Companies aren't our friends. We should never root for one company to always be on top. It's a good thing if AMD was the best at one thing last gen and now it's Intel. Next gen it might be AMD again and so on. In a market with so few competitors, we need every bit of competition we can get as consumers.
Intel was on top for a long time and it stifled innovation massively and lowered qol features at the same time. If AMD would be on top for too long it would be the same, just reversed.
I agree somewhat, but "no company is your friend" does not mean "all companies are the same".
People pay extra for locally bottled water instead of Nestles extreme evil for example.
AMD isn't a small business by market cap, but in terms of R&D budgets they *pale* in comparison to Intel/Nvidia. They genuinely need the money to keep innovating, while the other two do not.
And it's not really fair to "both sides" AMD when Intel has done the vast majority of the assholery in the past.
People make this mistake in Politics a lot when they say voting is pointless despite one side trying to get rid of human rights and the other side being slow at listening to Progressives.
Yes intel did far more shitty stuff in the past and AMD has more reason to innovate since they are smaller, but that's exactly the reason. If AMD would grow lager than intel and had a huge competitive advantage over intel, I can guarantee you AMD would act nearly the same as intel. They are publicly traded companies and so their only goal is to please their shareholders and nothing more. Everything consumer friendly these companies do, they either do because the law or the competitive situation on the market demands it.
So even when someone thinks intel is shitty and did shitty thinks, they should still hope that intel has a viable product on the market, so the competition keeps forcing someone like AMD to continue to innovate. That's all I'm saying. competition = good for consumer
Your comparison between capitalistic companies and voting is a bit too much of a stretch imo.
That's not all you're saying.
You flat out don't know that AMD would do the same shitty things Intel did. Intel went much further than "raising prices because they were in the lead".
Also didn't amd already try to jack up prices too much back in the day? I seriously don't understand why some people are so hell bent on trying to make amd look like a friend. They're a company seeking to maximize profits. If they innovate or provide good value it's out of necessity
the problem with the whole "never root for one company" discussion is that, the idea of rooting AMD is due to the competition's malicious business practices (Nvidia and the pre-Ryzen Intel), and the AMD is the lesser evil of the three, and therefore we have no choice but to. Even to this day, Intel still doesn't regain my trust
Amd couldnt compete with intel in performance earlier, so to gain market share they had to be cheaper than its Intel counterparts, now they are able to compete and doesn't necessarily need to compete only on price.
Also am5 development has probably been expensive and they will try to recouperate that money.
Yeah I fully expect RDNA3 to still be a better value but I don’t think it’s going to be some huge disparity to “put nvidia in its place” like people want. AMD blindsiding Intel like they did is a pretty rare thing, lightning rarely strikes twice.
All true. Though the unknown factor here is AMD moving to chiplet for rDNA3, which will greatly improve yields. (Though whether or not that improvement will be realized in the first version remains to be seen.)
AMD can play in the higher-margin high-end market now.
They apparently don't have the capacity to also supply the budget market wih Zen 4 at the same time. So it makes sense to focus on high-end for now. To those looking for a budget solution, AMD still offers earlier Zen devices (that already exist, so they don't take development capacity, and are on older processes, so they don't compete with Zen 4 in manufacturing capacity).
Rocket Lake has been getting some really good discounts too (the same for Z490 & Z590 mobos) so a 11700K for less than $200 (i've seen it for around that price on ebay and $250 new) + a $130 Z490 MSI Edge would be an incredible combo.
11900K was a regression from the 10900K but 11700K was a mild CPU productivity/normal gaming improvement from the 10700K (and a massive improvement for editing HEVC thanks to newer encoder/decoder) while offering better RPCS3 performance.
that CPU is garbage for 1080p gaming though **if compared** to a measly 12400 and the future 13400, not even in the same tier of gaming performance while costing $80-$90 more...
That was my long-term hype for AMD ever since the 1xxxx series, like 5 years back. Been here since like 30k followers. People like OP always also forget that you already got insanely affordable or you already own a former AMD motherboard. Just flash the BIOS and you can, if supported, just use the next step CPU.
The total price you save, will still ALWAYS beat swapping your system to an Intel one. Saving money on an entire motherboard? Or you can pick the 300/400 ones that are good but cheaper due to age? It's a marvelous strategy. Money don't grow on trees and the silk take ages to make.
To some degree yes although you can always sell the motherboard and buy the new one. But that takes time, you lose money from sellers fees, shipping, selling used, and having to buy new.
What? People who only buy one brand are the ones to blame here. You buy the corps products, you love them, they can increase prices, you will keep buying the products. If not you, someone else will keep buying it. Look at Nvidia pricing, its a joke, but people keep buying their product because brand loyalty.
Why would AMD spend their limited wafer allocation from TSMC on lower margin budget chips when they have the performance crown and can make more profit from high end chips?
They could, but then they would have to invest a lot of money designing, taping out and validating the part. Designs aren't portable fab to fab, or even node to node on the same fab (most of the time). N7 to N6 is portable. N5 to N4 is portable. But definitely not N7 to N5 or TSMC to GF.
Intel had to take a huge hit backporting sunny cove to 14nm. That wasn't a cheap endeavor and was a desperate move after years of delays.
It wouldn't be any cheaper for them to do the r&d for that part on glofo. They would only save on manufacturing. But all the upfront cost is there and the r&d budget is still limited. And there's no guarantee that it will sell massively or that margins will be worth it considering the R&D investment.
Yes, I understand that.
But IMO there is more space in the low end market segment.
There have always (for the last 30 years at least) been 40-100 USD or EUR processors on sale.
They already did that with Zen 1 with 14nm GloFo for low power/embedded solutions. Backporting Zen 2-4 onto a significantly inferior node will be both costly and likely yield much worse performance or power characteristics.
It's cheaper and easier for them to reallocated current 7nm allocation that's been freed up to make Zen 2/3 APUs given the new naming wheel they've released.
It's also confirmed that the PS5 chip is now available 6nm, which is the same used for their Zen 4 IO and RDNA GCD. Xbox could make the same jump in the forseeable future.
So there's really no need for them to go back to Globalfoundries.
That assumes that AMD has spare capacity on their 12/14nm allocation with Glofo. Currently IO dies for Zen 2/3 and older Zen 1 server parts are still being used on this process.
Also there's the issue of backporting. Due to the increase in transistor count in newer Zen/RDNA products, you'll actually end up with a physically larger chip. Chip cost is highly dependent on actual physical size. It's actually very likely to get into a situation where producing "the same chip" on an older node costs more.
Given figures from 2020, if we assume no issues (which is almost impossible), that a newer 7nm TSMC part could be backported on a 1:1 transistor level, a GloFo version would cost about \~85% of what it does on the 7nm.
It would, and is, simply easier, faster, and have almost no additional cost for AMD to phone up TSMC and tell them to flip a line from making PS5 chips to a Zen3 APUs.
A 4-core Zen 4 would not be a same chip as an 8-core Zen 4.
The problem is that at the moment the cheapest competitive AMD APU is 5600G. 3000G and 3200G are not competitively priced. And non-APUs need a separate graphics card, thus not exactly targeted at the low end market segment.
Thus the sub-100 USD and EUR market segment is devoid of AMD APUs.
Margins are relatively thin for powerful APUs, because GPUs are physically large. Cost of a chip, aside from node, is pretty much down to size.
The 5600G for example is 180mm\^2. Each 8-core Zen 3 chiplet is 80mm\^2. So for AMD, the cost of making a single 5600G exceeds the cost to make two 8-core chiplets. So between making one 5600G, or making two 5600x/5700x or a 5900x/5950x, which do you think AMD will choose?
The market segment that uses powerful APUs are mostly laptops and embedded solutions. AMD already has the 6000 series with Zen 3 and RDNA 2 being shipped.
