Will AMD survive Intel's GPU?

[killcomic]

I've been thinking about going AMD for my next GPU as I really want a Freesync monitor. Gsync pricing is just too ridiculous to even consider.

However, I do wonder how long will AMD be pushing out gaming GPUs?

Currently, AMD does not have the money to provide a competitive alternative to Nvidia's gaming line up.

They have no plans to release any gaming GPUs till Navi is ready, that's all the way to the second half of 2019. That's very close to when Intel releases their own GPU.

 

What I want to know is, will AMD be able to survive Intel's launch? Do you think they'll give up the gaming GPU market as they'll have no revenue to cover R&D? Or do you think Navi might save their GPU division?

What are your thoughts?

 

And for Christ's sake, no fanboys.

[Froody129]

We don't know anything more than you do. 

[vanished]

I wouldn't assume Intel's gonna just come out of no where with a total game changer and single-handedly kill off RTG.  If Nvidia hasn't managed it yet, I doubt a first-timer to the scene, despite whatever experience they may have in iGPUs and other spaces, is going to do it.

[Jurrunio]

36 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

If Nvidia hasn't managed it yet,

they did force AMD into relying APUs for making money tho

[Skiiwee29]

So your asking us to let you know if AMD will survive a product in development right now and likely not scheduled to be released until 2020 or 2021??

[KarathKasun]

4 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

they did force AMD into relying APUs for making money tho

AFAIK, RTG is what kept AMD profitable manageable during faildozer.

[Jurrunio]

4 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

AFAIK, RTG is what kept AMD profitable manageable during faildozer.

AFAIK AMD's proper response to the 9 series card (Polaris) didnt come until 10 series comes, though they did manage to surpress the price enough to make Polaris a good competitor to the 1060

[KarathKasun]

Just now, Jurrunio said:

AFAIK AMD's proper response to the 9 series card (Polaris) didnt come until 10 series comes, though they did manage to surpress the price enough to make Polaris a good competitor to the 1060

That wasn't what kept the lights on, Hawaii did.  Even though it was older, it was the 9 series competitor and held its own in that performance bracket.

[killcomic]

13 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

So your asking us to let you know if AMD will survive a product in development right now and likely not scheduled to be released until 2020 or 2021??

I'm asking for thoughts. A year or two is a very short time in GPU cycles. 

Someone with knowledge if AMD's position in the market and current financial situation could make an educated guess as to whether RTG can survive a third player in the market, specially one as well funded as Intel. 

[Ross Siggers]

9 minutes ago, killcomic said:

I'm asking for thoughts. A year or two is a very short time in GPU cycles.

A year or two is an entire GPU cycle, if you look at nVidia...

[Skiiwee29]

52 minutes ago, killcomic said:

I'm asking for thoughts. A year or two is a very short time in GPU cycles. 

Someone with knowledge if AMD's position in the market and current financial situation could make an educated guess as to whether RTG can survive a third player in the market, specially one as well funded as Intel. 

Its impossible to predict what the GPU market will look like in 2 years when the intel cards are expected to launch.. we dont even know what market they intend to go into.. will it be the AI/Deep Learning market? Or will it be into the gaming sector.. my money will be on the AI/Deep Learning side personally. 

[killcomic]

8 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Its impossible to predict what the GPU market will look like in 2 years when the intel cards are expected to launch.. we dont even know what market they intend to go into.. will it be the AI/Deep Learning market? Or will it be into the gaming sector.. my money will be on the AI/Deep Learning side personally. 

Well, that's what AMD is leaning to at the moment. That's why I wonder if AMD will simply forego gaming when Intel enters the race.

[Humbug]

Intel is unlikely to be able to match AMD on the first attempt. They don't have the same experience with discrete GPUs, and also they will be at a process fabrication disadvantage. AMD will be on 7nm by that point for all their GPUs and CPUs.

 

AMD is not gonna give up on gaming GPUs. They were able to survive for a long time while the company makes was making losses, big losses.
Now the company is profitable, and the profits are increasing. Plus they are increasing their R&D every year, even though that takes time to manifest itself in shipping products. There is now way that AMD is gonna give up now, it doesn't make any sense after what they have been through.

 

Also Nvidia is more interested in making big profit margins than trying to take AMD's smaller GPU market share. So for example they launch the GTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 ti. Now the normal thing to do is to replace the previous generation. But Nvidia does not do that this time, instead they create a whole new pricing tier to sell the new generation on top of the old generations pricing tier. So what that means is whenever AMD does launch their next generation GPUs they have enough room to slot them into the market and sell them profitably, because Nvidia keeps pricing high with big margins.

