[UPDATE 3 - Sapphire's Reference Costs $649 USD] AMD Reveals R9 Nano Benchmarks Ahead of Launch

[patrickjp93]

It has Volumes in consumer graphics now...

Pascal vs whatever AMD has... if AMD has one thing going for them, it is real life experience with HBM.. It is an edge when it comes to the technology. Who knows, with DX12 on the steps, perhaps we are looking at another shift between team Red and team Green.

Who knows. Assuming Nvidia will always be on top because "more money" is simply foolish. Bigger companies has made shittier products with bigger investments then what AMD or Nvidia has.

Nvidia will remain on top as long as AMD has the structural issues it has as a company and only adds 2 cards of a new architecture each generation. It's not going to win with the Rx 400 series. I stake my reputation on it.

[patrickjp93]

But nvidia cant push back too hard. As they will just become a monopoly. Amd can do whatever, I bet they have pascal ready but dont want to release it until AMD greenland comes out

You do know monopolies are legal, right? It's only abusing your position as a monopoly or gaining that position through anticompetitive means as defined in law which are illegal.

[patrickjp93]

Fulfilling contracts and fulfilling a market is two different things.

Nvidia can still fulfill their contracts in regards to volta, without fulfilling the professional market.

I still expect earlier release for the professional market.

I highly doubt it since Volta is a 10nm design and there's no way TSMC is going to be on time with it.

[Prysin]

You do know monopolies are legal, right? It's only abusing your position as a monopoly or gaining that position through anticompetitive means as defined in law which are illegal.

Well.... you know....

 

Even when Intel and Nvidia DO have some competition, they still charge a premium for no damn reason...

Without a competitor, it would be wild west for a long time.

 

EDIT.

i swear, in the case of Nvidia though.

They are turning into the "Apple" of GPUs...

 

Also, the time it takes between a legal action is taken, and result of legal actions show... Yeah, lets hope AMD stays afloat, or atleast that our current hardware can last a few generations.

[Tomsen]

I highly doubt it since Volta is a 10nm design and there's no way TSMC is going to be on time with it.

We will find out at that time

[FatalityDiablo]

if this card draws about the same amount of juice as the 970, then im saving up for it:) hopefully they price it accordingly.

[patrickjp93]

Well.... you know....

 

Even when Intel and Nvidia DO have some competition, they still charge a premium for no damn reason...

Without a competitor, it would be wild west for a long time.

 

EDIT.

i swear, in the case of Nvidia though.

They are turning into the "Apple" of GPUs...

 

Also, the time it takes between a legal action is taken, and result of legal actions show... Yeah, lets hope AMD stays afloat, or atleast that our current hardware can last a few generations.

There's a legal difference between price gouging/fixing and charging more than a competitor. Hell, charging more makes it easier for the competitor to compete based on microeconomic factors.

[Prysin]

There's a legal difference between price gouging/fixing and charging more than a competitor. Hell, charging more makes it easier for the competitor* to compete based on microeconomic factors.

 

*if there is a competitor

you forgot to add a asterix

 

here, let me edit it in for you

[patrickjp93]

you forgot to add a asterix

 

here, let me edit it in for you

Not necessary. There's no legal expectation for Intel or Nvidia to drop prices if AMD goes down. They will be very constricted in further raising prices and gaining "obscene" profits, but they have no obligation to lower them once AMD goes down, especially against inflation and rising production costs from their respective foundries.

[Prysin]

Not necessary. There's no legal expectation for Intel or Nvidia to drop prices if AMD goes down. They will be very constricted in further raising prices and gaining "obscene" profits, but they have no obligation to lower them once AMD goes down, especially against inflation and rising production costs from their respective foundries.

They also have no obligation to not just make the "next 970" perform like "last generations 960" and so on... they could just make shittier products at todays prices. Which would shaft us all if the economy keeps fluctuating like it is these days.

[AlwaysFSX]

Not necessary. There's no legal expectation for Intel or Nvidia to drop prices if AMD goes down. They will be very constricted in further raising prices and gaining "obscene" profits, but they have no obligation to lower them once AMD goes down, especially against inflation and rising production costs from their respective foundries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

 

I think this is the ruling that pertains most to Nvidia. If they happen to create a monopoly by gaining more of the market simply by having a better product then it is completely okay.