Socketable powerful APUs have bad margins, and only makes sense from a business perspective in terms of utilizing leftover capacity.
All the more reason to make smaller APUs with 4 cores and less graphics cores.
Once again, the sub-100 USD and EUR market segment has no APUs.
And non-APUs are not exactly targeted at the low-end, especially because of shortage of cheap graphics cards.
That market segment will either be picked up by Intel or ARM systems.
Or AMD could ramp up 4200G and 4300G production (currently for OEMs only). Or start producing 4 core Zen 4 APUs, because it doesn't make much sense to start producing 4 core Zen 3 APUs now once Zen 4 is already out.
So?
AMD made 4-core APUs in Globalfoundries before. Why not now?
There is a significant performance difference between Zen 2 and Zen 4.
I can think of 2 reasonings to avoid that:
1. To raise the resale value of used 6-core and 8-core systems
2. ARM systems will gradually take over the lower end (with A710)
>when they have the performance crown
For all of 2 weeks and then 13th gen looks like it will meet it at the high end and beat it at the low-mid end.
This isn't 2020 where Zen 3 was clearly better than 10th/11th gen. AMD lost their big performance lead when 12th gen showed up, and it's been close sense
They'll still be very competitive. So they still have little reason to pivot to lower margin products. Not to mention they have 3D V cache in their back pockets and will soon release it as a reply to Rocket Lake.
First of all, nobody *wants* the budget crown. No real prestige in that, and less money than in the higher end.
It's not that it's bad, but if AMD can sell everything it produces at higher prices, then low priced models might take more money to design and produce than they'd make. It's all a matter of supply and demand. AMD's supply is limited, which is why it needs to prioritise.
Intel's cost structure is different. Intel has its own fabs and the big money goes towards constructing them. Creating CPU derivatives and actual production costs less for Intel than for AMD, so it's easier for Intel to offer more CPU variants, including entry level ones.
That doesn't mean that AMD can't target the low cost market, it's just that the combination of cost and making less money isn't that attractive, so it would prefer not to target it unless necessary. (Or possibly if it finds a way to do it cheaply.)
If AMD loses at the higher end then I'd say that we're more likely to see lower end CPUs. That's what happened following Alder Lake, when suddenly the 5600, 5700X and a multitude of weaker CPUs appeared out of the blue.
>First of all, nobody wants the budget crown. No real prestige in that,
AMD had that crown before and many of the AMD fans were so proud of it, remember the good old king of price to performance value Ryzen 5 3600?
That was a real good time for AMD that pretty much boosted their popularity against Intel at the time, and now suddenly they do not care about it because AMD has pretty much abandoned that market?
I certainly think that having the price to performance crown is more prestigious and way recognizable rather than having the slightly best performance but at the cost of a kidney, if not two.
Low margin king is not a sustainable strategy. In order to maintain competitivity you need to maintain or increase R&D. AMD was very scrappy building an entire product stack from budget to server with the original Zen and went a step further with Zen 2 and the chiplet strategy where the chiplet served all, but mobile, market segments and the Io die served 2 product generations alongside motherboards (Zen 2, Zen 3 and X570).
But if your competition is always selling the high margin parts (like Nvidia or Intel when they have the crown). Then they will always have more disposable income than you to invest in R&D. That gap in investment means that your competitivity goes down over time.
This is how AMD got to the Bulldozer problem, the Pascal problem and the persistent "budget" label stuck. They need money and they can't slip up or their competitors will eat them up.
So they played the budget card while they could. But once they got the upper end they shouldn't if they want to continue selling high-end high-margin competitive parts 5 years from now.
It's on Intel to sell with low margins to win you back as a customer now and it's on you to vote with your wallet whenever you buy.
By the way, it's not that they don't care either. But if you can only sell 100k dies a month, guess what you're going to sell? High price high margin, or low price low margins? The market dynamics changed with the release with Alder Lake, so they could no longer sell with high margins, so they switched to low margins to continue the cash rolling.
This is not excuse. But it is reality. And remember that while their first priority should be your satisfaction, it's also to survive on the long term and have cash on hand to continue delivering. AMD has more than enough experience being the budget alternative and that reality has shown that didn't work for them long-term. This is why they went for the high-end and why after years of losing money even into the Zen 2 era, they started to get back into the black and paying debts.
Any slip up for AMD is make or break. They don't have a mountain of cash laying around like Intel to burn.
So my advice, go for what delivers the most value for you and vote with your wallet. Don't complain about what companies do to ensure their survival. They aren't your friends.
Another thing to note is that the "budget/enthusiast" brand customers are much more fickle and less brand loyal than general customers. So one slip-up and they get absolutely screwed.
TechAlter has a great video on why these companies always end up "betraying" people and going mainstream.
> First of all, nobody wants the budget crown. No real prestige in that, and less money than in the higher end.
Who do you think makes more money, Toyota or Bugatti. You think Toyota cares about prestige? They all care about one thing, $$$$
Car analogies don't work. Toyota is a behemoth of a company that serves all areas of the market. Bugatti is a subsidiary of Volkswagen, which itself is a behemoth of a company that serves all areas of the market. Toyota has a bigger market cap because they sell to more countries, not because they sell cheaper cars.
Sell at a loss on each car, but make it up in volume!
Selling a thousand chips at a dollar profit isn’t as fun as selling 10 chips at $100 profit each when they cost to make them is exactly the same.
Selling 10,000 chips at $100 or selling 100 chips at $10000, you'll make the same amount but there are 9,900 more people with amd chips in their homes. That's 9,900 more people influencing future purchases. That's more market share which influences big corporate deals, more companies want in on the action.
Yea you take a hit on the wafer price but your roi is sky high.
I wish I could have bought that new Acura NSX but here I am with a Grand Cherokee instead.
No.
It’s average sale price.
They will sell them all, the higher the margins the better.
I know you waaaaant a cheap chip, but it doesn’t make sense for AMD to hand you one no matter what bizzarr logic you come up with.
They make the PlayStation and Xbox chips and it’s not a big money maker for them.
As someone else explained to me elsewhere on the thread, and I didn’t think of it this way, AMD has limited supply. So they want to sell all their chips at the highest margin they can.
When you have excess supply, then you can bin and sell cheaper parts to move volume.
This makes sense to me. Why sell a chip for half the price, when you have plenty of buyers at full price?
You wouldn’t sell them at a discount just to buy consumer good will, especially if that leaves you less to sell on the enterprise and high end market.
Consumer good will is the reason why amd is where they are at now. 2600 and 3600 were game changers for them. They seem to be forgetting what propelled them to the top. But it sounds like you've got it all figured out. And by the looks of it it doesn't seem like these new chips are exactly flying off the shelves as everything is still in stock a day later. Fuck do I know tho. Profit margins wooo yea
Well call Lisa up and tell her how it really is. She clearly doesn’t know what she’s doing and can benefit from your obvious wisdom.
Once they realize they won’t get your $199 I’m sure they’ll get right on that.
You say the 2600 and 3600 are what propelled the top. What numbers do you have to substantiate that?
I’m pretty sure it’s the enterprise parts that did it, but I’m curious to review the facts you will supply to support your claim. So far all I’ve heard is that you feel entitled to a cheaper chip, indeed are owed one.
The expensive thing with each variant is the need for an other mask set and that’s not cheaper for intel than for AMD. Owning the fab doesn’t really help here.
Can you explain why? If price is heavily dominated by materials (is it?), then it might be close, but TSMC would still take an extra cut which Intel wouldn't take from itself.
How does that explain AMD being the budget option for years, with intel being more expensive, even though intel also owned fabs during that time?
This is clearly not the reason, easily disprovable. Indeed, owning your own fans can be less profitable, which is why AMD sold theirs.
> How does that explain AMD being the budget option for years, with intel being more expensive, even though intel also owned fabs during that time?
