Thursday, August 24th 2017
Retailers are Buying AMD RX Vega 64 at $675 Each
The Radeon RX Vega series launch has been particularly disappointing for gamers and PC enthusiasts because their otherwise interesting price-performance ratios at $499 for the RX Vega 64 and $399 for the RX Vega 56, were quickly stripped away by dwindling stock and sky-rocketing prices, with the RX Vega 64 even going above $1k in some places. We are not even sure if the miners are to blame or whether supplier-level pricing has been adjusted after the launch to a higher price point that makes AMD's promised pricing impossible to achieve.
It turns out that retailers might not be the ones making a quick buck at this madness. Leaked invoices show that distributors (entities that supply inventory to retailers) have inflated prices even at their level. A San Jose-based distributor, Ma Laboratories Inc., is quoting USD $675 per unit of a reference-design (not Limited Edition), Radeon RX Vega 64 SKU to a computer store. The $499 price AMD launched the RX Vega 64 at, is supposed to be the end-user price (minus government taxes). The retailer we're in touch with confirmed that they were offered no volume pricing discount due to low stock at the distributor itself. A distributor should ideally sell the product to a retailer at a much lesser price than $499, so the retailer can make their margin. The higher up the supply-chain, the more control AMD gets. The company is in a better position to rein in on distributors than retailers. If distributors are inflating prices with apparent impunity, it wouldn't surprise us if this goes even higher up.
Can AMD do anything about this? It can work with AIB partners to significantly increase production to bring down prices. But that would be a huge gamble, which will either work, putting cards in the hands of gamers at the prices they were promised; or won't, by creating more miners; or worse still, end up as bankruptcy-causing unsold inventories, if the mining craze were to somehow subside.
There is another option AMD can try, in our opinion. It can re-launch RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 as new SKUs which come with crippled cypto-currency mining abilities (a special BIOS or something driver-level, or even something at the silicon-level), and discontinue the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. The new SKUs could be clearly advertised as not being meant for crypto-currency mining (so as to deter false-marketing lawsuits). This is important for AMD, because the Radeon brand is under threat.
The more overpriced Radeon cards end up in the hands of miners, the fewer cards end up in the hands of gamers at the prices AMD promised; and conversely the lesser game developers are inclined to optimize their games for AMD Radeon, because fewer gamers use Radeon. NVIDIA can accelerate brand Radeon's demise by doubling down on game developer relations and pushing the next-generation of Game Works.
It turns out that retailers might not be the ones making a quick buck at this madness. Leaked invoices show that distributors (entities that supply inventory to retailers) have inflated prices even at their level. A San Jose-based distributor, Ma Laboratories Inc., is quoting USD $675 per unit of a reference-design (not Limited Edition), Radeon RX Vega 64 SKU to a computer store. The $499 price AMD launched the RX Vega 64 at, is supposed to be the end-user price (minus government taxes). The retailer we're in touch with confirmed that they were offered no volume pricing discount due to low stock at the distributor itself. A distributor should ideally sell the product to a retailer at a much lesser price than $499, so the retailer can make their margin. The higher up the supply-chain, the more control AMD gets. The company is in a better position to rein in on distributors than retailers. If distributors are inflating prices with apparent impunity, it wouldn't surprise us if this goes even higher up.
There is another option AMD can try, in our opinion. It can re-launch RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 as new SKUs which come with crippled cypto-currency mining abilities (a special BIOS or something driver-level, or even something at the silicon-level), and discontinue the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. The new SKUs could be clearly advertised as not being meant for crypto-currency mining (so as to deter false-marketing lawsuits). This is important for AMD, because the Radeon brand is under threat.
The more overpriced Radeon cards end up in the hands of miners, the fewer cards end up in the hands of gamers at the prices AMD promised; and conversely the lesser game developers are inclined to optimize their games for AMD Radeon, because fewer gamers use Radeon. NVIDIA can accelerate brand Radeon's demise by doubling down on game developer relations and pushing the next-generation of Game Works.
135 Comments on Retailers are Buying AMD RX Vega 64 at $675 Each
You can't design a chip with a 2048bit HBM interface and just switch it to GDDR.