 

Also AMD wants to keep dominating the console market, and there is synergy there with developing for the PC market. So their next GPU for example Navi caters for both consoles and PC. It doesn't make any sense for AMD to quit the PC gaming market.

[killcomic]

5 minutes ago, Humbug said:

Intel is unlikely to be able to match AMD on the first attempt. They don't have the same experience with discrete GPUs, and also they will be at a process fabrication disadvantage. AMD will be on 7nm by that point for all their GPUs and CPUs.

 

AMD is not gonna give up on gaming GPUs. They were able to survive for a long time while the company makes was making losses, big losses.
Now the company is profitable, and the profits are increasing. Plus they are increasing their R&D every year, even though that takes time to manifest itself in shipping products. There is now way that AMD is gonna give up now, it doesn't make any sense after what they have been through.

 

Also Nvidia is more interested in making big profit margins than trying to take AMD's smaller GPU market share. So for example they launch the GTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 ti. Now the normal thing to do is to replace the previous generation. But Nvidia does not do that this time, instead they create a whole new pricing tier to sell the new generation on top of the old generations pricing tier. So what that means is whenever AMD does launch their next generation GPUs they have enough room to slot them into the market and sell them profitably, because Nvidia keeps pricing high with big margins.

 

Also AMD wants to keep dominating the console market, and there is synergy there with developing for the PC market. So their next GPU for example Navi caters for both consoles and PC. It doesn't make any sense for AMD to quit the PC gaming market.

I completely forgot about the console market! You got a good point there.

[yian88]

Almost 99.9% surely it will survive, unless they fuck up something else and cant get a good CTO/CEO to replaca Raja Koduri, intel/nvidia is stealing all the talent so not much left for AMD.

 

AMD RTG is currently working on Navi for PS, probably other consoles aswell on 7nm from TSMC, and then Q3/4 2019 they might release desktop Navi gpu with GDDR6 on 7nm aswell which will be amazing performance boost from new memory, new process node and new arhitecture.

 

On the other hand intel will release its first dedicated GPU's one year later after that in q3/4 2020 and intel still doesnt have 10nm ready they will build gpu's on 14nm tech with unoptimized drivers and god knows what arhitecture and performance, people will be skeptical and most likely intel wont blow the competition away, also those GPU's even if they are good and match AMD/Nvidia they will be expensive, since this is intel we are talking about, im sure they will deliver  the GPU equivalent of "4core cpu's" with locked overclocking and unlocked models for much more, if they do that i will forever boycott/hate intel and never recommend/buy products from them. If they dare to attempt to ruin GPU market more than nvidia has done already i will fking go mad, cant accept that.

[Jurrunio]

1 hour ago, KarathKasun said:

That wasn't what kept the lights on, Hawaii did.  Even though it was older, it was the 9 series competitor and held its own in that performance bracket.

Hawaii? Against the 7 series it is holding its own turf (if not eating into 7 series' market share), but didnt fare so well (much better than CPUs though) when 9 series came and AMD spent their GPU research budget into Fiji, which never made it past the high end market (leaving Hawaii to defend the mid range market). The 390 at the time is about the price of the 970, and not even undervolting helped it reach 970 levels of efficiency. At least undervolting AMD GPUs are officially supported, unlike 9 series cards which need flashing BIOSes.

[KarathKasun]

31 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Hawaii? Against the 7 series it is holding its own turf (if not eating into 7 series' market share), but didnt fare so well (much better than CPUs though) when 9 series came and AMD spent their GPU research budget into Fiji, which never made it past the high end market (leaving Hawaii to defend the mid range market). The 390 at the time is about the price of the 970, and not even undervolting helped it reach 970 levels of efficiency. At least undervolting AMD GPUs are officially supported, unlike 9 series cards which need flashing BIOSes.

Honestly, who in PC gaming seriously care about efficiency?  Perhaps a tiny portion total, well under 10%.

 

If we cared about efficiency we would not have 300w+ GPU's flying off the shelves at pretty much every launch.

[Col. Sandurz]

3 hours ago, killcomic said:

I've been thinking about going AMD for my next GPU as I really want a Freesync monitor. Gsync pricing is just too ridiculous to even consider.

However, I do wonder how long will AMD be pushing out gaming GPUs?

I think AMD will survive, but i am questioning this point of your worries.

Intel most likely will use freesync that is not proprietary, so i wouldn't be worried by that.