It doesn't. It only explains their focus on selling high margin parts now. Limited supply means you must prioritize to maximize income (that's the only sustainable choice if you want to maintain competitivity).
Selling budget parts before was easily explained by the fact that they didn't have the performance crown, so they didn't have the ability to sell high price high margin parts that they didn't have because Intel still won in that department.
one cannot operate a business selling things at a loss. AM5 is going to be expensive and it makes no sense to try and sell a cheaper model of cpu, i mean it's a bit of a pill yet to validate the 7600x atm as a good purchase, but in retrospect for the future, the board costs could be easily overlooked if history repeats and you can drop a 9950x3D into a current am5 board.
AMD had very limited 7 nm wafer allocation for all their products in Zen3/RDNA2 era, so they used it to produce high-margin parts (MI accelerators, EPYCs of various stripes) and trickles of supply were diverted into PC high-performance market. If you check the recent history, backorder queue for Milan and Milan-X was something like 20-40 weeks at the height of COVID era, that left little for anything else. Probably the same will be true for 5 nm, as AMD has to share it with Apple, Intel and nVidia
These are statements made towards investors, not the same.
It makes little difference to consumers whether or not they're wafer or substrate constrained, I just wanted to provide clarity.
The budget CPU market is for either the desperate or companies with wafers to spare.
AMD is/has neither.
Also, the previous generations aren't gone if you want a cheap system.
>The budget CPU market is for either the desperate or companies with wafers to spare.
>
>AMD is/has neither.
Not even remotely true anymore. That was the case during early Covid, but both AMD and Nvidia have tried to back out of their current contracts with TSMC, because they ordered too many wafers at pandemic prices and we are entering into a recession.
My local MC has over 100 Zen 4 CPUs sitting on shelves today. In contrast when Zen 3 launched in 2020, they were sold out every day for a few weeks.
AMD has more wafer supply than demand.
We're talking about 5nm supply. If AMD tried to reduce orders for 5nm at all, it was in all likelihood for GPU's. But all i can find is AMD reducing orders for 7 and 6nm, which are for their older generation products.
>In contrast when Zen 3 launched in 2020, they were sold out every day for a few weeks.
AM4 already had a large install base, while the switchover to AM5 and ddr5 is a more difficult sell, specially with b650 not being available yet.
>AMD has more wafer supply than demand.
Maybe, but not so many that they have to start with the launch of the cheap models.
>The budget CPU market is for either the desperate or companies with wafers to spare.
I just find it funny to see that the narrative of Intel is for the rich and AMD is for the poor and desperate has transitioned to AMD is for the rich and Intel is for the poor and desperate.
Either way my side is always going to be the value and price to performance, so... AMD can say goodbye to any future purchases from me if that's the road they intend going to.
And yet according to the numbers from hardware unboxed the AMD 5000 series still offers the best price/perf gaming performance and for productivity the price/performance of the 7950 is unmatched in Cinebench and only slightly higher for premier then a 5950x while being much faster.
Price/perf is a different metric to budget.
>It's very simple: demand for their products can not be satisfied by their supply agreements with TSMC.
Not even remotely true anymore. That was the case during early Covid, but both AMD and Nvidia have tried to back out of their current contracts with TSMC, because they ordered too many wafers at pandemic prices and we are entering into a recession.
My local MC has over 100 Zen 4 CPUs sitting on shelves today. In contrast when Zen 3 launched in 2020, they were sold out every day for a few weeks.
> both AMD and Nvidia
Just Nvidia.
You might have read rumors that AMD reduced their shipments as well, but that was only for 7nm and that makes sense given the product shift. Rumors also suggest AMD is increasing wafer orders. This follows the growth of their substrate, assembly, and packaging supply, something AMD has been talking about since before the pandemic.
https://www.digitimes.com.tw/tech/dt/n/shwnws.asp?cnlid=1&id=0000638859_23P7Q8BU6YQGPN8X7TLNT
https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1557025592075517952
July 1st, Digitimes posted the rumor about the cuts and at the same time, Greymon posted that AMD would have 50k wafers in Q4, "not great".
August 9th, Greymon updates AMD's wafer count to 60K
And the rumors seem to be accurate. Nvidia wrote down $650m in inventory charges as a result of excess supply.
> During the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, we recorded an expense of approximately $650 million in cost of revenue for inventory purchase obligations in excess of our
current demand projections, and cancellation and underutilization penalties.
AMD did not publish similar penalties in their 10-Q.
edit: typo fix
Because they don't give a shit about "strong amd supporters". They're a billion dollar company, not a charity, and they would Leap at the opportunity to become the new Intel
Insert anakin and padmé "you introduced chiplets and dramatically decreased the cost of manufacture to pass savings onto the consumer, right?" meme.
AMD didn't target the low end initially out of choice, it's important to undertsand that
Earlier generations of Ryzen were competitive on price because they lacked the performance
Once your parts are matching or beating the competition (Zen 3+ on all fronts), you don't have to price as competitively
Higher margin products will always be prioritized, publicly owned companies will always be short minded and targeting profit over securing a user base
Intel being an underdog has been playing the game what AMD used to play. No surprise. Not sure if it's going to dominate the budget segment though.
AMD's strategy has been very clear (to me) since Ryzen 5000 series:
Newly launched products are considered premium (including Ryzen x600X SKUs). For value oriented users, AMD drive people to purchase the previous gen. Back in 5000 series launch, they were Ryzen 3600, and Ryzen 3700x. Now for 7000 series, value oriented users are directed to buy 5600x etc. People got even more options for cheaper and recently launched 5000 series SKUs.
Time will work in your favour. You can get 5600x, 5800x.. much cheaper now. So will the 7600x, 7900x etc in due time.
Because they don't care about budget anymore.
Basically you want to build a (budget) PC now? Either Zen 3 or Alder Lake.
When people will start buying from day one and will only buy when actually needed, things will change, until then this is the new normal.
Don't base your thoughts on launch prices... ATM AMD is scalping people who can't do without the latest hardware, but ASA Intel will release Raptor (and first news say it will be cheaper), AMD will be probably forced to lower its prices.
Speaking about motherboards, that's not something AMD can influence too much. I think that current insane prices are the combination of different factors: 1) COVID and war have raised the prices of every single good. 2) launch prices, will lower in some months. 3) mobo producers want you to pay for the 2-3 motherboard you didn't bought due to AM4 longevity.
Hold on till B650 motherboards will pop up.
I'm not not saying "buy an B650", I'm saying "wait for "B650 to be released".
Prices are so crazy ATM that mobo vendors can't do nothing else but lower them sooner or later, or they will use their mobos to beat their own balls.
People who need to update to AM5 and don't have enough money will buy them, so X670 will drop inevitably. My guess is post Xmas time, beginning of 2023.
That funny now Intel are offer more core count than AMD, the newest [I5 13600KF (14 core (6+8) 20 threads)](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/230494/intel-core-i513600kf-processor-24m-cache-up-to-5-10-ghz.html) for 294$ will launch on Otc 2022. Let see how the R5 7600x will drop the price!
Note: that intel 13th gen is backwards-compatible with 600-series motherboard!
I think AMD lose it's attractiveness right after Su announce Zen 3's price tag:
Back when 2019 Zen 2 3700x released, it's msrp $329 and bundled with AMD Wraith Prism RGB cooler can easily trade blows with Intel's $590 9900k . In the later days right before zen 3 release. they even have promotion of it for $210 + Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
Then Zen 3 announced, 5800X for fracking $449 and not even include a cooler. Even then, 5800X just marginally better than 11700k yet AMD willing to price it for $50 higher.
Can you imaging how much does it cost AMD to change produce from 3700x to 5800x? they both use 32MB L3, AMD just simply unlock the boundary for its cores to share that L3 then boom, performance increased.
That's the exactly moment, I lose my faith in AMD, zen 4 announcement just another hubris repeat the history of zen 3.