[patrickjp93]

They also have no obligation to not just make the "next 970" perform like "last generations 960" and so on... they could just make shittier products at todays prices. Which would shaft us all if the economy keeps fluctuating like it is these days.

Actually they do have an obligation against that under the same antitrust laws that snared Standard Oil.

[patrickjp93]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

 

I think this is the ruling that pertains most to Nvidia. If they happen to create a monopoly by gaining more of the market simply by having a better product then it is completely okay.

That's one of a few, but yes. It's why Intel's not staring down the barrel of the FTC's 15" cannon.

[Swndlr]

Ehh, Ill wait for some real benchmarks

[HalGameGuru]

Actually they do have an obligation against that under the same antitrust laws that snared Standard Oil.

The Standard Oil reference is arguable, but that practice would be what would cause the outcry and government intervention faster than anything short of blatantly destructive or victimizing practices. 

[MageTank]

Even when Intel and Nvidia DO have some competition, they still charge a premium for no damn reason...

EDIT.

i swear, in the case of Nvidia though.

They are turning into the "Apple" of GPUs...

Can you elaborate on this? Nvidia products are priced competitively and perform competitively. They are not priced at a premium. The only "premium" i have seen from Nvidia lately is in regards to G-Sync. However, G-Sync is clearly a superior technology, and is seen as such by reviewers and blind test subjects alike. 

 

If you are referring to the hardware itself, then yes. Nvidia sells inferior hardware than AMD. Where they make up for it is their software, and relationships with developers (which is often frowned upon, but that is an entirely different subject).

 

For Nvidia to become the Apple of GPU's, they would need to sell a product that is completely overpriced, with a competitive product available to easily make it a terrible choice, just for the sake of saying you own their brand.. Every AMD card has a reasonably priced Nvidia card to answer for it, and vice versa.

 

If AMD put more effort into refining their drivers, their superior hardware would show far more in the benchmarks we see. Just look at that thread with the DX12 benchmarks, at how much an improvement it showed on AMD devices, vs Nvidia ones. Clearly Nvidia put a lot more time in their DX11 drivers to try to remove CPU overhead from the equation.

[AlwaysFSX]

That's one of a few, but yes. It's why Intel's not staring down the barrel of the FTC's 15" cannon.

Maybe AMD can save their bacon with some Opteron goodness? Might give them time to recoup cash for the consumer side of things.

[Clyne]

*cough cough* Fermi *cough cough*

*cough cough* FX 5800 Ultra *cough cough*

[Dabombinable]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

 

I think this is the ruling that pertains most to Nvidia. If they happen to create a monopoly by gaining more of the market simply by having a better product then it is completely okay.

Which is AMD's problem. They haven't made a product that's better than what Intel provides for years. They've pretty much gone the way of Maxtor, who ended up only having the price of their HDD as a selling point-nothing else.

[patrickjp93]

Maybe AMD can save their bacon with some Opteron goodness? Might give them time to recoup cash for the consumer side of things.

Even if they based a new line of Opterons on Excavator right now, they have a market flooded with Haswell Xeons and a market that just doesn't need a ton of new supercomputing power right now. Zen "Opterons" will be out in mid-late 2016 and into 2017 with HPC APUs as we know, but then it's gonna be Broadwell Xeons, with Skylake roaring down the line right in after. AMD would have to pull off such a huge performance gain it would rock the entire semiconductor industry to its foundations. Keller is good. He's not that good. Intel and IBM already employ his equals and his betters. Maybe Intel is holding back improvements to keep AMD alive as long as possible as I once theorized, and maybe it just is this hard, in which case, Keller's about to hit the same wall as Intel, and that's not enough to beat it, which AMD has to to get sales in HPC. Cray alone can't keep AMD afloat in HPC. It only gets 15 clients a year, and those clients were in talks with all the major designers before that to know exactly what they were getting.