 

Of course the fact that AMD is struggling to advance the manufacturing technology of its products while Intel pulls ahead is of some concern.

Wait what?

[Jurrunio]

11 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Honestly, who in PC gaming seriously care about efficiency?  Perhaps a tiny portion total, well under 10%.

 

If we cared about efficiency we would not have 300w+ GPU's flying off the shelves at pretty much every launch.

because the 300w+ GPUs are the best of the best at that time? Not Hawaii in its refreshed form though. Besides, drawing twice the power as your competition just to beat it by a considerable margin isnt impressive at all.

[Stefan Payne]

3 hours ago, killcomic said:

What I want to know is, will AMD be able to survive Intel's launch?

You should worry more about nVidia than AMD as AMD has High Performance (AMD64) CPUs, with that they are able to get into consoles and other stuff. 

And AMD has already a rather low Market share, so they can hardly loose much.

 

nVidia does not have that, they don't have CPUs you want in an HPC enviroment, they have high(er) Market share, there is nothing to win for them anymore but everything to loose!

 

If Intel comes to the Market, do you think it will get more shares from the one that has 20% Marketshare or the one that has 80%?? 

And there is also the HPC stuff where there lies real money, with Intel already making CPUs, they can modify the CPU with a new Interface - much like AMD does with Infinity Fabric - that gets rid of much of the Latency of PCIe and improves the data transfers...

 

Right now I'm not worried about AMD; and I'd be more worried about nVidia as they will be pressed against the wall and loose much of their Revenue as they only have GPU and not much else.

[KarathKasun]

20 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

because the 300w+ GPUs are the best of the best at that time? Not Hawaii in its refreshed form though. Besides, drawing twice the power as your competition just to beat it by a considerable margin isnt impressive at all.

I keep hearing this, but I see the opposite reaction from the same crowd when NV fumbled the power envelope.  OG Titan and Fermi were great examples of when I saw this argument disappear followed by lots of hot NV cards showing up in the machines of that crowd.

[Stefan Payne]

2 hours ago, killcomic said:

Someone with knowledge if AMD's position in the market and current financial situation could make an educated guess as to whether RTG can survive a third player in the market, specially one as well funded as Intel. 

1) AMD will be in Playstation 5 and if Sony doesn't totally mess it up, they will further dominate the market. That alone is a pretty big portion of the Market.

Right now, I'd expect AMD to hold their ground and maybe improve their Market Share a bit. While the only one to loose when a 3rd player enters the Market is nVidia. You should be worried about them, not AMD: AMD knows how to deal with dominant forces in the Market, nVidia doe not as they were always the Darling of the Media and got pushed since Riva 128 time.

 

2) Even if they have Money, they are responsible to the shareholders and can't just waste money because they feel like it, they have to make money for them. If they don't do that, the Shareholders can sue and force Intel to change their policy...

 

So look what makes money in the companys and what else they have!

 

AMD has CPUs, GPUs and APUs. With their Semi Custom part, you can go to them and order whatever chip you want, that is made out of the components they already have. That is what sony really likes. We don't know anything about XBox Two (yet), might be that it won't ever exist, might be that they will also use AMD, wich would be the third generation XBox with AMD Graphics!

But it also might be that the XBtwo will never be...

Their revenue changes between CPU and GPU regularly.

 

Intel has CPUs but also Mobile Modems, Flash. But their main thing is IIRC Processors.

They aren't well diversified but they have options.

 

nVidia only has GPUs wich make the most of their revenue. IIRC it was like 80% of their Revenue, maybe even more. And the HPC Market is very lucrative as you sell "normal Graphicscards" for a rediculous amount of money. And that will be the most interesting thing for Intel to attack....

So even if Intel is only able to get 25% of the HPC Market, that is some serious Problem for nVidia as they would loose those 25%....

 

 

So buttom Line: 
AMD is fine, especially since their CPU is pretty good.

 And they are working hard on the next generation of graphics for a couple of years now, so its possible that they will be back with a vengeance with NAVI. As they always do when something doesn't work well, they go into hiding and work their ass off and come back with something good.

 

nVidia was unable to diversify and only have one part. Almost all of their business is based on GPU Hardware...

 

Intel is a bit diversified but not that much as their processor part is the biggest part, but not the only one. They also have a ton of Network stuff (WiFi, Bluetooth, MODEMs, LAN Chips, 1GB/sec and the good 10GB/sec stuff).

 

So Hard days for nV will come.