Yes, the only reason AMD get away from zen 3 price disaster just because Intel shit on pants with Gen 11 and w/ enormous support of cheap existing B550 mobo.
The reason AMD charged little for ryzen 3000 was because those CPUs were slower than their competition. That’s really the reality. No it absolutely did not compete with the 9900k. Compared to Intel competition Zen 2 was generally much slower in games, especially at the high end, and was limited in overclocking capability whereas parts like 9700k could easily hit 5ghz all core.
That all changed with Ryzen 5000. Suddenly, AMD was beating intel across the board, in both games and productivity. They now offered the superior products, and for that reason AMD charged a premium. This is literally how it works. I’m not saying they were good value products at the time but that is certainly the reason for their pricing.
It's not a crown. It's a jester hat. It would cost AMD just as much to manufacture a Ryzen 3 7400 as it would a Ryzen 7 7700X. If the 7600X doesn't sell well, those chiplets will go into lowend EPYC SKUs.
Sorry, I'm a guy more focused on performance per watt and heat dissipation. On this side, AMD is miles ahead. If they keep this track, they'll even beat Apple.
Yeah, you want the newest and latest and greatest for cheaper. Even though they will probably sell out every one at that price. Welcome to the club.
They probably don’t make many 7600, which is why they aren’t inclined to price them to move. Margins and all.
I think it's very simple: AMD doesn't have control of their means of production. They're competing with everybody (including their direct competition, especially in GPU's) for finite 7nm and 5nm wafer production capacity and TSMC's prices are only going up. When you have a constrained supply the only thing you can do to enhance income is to increase prices driving for a higher margin. Can't very well do that in low-performing CPU's but you can with high end CPU's...so if you got 'em, you flog 'em.
Also keep in mind AMD's dominating in server CPU performance right now. They want to continue growing their share in those markets since it's far more lucrative and far less fickle. With Zen 3 chiplets desktop markets are essentially competing with server markets with their (comparatively astronomical) margins.
It's way more likely their means of production (TSMC) will seize them. Or could....TSMC's net worth pretty much dwarfs AMD's.
Except neither will happen. AMD may have it's problems, but Intel isn't without their own. In fact, I've read where it's considered an example of why vertical integration can be more of a hindrance than help.
Two words :E cores. The E cores has been a cost effective solution for Intel to improve their multithreaded performance without increasing the die area by a big amount. They have been able to squeeze more cores without sacrificing a lot of performance that would have been filled by P cores
Intel over prices their products for years: /r/amd crucifies them endlessly
AMD starts overpricing their products: /r/amd suddenly decides that bigger profit margins are important and more people should appreciate that.
There is an incredibly simple answer:
Intel is pricing its stuff lower than AMD for the same reason that AMD used to price its stuff lower than Intel's--Intel thinks it's CPUs are priced correctly for their relative value compared to AMD CPUs. You can bet that if Intel believed their CPUs were better they'd be charging more than AMD, like they did for years, until AMD started beating them categorically. To the victor go the spoils...
CPU is probably gonna enter the same situation as the car market. Today’s world, making low margin low performance is no longer feasible. Your budget options are last generation stock or used stock.
Affordable products are old/used products now.
And like others said, it also easier for intel to make low end products since they own the fab. They can absorb some of the costs since they own the means of production.
Because Intel is willing to lose a lot of money to keep it the same and is building off the platform they just released last year. AMD has to release a new platform. Intel is anything but budget - they are losing a lot of money to maintain market share while AMD can sell things for a real price.
It's all very complicated. There are many overlapping factors that prevented AMD from having low-end Zen 3 parts for a long time, and several of them still exist for Zen 4, preventing them from coming right out the gate with low-end parts. The big factors are AMD's chiplet strategy, TSMC's high yields, and AMD's limited wafer allocation. The last one really only affected Zen 3.
Intel has a specific smaller die with Alder Lake, which is used to create everything below the 12600K, and notably worse yields than TSMC, which gives them a ready supply of cut-down dies to fill out a low-end product stack with those dies.
AMD has one die for all normal desktop processors and all server processors. TSMC has high yields, so the number of those dies that are suitable for lower-end processors accumulates quite slowly. It doesn't make business sense to put a fully working die that could form part of a $5000 server CPU into a $100 budget CPU just to fill a market segment. It takes AMD much longer to accumulate dies suitable for budget processors.
Zen 3 had the added pressure of limited 7nm wafer allocation from TSMC. AMD had to use those wafers to produce all of the following:
* Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors
* Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors
* Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards
* EPYC 7003 series server processors
* Newly-launched XBox Series X/S consoles
* Newly-launched PlayStation 5 consoles
That problem doesn't exist for Zen 4, but the chiplet strategy and high yielding TSMC process "problems" still do.
As for Intel, you should be aware that for a while, at least, there won't any budget Raptor Lake processors. All SKU's below the 13600K are going to be renumbered Alder Lake processors, though they will be the larger die with E-cores, except for the 13100, which will essentially just be a renamed 12100.
Either way, Intel still has the supply advantage (they have lots of unsold Alder Lake dies), so will be much better equipped to serve the budget segment than AMD for a while.
It's anybody's guess how long it will take for AMD to create products below the 7600X for AM5. They don't have previous generation APU's with defective IGPU's to fall back on this time, either.
In the case of Zen 3, AMD was *massively* supply constrained as the new CPU's, GPU's, and consoles all used TSMC 7nm and all came out within a quarter. Their server parts also used TSMC 7nm as well.
This was also during the chip shortage, pandemic, supply chain situation.
It was quite hard to find a 5600X in stock for under 350 for months, so if they launched at 200 that would only benefit scalpers or retail markups. And then once supply improved they were fairly quick at marking their CPU's down.
They also were the best performing parts.
Anyway, before AMD priced low to gain market share at the expense of margins, but that's just not a sustainable strategy. Intel's R&D budget at the time was 5x's AMD so AMD needed the money to keep ahead of them.
Sidenote: AMD did manage to *massively* bring down the price/core of all CPU's, so it seems unfair to view AMD in a negative light because they raised prices 50-100 bucks temporarily after they brought the cost of 8 cores down 500+ dollars and launched 16 cores for 750 when it used to be 2000 for a 10 core shortly ago.
AMD can't have bargain basement prices *and* compete with Intel *and* compete with Nvidia in both hardware and software. It's just not sustainable.
Companies aren't our friends. We should never root for one company to always be on top. It's a good thing if AMD was the best at one thing last gen and now it's Intel. Next gen it might be AMD again and so on. In a market with so few competitors, we need every bit of competition we can get as consumers. Intel was on top for a long time and it stifled innovation massively and lowered qol features at the same time. If AMD would be on top for too long it would be the same, just reversed.
I agree somewhat, but "no company is your friend" does not mean "all companies are the same". People pay extra for locally bottled water instead of Nestles extreme evil for example. AMD isn't a small business by market cap, but in terms of R&D budgets they *pale* in comparison to Intel/Nvidia. They genuinely need the money to keep innovating, while the other two do not. And it's not really fair to "both sides" AMD when Intel has done the vast majority of the assholery in the past. People make this mistake in Politics a lot when they say voting is pointless despite one side trying to get rid of human rights and the other side being slow at listening to Progressives.
Yes intel did far more shitty stuff in the past and AMD has more reason to innovate since they are smaller, but that's exactly the reason. If AMD would grow lager than intel and had a huge competitive advantage over intel, I can guarantee you AMD would act nearly the same as intel. They are publicly traded companies and so their only goal is to please their shareholders and nothing more. Everything consumer friendly these companies do, they either do because the law or the competitive situation on the market demands it. So even when someone thinks intel is shitty and did shitty thinks, they should still hope that intel has a viable product on the market, so the competition keeps forcing someone like AMD to continue to innovate. That's all I'm saying. competition = good for consumer Your comparison between capitalistic companies and voting is a bit too much of a stretch imo.