 

Hell, AMD should have won the DOE supercomputer contracts instead of Intel if Zen was actually going to be this good, because Skylake prototype samples already existed 2 years ago. Cannonlake prototypes exist now. Zen prototypes in all likelihood did too. AMD's not going to come out on top. I don't know how much more fact and logic I can put into this to have you people see reason. AMD is dying. It's going to die. Financial analysts are saying so with more evidence than ever, in a world where the PC market is shrinking, the HPC market is all but locked up and barely growing, mobile is not an AMD strongsuit, and AMD has structural issues as a company, quality issues with its products in regards to competitiveness, debts it has due on hard dates fast approaching, and barely enough liquid cash to pay them all off if no new R&D expenses were incurred.

 

For AMD to win in all this, HSA support would have to grow explosively in the next 8 months. Contracts galore would have to be signed to supply Zen chips and Greenland accelerators. AMD would have to look strong enough to handle the growth needed to sustain aid to programmers on such a scale. Where is this strength going to come from? AMD just lost 10 of its game development programmers to Intel and Bethesda. It's searching for GPU driver engineers, but the problem is that search is being done on a market where your only sources are passionate open-source programmers who generally don't budge on making sure what they make is open, even worse that Nvidia poaches most of the rest. Intel can just repurpose programmers. It has an army of them. AMD is hemorrhaging on the operating table left and right. It's yelling out announcements which have given it a temporary stock boost, cries begging for help with a vision that is slipping away. If you have faith in a miracle, fine. There's no convincing you. Those of us who rely on the facts and the logic, see the only hope left for AMD is something outside logic completely, a wholly irrational decision by a filthy rich investor to buy out the debts, refinance, and put their money down for 20 years before it'll be recovered. No investor alive works that way anymore, not unless it's on penny stocks of extremely innovative, driven, young companies with everything to gain and nothing to lose amidst unassuming competitors. There's nothing else to it. The facts and all good logic says AMD dies. It won't be in the next 3 years, but it will happen, because without a stupid amount of money to dig themselves out, the cost of research and development is only increasing on these tougher nodes, all the low-hanging fruit picked. It's just not reasonable to expect AMD to recover. 

[AlwaysFSX]

It's just not reasonable to expect AMD to recover. 

Don't get me wrong, I expect AMD to die. I've said it multiple times to boot. But there's always the small thing that if they do die, the market might not handle it so well with their competition, however small, not existing.

 

Right now I only care for speculation on who or what will replace them, if they are not bought out or anything the own is not bought, because that is what will matter the most in the coming years.

[Tomsen]

Good thing supercomputing isn't the only area where server processors is relevant in..

Every customer desire something different. Intel cannot fulfill all their customers needs.

AMD doesn't have to beat Intel in pure performance. Because that is not necessarily what is most important.

 

There are many things to consider when a company land a contract. It is not as simple as "skylake is better than zen".

AMD should be done with zen core IP and uncore IP, and should start tape-out around this time, before they start mass-producing.

 

I think it is funny people are already calling out "AMD dying". What if they shrunk to the irrelevance of VIA, and continued with semi-custom?

AMD structured issues are been taking care of. They have been restructuring the company in the last half decade or so.

 

For AMD to win, they just need to gain a fair share. They don't need to win over Intel.

[HKZeroFive]

Update:

Benchmarks of the R9 Nano pitted against the GTX 970 mITX are now in the OP.

[That Norwegian Guy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

 

I think this is the ruling that pertains most to Nvidia. If they happen to create a monopoly by gaining more of the market simply by having a better product then it is completely okay.

 

Nvidia will never have a monopoly in the eyes of the FTC anyway, as long as Intel keeps making CPUs with iGPUs.

 

We're talking bureaucratic logic here. They would most certainly be retarded enough to not consider dGPU and iGPU different markets.

 

Which is why Nvidia is always on the throttle and Intel are always on the brakes. Because Intel WOULD have anti-trust coming their way if AMD disappears, (consumer CPU market) while Nvidia would not. (Intel would be considered competition)

[GeathX]

Update:

Benchmarks of the R9 Nano pitted against the GTX 970 mITX are now in the OP.

image.jpg

That could be a mightly tempting buy for a real SFF pc.

While I can understand people saying it should be compared to the 980, think you also have to mix in the fact that people could also being looking for the best performance in an itx form factor, not just a price to performance ratio