbage?

 

 

Also, how fucked up is it that you need a license to make processors?

Ye, ye - "specific architecture"... but EVERYONE uses this architecture, you cant really enter the same market with something else.

You don't need a license to make a processor. Anyone could invent and market their own processor. However, the x86 instruction set (or the extension: x86-64 instruction set) is entirely a copyrighted proprietary technology. The creators of this technology (Intel) have the right to license it to whoever they want, just like any other piece of proprietary technology (Like G-Sync for example, NVIDIA chooses not to license it at all).

 

Other processor "architectures", such as ARM, exist. ARM is also proprietary, but they will grant the license to pretty much anyone who is willing to pay the fee.

 

I'm confused as to why you think that it is "fucked up". We live in reality, not a license/copyright free utopian wonderland.

 

There used to be more x86 processor manufacturers in the past that had an x86 license, but they all went belly up and pulled out of the industry. If AMD ever went bankrupt or was bought by another company (Microsoft, or anyone else), then Intel would be forced by the US Gov't to either:

1. Provide AMD (or AMD's buyer) with a renewed cross license agreement, or

2. Sell a new x86 license to a new entrant (Such as Qualcomm, Samsung, IBM, etc).

The US Gov't would do this to prevent a monopoly from forming in the x86 processor space.

[mr moose]

You don't need a license to make a processor. Anyone could invent and market their own processor. However, the x86 instruction set (or the extension: x86-64 instruction set) is entirely a copyrighted proprietary technology. The creators of this technology (Intel) have the right to license it to whoever they want, just like any other piece of proprietary technology (Like G-Sync for example, NVIDIA chooses not to license it at all).

 

Other processor "architectures", such as ARM, exist. ARM is also proprietary, but they will grant the license to pretty much anyone who is willing to pay the fee.

 

I'm confused as to why you think that it is "fucked up". We live in reality, not a license/copyright free utopian wonderland.

 

There used to be more x86 processor manufacturers in the past that had an x86 license, but they all went belly up and pulled out of the industry. If AMD ever went bankrupt or was bought by another company (Microsoft, or anyone else), then Intel would be forced by the US Gov't to either:

1. Provide AMD (or AMD's buyer) with a renewed cross license agreement, or

2. Sell a new x86 license to a new entrant (Such as Qualcomm, Samsung, IBM, etc).

The US Gov't would do this to prevent a monopoly from forming in the x86 processor space.

 

Or Intel might just do it off the bat anyway because it's another stream of income they don't have to think about and provides bargaining power when Intel want to forge a new IP agreement with said new player.  Because in all this I'd assume anyone who brought AMD would also be taking ownership of the coveted X64 IP.

[vm'N]

There used to be more x86 processor manufacturers in the past that had an x86 license, but they all went belly up and pulled out of the industry. If AMD ever went bankrupt or was bought by another company (Microsoft, or anyone else), then Intel would be forced by the US Gov't to either:

1. Provide AMD (or AMD's buyer) with a renewed cross license agreement, or

2. Sell a new x86 license to a new entrant (Such as Qualcomm, Samsung, IBM, etc).

The US Gov't would do this to prevent a monopoly from forming in the x86 processor space.

I have my doubt about this. These monopoly laws does not make a monopoly illegal. You will have to abuse your monopoly power in a prohibited way to even be considered an offense.

[Manny Calavera]

well it would be nice to get windows licence along with your brand spanking new but expensive fury x system

[Speaker1264]

I hope not.  They just want to make cheaper graphics cards and cpus for their consoles.  I have a feeling they would make AMD move away from the PC market entirely, which would be really bad for us.