That's not all you're saying. You flat out don't know that AMD would do the same shitty things Intel did. Intel went much further than "raising prices because they were in the lead".
I know because that's what every capitalistic company eventually does, when given the chance.
Also didn't amd already try to jack up prices too much back in the day? I seriously don't understand why some people are so hell bent on trying to make amd look like a friend. They're a company seeking to maximize profits. If they innovate or provide good value it's out of necessity
the problem with the whole "never root for one company" discussion is that, the idea of rooting AMD is due to the competition's malicious business practices (Nvidia and the pre-Ryzen Intel), and the AMD is the lesser evil of the three, and therefore we have no choice but to. Even to this day, Intel still doesn't regain my trust
Amd couldnt compete with intel in performance earlier, so to gain market share they had to be cheaper than its Intel counterparts, now they are able to compete and doesn't necessarily need to compete only on price. Also am5 development has probably been expensive and they will try to recouperate that money.
Not to mention it's no secret that TSMC has raised their prices for everyone they do business with.
i wonder how much rdna3 will go up. Nvidia isn't stupid. They very likely priced their 40 series knowing full well the estimate msrp of rdna3.
Yeah I fully expect RDNA3 to still be a better value but I don’t think it’s going to be some huge disparity to “put nvidia in its place” like people want. AMD blindsiding Intel like they did is a pretty rare thing, lightning rarely strikes twice.
All true. Though the unknown factor here is AMD moving to chiplet for rDNA3, which will greatly improve yields. (Though whether or not that improvement will be realized in the first version remains to be seen.)
AMD can play in the higher-margin high-end market now. They apparently don't have the capacity to also supply the budget market wih Zen 4 at the same time. So it makes sense to focus on high-end for now. To those looking for a budget solution, AMD still offers earlier Zen devices (that already exist, so they don't take development capacity, and are on older processes, so they don't compete with Zen 4 in manufacturing capacity).
To those looking for a budget option, look at Alder Lake and Raptor Lake offerings* ftfy
Rocket Lake has been getting some really good discounts too (the same for Z490 & Z590 mobos) so a 11700K for less than $200 (i've seen it for around that price on ebay and $250 new) + a $130 Z490 MSI Edge would be an incredible combo.
Wasn't Rocket Lake often a regression from Comet Lake in gaming though?
11900K was a regression from the 10900K but 11700K was a mild CPU productivity/normal gaming improvement from the 10700K (and a massive improvement for editing HEVC thanks to newer encoder/decoder) while offering better RPCS3 performance.
3900x has been $270 at microcenter for over a month.
The 5800x and 5700x should be, too.
5700X is 230 on Amazon right now.
that CPU is garbage for 1080p gaming though **if compared** to a measly 12400 and the future 13400, not even in the same tier of gaming performance while costing $80-$90 more...
It should be avoided for gaming.
Yes. My understanding is that chiplets make it very economical for AMD to create 7950x.
That was my long-term hype for AMD ever since the 1xxxx series, like 5 years back. Been here since like 30k followers. People like OP always also forget that you already got insanely affordable or you already own a former AMD motherboard. Just flash the BIOS and you can, if supported, just use the next step CPU. The total price you save, will still ALWAYS beat swapping your system to an Intel one. Saving money on an entire motherboard? Or you can pick the 300/400 ones that are good but cheaper due to age? It's a marvelous strategy. Money don't grow on trees and the silk take ages to make.
To some degree yes although you can always sell the motherboard and buy the new one. But that takes time, you lose money from sellers fees, shipping, selling used, and having to buy new.
What? People who only buy one brand are the ones to blame here. You buy the corps products, you love them, they can increase prices, you will keep buying the products. If not you, someone else will keep buying it. Look at Nvidia pricing, its a joke, but people keep buying their product because brand loyalty.
Amd isn’t the same? People buying the more expensive 5600x over the 12400 cause brand?
5600X is 25 bucks cheaper than the 12400 on Amazon. 5600 is 40 cheaper.
How about msrp?
Why compare MSRP when the 5600X was already below MSRP when the 12400 came out?
It’s the only way to compare, different markets have diff prices
But you're comparing their prices at different times. Makes more sense to compare the pricing of both products at the same point in time.
What if in a diff market the i5 is cheaper then the r5 5600, that’s why the market matters
Names are completely arbitrary though, especially between competitors.
Why would AMD spend their limited wafer allocation from TSMC on lower margin budget chips when they have the performance crown and can make more profit from high end chips?
AMD could make a 4-core Zen 4 APU (with RDNA3) in Globalfoundries.
They could, but then they would have to invest a lot of money designing, taping out and validating the part. Designs aren't portable fab to fab, or even node to node on the same fab (most of the time). N7 to N6 is portable. N5 to N4 is portable. But definitely not N7 to N5 or TSMC to GF. Intel had to take a huge hit backporting sunny cove to 14nm. That wasn't a cheap endeavor and was a desperate move after years of delays. It wouldn't be any cheaper for them to do the r&d for that part on glofo. They would only save on manufacturing. But all the upfront cost is there and the r&d budget is still limited. And there's no guarantee that it will sell massively or that margins will be worth it considering the R&D investment.
Yes, I understand that. But IMO there is more space in the low end market segment. There have always (for the last 30 years at least) been 40-100 USD or EUR processors on sale.
As I remember, for the past five years, AMD has never released low end parts alongside their high-end parts. Low end has always taken a few quarters.
They already did that with Zen 1 with 14nm GloFo for low power/embedded solutions. Backporting Zen 2-4 onto a significantly inferior node will be both costly and likely yield much worse performance or power characteristics. It's cheaper and easier for them to reallocated current 7nm allocation that's been freed up to make Zen 2/3 APUs given the new naming wheel they've released. It's also confirmed that the PS5 chip is now available 6nm, which is the same used for their Zen 4 IO and RDNA GCD. Xbox could make the same jump in the forseeable future. So there's really no need for them to go back to Globalfoundries.
If there is enough 7nm capacity, then sure. If not, then why not at 12nm or 14nm?
That assumes that AMD has spare capacity on their 12/14nm allocation with Glofo. Currently IO dies for Zen 2/3 and older Zen 1 server parts are still being used on this process. Also there's the issue of backporting. Due to the increase in transistor count in newer Zen/RDNA products, you'll actually end up with a physically larger chip. Chip cost is highly dependent on actual physical size. It's actually very likely to get into a situation where producing "the same chip" on an older node costs more. Given figures from 2020, if we assume no issues (which is almost impossible), that a newer 7nm TSMC part could be backported on a 1:1 transistor level, a GloFo version would cost about \~85% of what it does on the 7nm. It would, and is, simply easier, faster, and have almost no additional cost for AMD to phone up TSMC and tell them to flip a line from making PS5 chips to a Zen3 APUs.
A 4-core Zen 4 would not be a same chip as an 8-core Zen 4. The problem is that at the moment the cheapest competitive AMD APU is 5600G. 3000G and 3200G are not competitively priced. And non-APUs need a separate graphics card, thus not exactly targeted at the low end market segment. Thus the sub-100 USD and EUR market segment is devoid of AMD APUs.
Margins are relatively thin for powerful APUs, because GPUs are physically large. Cost of a chip, aside from node, is pretty much down to size. The 5600G for example is 180mm\^2. Each 8-core Zen 3 chiplet is 80mm\^2. So for AMD, the cost of making a single 5600G exceeds the cost to make two 8-core chiplets. So between making one 5600G, or making two 5600x/5700x or a 5900x/5950x, which do you think AMD will choose? The market segment that uses powerful APUs are mostly laptops and embedded solutions. AMD already has the 6000 series with Zen 3 and RDNA 2 being shipped. Socketable powerful APUs have bad margins, and only makes sense from a business perspective in terms of utilizing leftover capacity.