The lower Vega will prob all be GDDR based.
Consumer Volta is most probably going to be GDDR5X, leaving the HBM versions for the Pro Crowd.
OMG how dumb are some of these tech editors. Jesus it's like some of you fundamentally do not understand mining or even basic business!
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/amds-rx-vega-launch-prices-might-be-just-smoke-and-mirrors.236177/page-5#post-3711427You responded with 37mhs result, but never broke down the math for this being the best at whatever the hell you were talking about.
Wait how would Vega not at least get like 35 MH/s or higher? I don't believe you have ever mined a day in your life because you clearly do not even know how this works...
"hey Bob that vega is looking pretty good in Maya, did... uh... did you ever add that one maya thing to the package before you sent it?"
- bob: "Ohhhhhh.... shhh... ahh. We gotta call Matt, he will figure out how to make this sound like a good thing." moment.
what in the current price of the currency that you mine is 45 mh/s or 35 mh/s mean in terms dollars per day?
Likewise the AIB partners to put one up for d/l for existing owners given it seems to be locked at the moment so folks can't currently do it themselves.
On the other topic, regarding the 3x improvement on the TitanXp, that was nothing to do with development, they already had that performance available and used on the higher grade cards and just enabled it because of competition from Vega.
Cryptocurrencies are pretty much irrelevant for Vega10 due to energy efficiency. Just like with datacenters, "serious" miners primarily care about energy efficiency because cooling always becomes the problem.
radeon.com/_downloads/vega-whitepaper-11.6.17.pdf
Also pseudo channel is not working as intended, maybe needs a driver or firmware update ~
If a hardware feature is disabled, then it's because it doesn't work as intended. This is quite normal. But some of you will always interpret this as future gains, and always keep waiting for the next mythical driver to finally solve everything. If you keep waiting, we'll be buying the successor of Volta long before you get to "unleash" your Vega…
Go look at the fine wine that is any older GCN card today, such as the Fury X. It has gained some performance, but again, only in select titles. The general Fury X perf level is still where it was at launch, +-5% depending on game.
Hell, not even AMD itself is saying Vega will go much faster, yet somehow some people still believe it will.
You were the one referring to a hardware feature which is (supposedly) not enabled.
Since i'm also doing 3d rendering I used to bet on AMD since their consummer product got more compute power, but even now the developpers find that cuda is just more mature and easy to work with. Octane renderer ? cuda only. Redshift ? same story. Cycle renderer ? the open cl version got less features. Pixar ? They developped a bunch of tools that only works with nvidia hardware. Even vray is faster with cuda than open cl. Apple only using AMD gpu ? it doesn't help that open cl on mac is not only slower than on windows and linux, it also got stability issue. Having a Nvidia gpu for creative content creation give you more options, while AMD is forcing you to look for specific option that are not always the best. Add that to the current state of the market, and that's another thing that makes amd less attractive for conssumers, and will not push developpers to work with open cl.
Even with not so great mining perfomance, Nvidia is still making a huge chunk of money, and manage to keep their brand fidelity. Meanwhile the gaming market not so happy with AMD right now, and if the price keep being inflated because of the crypto currency, AMD might win a market but lose another one.
I'm not saying that crypto should die, but AMD need to rethink their strategy.
2. Why is nvidia able to push that much FPS with the 150W GTX1070 having only 3 GPC, where we wait and wait to see AMD doing equal with GCN with 4 Engines with equal Watts?
3. I can´t build a "good in some years"-Card while needing a good and efficient card to compeet, NOW.
4. Same fault like the Bulldozer-idea... meh in some couple of month it could be widely adopted and optimized bla bla. How with inactive/broken engines and nearly no marketshare to get wide adoption and optimization?
5. being not to rigorous: if the 200W state of Vega does anytime in the future (month or years) beat the OC-Variants of the GTX1080 with same Watts, okay, better late then never. But if Vega in that state EVER gets near the FPS of 1080Ti i will be an idiot.
Either way Vega is a massive piece of S#!T for the price.