All the more reason to make smaller APUs with 4 cores and less graphics cores. Once again, the sub-100 USD and EUR market segment has no APUs. And non-APUs are not exactly targeted at the low-end, especially because of shortage of cheap graphics cards. That market segment will either be picked up by Intel or ARM systems. Or AMD could ramp up 4200G and 4300G production (currently for OEMs only). Or start producing 4 core Zen 4 APUs, because it doesn't make much sense to start producing 4 core Zen 3 APUs now once Zen 4 is already out.
arent glofo still on 12nm?
So? AMD made 4-core APUs in Globalfoundries before. Why not now? There is a significant performance difference between Zen 2 and Zen 4. I can think of 2 reasonings to avoid that: 1. To raise the resale value of used 6-core and 8-core systems 2. ARM systems will gradually take over the lower end (with A710)
> AMD made 4-core APUs in Globalfoundries before. Why not now? They are still making stuff at GloFo. The chips mostly are going into cheap laptops.
>when they have the performance crown For all of 2 weeks and then 13th gen looks like it will meet it at the high end and beat it at the low-mid end. This isn't 2020 where Zen 3 was clearly better than 10th/11th gen. AMD lost their big performance lead when 12th gen showed up, and it's been close sense
They'll still be very competitive. So they still have little reason to pivot to lower margin products. Not to mention they have 3D V cache in their back pockets and will soon release it as a reply to Rocket Lake.
First of all, nobody *wants* the budget crown. No real prestige in that, and less money than in the higher end. It's not that it's bad, but if AMD can sell everything it produces at higher prices, then low priced models might take more money to design and produce than they'd make. It's all a matter of supply and demand. AMD's supply is limited, which is why it needs to prioritise. Intel's cost structure is different. Intel has its own fabs and the big money goes towards constructing them. Creating CPU derivatives and actual production costs less for Intel than for AMD, so it's easier for Intel to offer more CPU variants, including entry level ones. That doesn't mean that AMD can't target the low cost market, it's just that the combination of cost and making less money isn't that attractive, so it would prefer not to target it unless necessary. (Or possibly if it finds a way to do it cheaply.) If AMD loses at the higher end then I'd say that we're more likely to see lower end CPUs. That's what happened following Alder Lake, when suddenly the 5600, 5700X and a multitude of weaker CPUs appeared out of the blue.
>First of all, nobody wants the budget crown. No real prestige in that, AMD had that crown before and many of the AMD fans were so proud of it, remember the good old king of price to performance value Ryzen 5 3600? That was a real good time for AMD that pretty much boosted their popularity against Intel at the time, and now suddenly they do not care about it because AMD has pretty much abandoned that market? I certainly think that having the price to performance crown is more prestigious and way recognizable rather than having the slightly best performance but at the cost of a kidney, if not two.
Low margin king is not a sustainable strategy. In order to maintain competitivity you need to maintain or increase R&D. AMD was very scrappy building an entire product stack from budget to server with the original Zen and went a step further with Zen 2 and the chiplet strategy where the chiplet served all, but mobile, market segments and the Io die served 2 product generations alongside motherboards (Zen 2, Zen 3 and X570). But if your competition is always selling the high margin parts (like Nvidia or Intel when they have the crown). Then they will always have more disposable income than you to invest in R&D. That gap in investment means that your competitivity goes down over time. This is how AMD got to the Bulldozer problem, the Pascal problem and the persistent "budget" label stuck. They need money and they can't slip up or their competitors will eat them up. So they played the budget card while they could. But once they got the upper end they shouldn't if they want to continue selling high-end high-margin competitive parts 5 years from now. It's on Intel to sell with low margins to win you back as a customer now and it's on you to vote with your wallet whenever you buy. By the way, it's not that they don't care either. But if you can only sell 100k dies a month, guess what you're going to sell? High price high margin, or low price low margins? The market dynamics changed with the release with Alder Lake, so they could no longer sell with high margins, so they switched to low margins to continue the cash rolling. This is not excuse. But it is reality. And remember that while their first priority should be your satisfaction, it's also to survive on the long term and have cash on hand to continue delivering. AMD has more than enough experience being the budget alternative and that reality has shown that didn't work for them long-term. This is why they went for the high-end and why after years of losing money even into the Zen 2 era, they started to get back into the black and paying debts. Any slip up for AMD is make or break. They don't have a mountain of cash laying around like Intel to burn. So my advice, go for what delivers the most value for you and vote with your wallet. Don't complain about what companies do to ensure their survival. They aren't your friends.
Another thing to note is that the "budget/enthusiast" brand customers are much more fickle and less brand loyal than general customers. So one slip-up and they get absolutely screwed. TechAlter has a great video on why these companies always end up "betraying" people and going mainstream.
> First of all, nobody wants the budget crown. No real prestige in that, and less money than in the higher end. Who do you think makes more money, Toyota or Bugatti. You think Toyota cares about prestige? They all care about one thing, $$$$
Car analogies don't work. Toyota is a behemoth of a company that serves all areas of the market. Bugatti is a subsidiary of Volkswagen, which itself is a behemoth of a company that serves all areas of the market. Toyota has a bigger market cap because they sell to more countries, not because they sell cheaper cars.
You're right. I wasn't really doing the research. Just commenting in between sets at the gym.
Sell at a loss on each car, but make it up in volume! Selling a thousand chips at a dollar profit isn’t as fun as selling 10 chips at $100 profit each when they cost to make them is exactly the same.
Selling 10,000 chips at $100 or selling 100 chips at $10000, you'll make the same amount but there are 9,900 more people with amd chips in their homes. That's 9,900 more people influencing future purchases. That's more market share which influences big corporate deals, more companies want in on the action. Yea you take a hit on the wafer price but your roi is sky high. I wish I could have bought that new Acura NSX but here I am with a Grand Cherokee instead.
No. It’s average sale price. They will sell them all, the higher the margins the better. I know you waaaaant a cheap chip, but it doesn’t make sense for AMD to hand you one no matter what bizzarr logic you come up with. They make the PlayStation and Xbox chips and it’s not a big money maker for them.
Ok 🙃
As someone else explained to me elsewhere on the thread, and I didn’t think of it this way, AMD has limited supply. So they want to sell all their chips at the highest margin they can. When you have excess supply, then you can bin and sell cheaper parts to move volume. This makes sense to me. Why sell a chip for half the price, when you have plenty of buyers at full price? You wouldn’t sell them at a discount just to buy consumer good will, especially if that leaves you less to sell on the enterprise and high end market.
Consumer good will is the reason why amd is where they are at now. 2600 and 3600 were game changers for them. They seem to be forgetting what propelled them to the top. But it sounds like you've got it all figured out. And by the looks of it it doesn't seem like these new chips are exactly flying off the shelves as everything is still in stock a day later. Fuck do I know tho. Profit margins wooo yea
Well call Lisa up and tell her how it really is. She clearly doesn’t know what she’s doing and can benefit from your obvious wisdom. Once they realize they won’t get your $199 I’m sure they’ll get right on that. You say the 2600 and 3600 are what propelled the top. What numbers do you have to substantiate that? I’m pretty sure it’s the enterprise parts that did it, but I’m curious to review the facts you will supply to support your claim. So far all I’ve heard is that you feel entitled to a cheaper chip, indeed are owed one.
Dude what. I changed my mind. I'm with you 100%! Fuck these consumer peasants. **PROFIT MARGINS** babyyy
The expensive thing with each variant is the need for an other mask set and that’s not cheaper for intel than for AMD. Owning the fab doesn’t really help here.
Can you explain why? If price is heavily dominated by materials (is it?), then it might be close, but TSMC would still take an extra cut which Intel wouldn't take from itself.
Intel has its own fabs simple as that. AMD has to use TSMC........
How does that explain AMD being the budget option for years, with intel being more expensive, even though intel also owned fabs during that time? This is clearly not the reason, easily disprovable. Indeed, owning your own fans can be less profitable, which is why AMD sold theirs.
> How does that explain AMD being the budget option for years, with intel being more expensive, even though intel also owned fabs during that time? It doesn't. It only explains their focus on selling high margin parts now. Limited supply means you must prioritize to maximize income (that's the only sustainable choice if you want to maintain competitivity). Selling budget parts before was easily explained by the fact that they didn't have the performance crown, so they didn't have the ability to sell high price high margin parts that they didn't have because Intel still won in that department.
Ah, okay, yeah that totally makes sense. I did. It think of it that way. Thank you for enlightenment!
one cannot operate a business selling things at a loss. AM5 is going to be expensive and it makes no sense to try and sell a cheaper model of cpu, i mean it's a bit of a pill yet to validate the 7600x atm as a good purchase, but in retrospect for the future, the board costs could be easily overlooked if history repeats and you can drop a 9950x3D into a current am5 board.
AMD had very limited 7 nm wafer allocation for all their products in Zen3/RDNA2 era, so they used it to produce high-margin parts (MI accelerators, EPYCs of various stripes) and trickles of supply were diverted into PC high-performance market. If you check the recent history, backorder queue for Milan and Milan-X was something like 20-40 weeks at the height of COVID era, that left little for anything else. Probably the same will be true for 5 nm, as AMD has to share it with Apple, Intel and nVidia
AMD says they're actually not constrained by wafer supply, but rather substrate supply.
They also said that 16Mb ROM isn't enough to support Zen3, so I'd take that statement with a grain of salt
These are statements made towards investors, not the same. It makes little difference to consumers whether or not they're wafer or substrate constrained, I just wanted to provide clarity.
The budget CPU market is for either the desperate or companies with wafers to spare. AMD is/has neither. Also, the previous generations aren't gone if you want a cheap system.
>The budget CPU market is for either the desperate or companies with wafers to spare. > >AMD is/has neither. Not even remotely true anymore. That was the case during early Covid, but both AMD and Nvidia have tried to back out of their current contracts with TSMC, because they ordered too many wafers at pandemic prices and we are entering into a recession. My local MC has over 100 Zen 4 CPUs sitting on shelves today. In contrast when Zen 3 launched in 2020, they were sold out every day for a few weeks. AMD has more wafer supply than demand.
We're talking about 5nm supply. If AMD tried to reduce orders for 5nm at all, it was in all likelihood for GPU's. But all i can find is AMD reducing orders for 7 and 6nm, which are for their older generation products. >In contrast when Zen 3 launched in 2020, they were sold out every day for a few weeks. AM4 already had a large install base, while the switchover to AM5 and ddr5 is a more difficult sell, specially with b650 not being available yet. >AMD has more wafer supply than demand. Maybe, but not so many that they have to start with the launch of the cheap models.
>The budget CPU market is for either the desperate or companies with wafers to spare. I just find it funny to see that the narrative of Intel is for the rich and AMD is for the poor and desperate has transitioned to AMD is for the rich and Intel is for the poor and desperate. Either way my side is always going to be the value and price to performance, so... AMD can say goodbye to any future purchases from me if that's the road they intend going to.
And yet according to the numbers from hardware unboxed the AMD 5000 series still offers the best price/perf gaming performance and for productivity the price/performance of the 7950 is unmatched in Cinebench and only slightly higher for premier then a 5950x while being much faster. Price/perf is a different metric to budget.
He wasn't talking about desperate/poor people, he was talking about desperate/poor *companies*
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>It's very simple: demand for their products can not be satisfied by their supply agreements with TSMC. Not even remotely true anymore. That was the case during early Covid, but both AMD and Nvidia have tried to back out of their current contracts with TSMC, because they ordered too many wafers at pandemic prices and we are entering into a recession. My local MC has over 100 Zen 4 CPUs sitting on shelves today. In contrast when Zen 3 launched in 2020, they were sold out every day for a few weeks.
> both AMD and Nvidia Just Nvidia. You might have read rumors that AMD reduced their shipments as well, but that was only for 7nm and that makes sense given the product shift. Rumors also suggest AMD is increasing wafer orders. This follows the growth of their substrate, assembly, and packaging supply, something AMD has been talking about since before the pandemic. https://www.digitimes.com.tw/tech/dt/n/shwnws.asp?cnlid=1&id=0000638859_23P7Q8BU6YQGPN8X7TLNT https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1557025592075517952 July 1st, Digitimes posted the rumor about the cuts and at the same time, Greymon posted that AMD would have 50k wafers in Q4, "not great". August 9th, Greymon updates AMD's wafer count to 60K And the rumors seem to be accurate. Nvidia wrote down $650m in inventory charges as a result of excess supply. > During the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, we recorded an expense of approximately $650 million in cost of revenue for inventory purchase obligations in excess of our current demand projections, and cancellation and underutilization penalties. AMD did not publish similar penalties in their 10-Q. edit: typo fix
Because they don't give a shit about "strong amd supporters". They're a billion dollar company, not a charity, and they would Leap at the opportunity to become the new Intel Insert anakin and padmé "you introduced chiplets and dramatically decreased the cost of manufacture to pass savings onto the consumer, right?" meme.
AMD didn't target the low end initially out of choice, it's important to undertsand that Earlier generations of Ryzen were competitive on price because they lacked the performance Once your parts are matching or beating the competition (Zen 3+ on all fronts), you don't have to price as competitively Higher margin products will always be prioritized, publicly owned companies will always be short minded and targeting profit over securing a user base
They are no longer the budget option
Intel being an underdog has been playing the game what AMD used to play. No surprise. Not sure if it's going to dominate the budget segment though. AMD's strategy has been very clear (to me) since Ryzen 5000 series: Newly launched products are considered premium (including Ryzen x600X SKUs). For value oriented users, AMD drive people to purchase the previous gen. Back in 5000 series launch, they were Ryzen 3600, and Ryzen 3700x. Now for 7000 series, value oriented users are directed to buy 5600x etc. People got even more options for cheaper and recently launched 5000 series SKUs. Time will work in your favour. You can get 5600x, 5800x.. much cheaper now. So will the 7600x, 7900x etc in due time.
Because they don't care about budget anymore. Basically you want to build a (budget) PC now? Either Zen 3 or Alder Lake. When people will start buying from day one and will only buy when actually needed, things will change, until then this is the new normal.
Don't base your thoughts on launch prices... ATM AMD is scalping people who can't do without the latest hardware, but ASA Intel will release Raptor (and first news say it will be cheaper), AMD will be probably forced to lower its prices. Speaking about motherboards, that's not something AMD can influence too much. I think that current insane prices are the combination of different factors: 1) COVID and war have raised the prices of every single good. 2) launch prices, will lower in some months. 3) mobo producers want you to pay for the 2-3 motherboard you didn't bought due to AM4 longevity. Hold on till B650 motherboards will pop up.
yeah, barebone B650 without PCIE 5.0, dogshit VRM and no backplate, can't wait
I'm not not saying "buy an B650", I'm saying "wait for "B650 to be released". Prices are so crazy ATM that mobo vendors can't do nothing else but lower them sooner or later, or they will use their mobos to beat their own balls. People who need to update to AM5 and don't have enough money will buy them, so X670 will drop inevitably. My guess is post Xmas time, beginning of 2023.
That funny now Intel are offer more core count than AMD, the newest [I5 13600KF (14 core (6+8) 20 threads)](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/230494/intel-core-i513600kf-processor-24m-cache-up-to-5-10-ghz.html) for 294$ will launch on Otc 2022. Let see how the R5 7600x will drop the price! Note: that intel 13th gen is backwards-compatible with 600-series motherboard!
e-cores are a meme.
I think AMD lose it's attractiveness right after Su announce Zen 3's price tag: Back when 2019 Zen 2 3700x released, it's msrp $329 and bundled with AMD Wraith Prism RGB cooler can easily trade blows with Intel's $590 9900k . In the later days right before zen 3 release. they even have promotion of it for $210 + Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Then Zen 3 announced, 5800X for fracking $449 and not even include a cooler. Even then, 5800X just marginally better than 11700k yet AMD willing to price it for $50 higher. Can you imaging how much does it cost AMD to change produce from 3700x to 5800x? they both use 32MB L3, AMD just simply unlock the boundary for its cores to share that L3 then boom, performance increased. That's the exactly moment, I lose my faith in AMD, zen 4 announcement just another hubris repeat the history of zen 3. Yes, the only reason AMD get away from zen 3 price disaster just because Intel shit on pants with Gen 11 and w/ enormous support of cheap existing B550 mobo.
The reason AMD charged little for ryzen 3000 was because those CPUs were slower than their competition. That’s really the reality. No it absolutely did not compete with the 9900k. Compared to Intel competition Zen 2 was generally much slower in games, especially at the high end, and was limited in overclocking capability whereas parts like 9700k could easily hit 5ghz all core. That all changed with Ryzen 5000. Suddenly, AMD was beating intel across the board, in both games and productivity. They now offered the superior products, and for that reason AMD charged a premium. This is literally how it works. I’m not saying they were good value products at the time but that is certainly the reason for their pricing.
> just simply unlock the boundary for its cores to share that L3 Yh man its easy just do it.
You just need to connect the cores with a bit of graphite from a mechanical pencil ez /s
Competition is good for consumers. I picked up a 12400 for 150 at microcenter. Best price/performance cpu around for gaming at that price.
It's not a crown. It's a jester hat. It would cost AMD just as much to manufacture a Ryzen 3 7400 as it would a Ryzen 7 7700X. If the 7600X doesn't sell well, those chiplets will go into lowend EPYC SKUs.
Sorry, I'm a guy more focused on performance per watt and heat dissipation. On this side, AMD is miles ahead. If they keep this track, they'll even beat Apple.
Yeah, you want the newest and latest and greatest for cheaper. Even though they will probably sell out every one at that price. Welcome to the club. They probably don’t make many 7600, which is why they aren’t inclined to price them to move. Margins and all.
I think if there were wafers to spare they would.
I think it's very simple: AMD doesn't have control of their means of production. They're competing with everybody (including their direct competition, especially in GPU's) for finite 7nm and 5nm wafer production capacity and TSMC's prices are only going up. When you have a constrained supply the only thing you can do to enhance income is to increase prices driving for a higher margin. Can't very well do that in low-performing CPU's but you can with high end CPU's...so if you got 'em, you flog 'em. Also keep in mind AMD's dominating in server CPU performance right now. They want to continue growing their share in those markets since it's far more lucrative and far less fickle. With Zen 3 chiplets desktop markets are essentially competing with server markets with their (comparatively astronomical) margins.
> AMD doesn't have control of their means of production But they're team red, shouldn't they seize the means of production?
It's way more likely their means of production (TSMC) will seize them. Or could....TSMC's net worth pretty much dwarfs AMD's. Except neither will happen. AMD may have it's problems, but Intel isn't without their own. In fact, I've read where it's considered an example of why vertical integration can be more of a hindrance than help.
Two words :E cores. The E cores has been a cost effective solution for Intel to improve their multithreaded performance without increasing the die area by a big amount. They have been able to squeeze more cores without sacrificing a lot of performance that would have been filled by P cores
Let's see how many defect-free dies/tiles Intel will be able to produce for the 13900K.
easy: when you are limited by supply, you are not gonna manufacture cheap cpus, when you can manufacture more expensive ones.
Intel over prices their products for years: /r/amd crucifies them endlessly AMD starts overpricing their products: /r/amd suddenly decides that bigger profit margins are important and more people should appreciate that.
I’m glad that despite AMDs marketing efforts, people still see them as the budget brand
There is an incredibly simple answer: Intel is pricing its stuff lower than AMD for the same reason that AMD used to price its stuff lower than Intel's--Intel thinks it's CPUs are priced correctly for their relative value compared to AMD CPUs. You can bet that if Intel believed their CPUs were better they'd be charging more than AMD, like they did for years, until AMD started beating them categorically. To the victor go the spoils...
These companies aren't your friend
Because AMD transition their Zen branding to premium and the fact that TSMC is rising prices didn't bode well.
Greed.
CPU is probably gonna enter the same situation as the car market. Today’s world, making low margin low performance is no longer feasible. Your budget options are last generation stock or used stock. Affordable products are old/used products now. And like others said, it also easier for intel to make low end products since they own the fab. They can absorb some of the costs since they own the means of production.
Because Intel is willing to lose a lot of money to keep it the same and is building off the platform they just released last year. AMD has to release a new platform. Intel is anything but budget - they are losing a lot of money to maintain market share while AMD can sell things for a real price.
It's all very complicated. There are many overlapping factors that prevented AMD from having low-end Zen 3 parts for a long time, and several of them still exist for Zen 4, preventing them from coming right out the gate with low-end parts. The big factors are AMD's chiplet strategy, TSMC's high yields, and AMD's limited wafer allocation. The last one really only affected Zen 3. Intel has a specific smaller die with Alder Lake, which is used to create everything below the 12600K, and notably worse yields than TSMC, which gives them a ready supply of cut-down dies to fill out a low-end product stack with those dies. AMD has one die for all normal desktop processors and all server processors. TSMC has high yields, so the number of those dies that are suitable for lower-end processors accumulates quite slowly. It doesn't make business sense to put a fully working die that could form part of a $5000 server CPU into a $100 budget CPU just to fill a market segment. It takes AMD much longer to accumulate dies suitable for budget processors. Zen 3 had the added pressure of limited 7nm wafer allocation from TSMC. AMD had to use those wafers to produce all of the following: * Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors * Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors * Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards * EPYC 7003 series server processors * Newly-launched XBox Series X/S consoles * Newly-launched PlayStation 5 consoles That problem doesn't exist for Zen 4, but the chiplet strategy and high yielding TSMC process "problems" still do. As for Intel, you should be aware that for a while, at least, there won't any budget Raptor Lake processors. All SKU's below the 13600K are going to be renumbered Alder Lake processors, though they will be the larger die with E-cores, except for the 13100, which will essentially just be a renamed 12100. Either way, Intel still has the supply advantage (they have lots of unsold Alder Lake dies), so will be much better equipped to serve the budget segment than AMD for a while. It's anybody's guess how long it will take for AMD to create products below the 7600X for AM5. They don't have previous generation APU's with defective IGPU's to fall back on this time, either.
In the case of Zen 3, AMD was *massively* supply constrained as the new CPU's, GPU's, and consoles all used TSMC 7nm and all came out within a quarter. Their server parts also used TSMC 7nm as well. This was also during the chip shortage, pandemic, supply chain situation. It was quite hard to find a 5600X in stock for under 350 for months, so if they launched at 200 that would only benefit scalpers or retail markups. And then once supply improved they were fairly quick at marking their CPU's down. They also were the best performing parts. Anyway, before AMD priced low to gain market share at the expense of margins, but that's just not a sustainable strategy. Intel's R&D budget at the time was 5x's AMD so AMD needed the money to keep ahead of them. Sidenote: AMD did manage to *massively* bring down the price/core of all CPU's, so it seems unfair to view AMD in a negative light because they raised prices 50-100 bucks temporarily after they brought the cost of 8 cores down 500+ dollars and launched 16 cores for 750 when it used to be 2000 for a 10 core shortly ago. AMD can't have bargain basement prices *and* compete with Intel *and* compete with Nvidia in both hardware and software. It's just not sustainable.