Friday, June 7th 2019
MSI CEO: AMD Plans to Stop Being the Value Alternative, X570 Motherboards to be Expensive
MSI's CEO Charles Chiang, quoted by Tom's Hardware at COMPUTEX 2019, laid out what we were already seeing with motherboard designs from all vendors of AMD's X570-based motherboards: pricing is likely increasing across the board, and AMD's market positioning won't be of the alternative, lower-value brand.
As quoted, Chiang said that ""Lots of people ask me, what do you think about today's AMD? I say today's AMD is completely different company compared to two, three, five years ago. They have nice technology and they are there to put the higher spec with the reasonable pricing. But right now they say, "Hey Charles, let's push to marketing to the higher [end]. So let's sell higher-pricing motherboards, higher-spec motherboards, and let's see what will happen in the market. So I don't think that AMD is the company that wants to sell low cost here, low cost there." Which does make sense: AMD isn't in the position of the underdog anymore -at least technology and product-portfolio wise when it comes to consumer CPUs. With better products, comes a desire for higher margins, and a change in direction for a company that was basically forced to almost cut itself out of the market in terms of profits with its previous, non-competitive CPU designs.
Efforts to survive on AMD's part have been immense, with the company severely tightening its belt in all fields, including R&D, in the times leading to the launch of their previous-gen architecture, Bulldozer. And with the way that one architecture panned out in the market, AMD didn't really find a way to dig itself out of the trenches. No like it has with Zen: a lithe, small, highly efficient design that allowed the company to not only make up lost ground on technology and CPU performance but also on profits. That the company wants to price its products in higher segments, alongside their performance improvements and competitiveness against Intel's slow-moving lineup, makes all sorts of sense from a business perspective.
Charles Chiang said that there a multitude of factors contributing to the higher pricing of X570 motherboards: that AMD is planning to charge more for each chipset (compared to the ASMedia-designed X470), but also because of the integration of PCIe 4.0. PCIe 4.0 support has meant a higher-TDp chipset (which has required a throwback to the days of old with active cooling over AMD's chipset, which has increased its TDp up to 10 W compared to the previous gen's X470's 3 W); and because PCIe switches are another best entirely in terms of complexity and power delivery capabilities. All of these add cost, and this cost will end up being passed on to end users (at least partially): as it always is.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
As quoted, Chiang said that ""Lots of people ask me, what do you think about today's AMD? I say today's AMD is completely different company compared to two, three, five years ago. They have nice technology and they are there to put the higher spec with the reasonable pricing. But right now they say, "Hey Charles, let's push to marketing to the higher [end]. So let's sell higher-pricing motherboards, higher-spec motherboards, and let's see what will happen in the market. So I don't think that AMD is the company that wants to sell low cost here, low cost there." Which does make sense: AMD isn't in the position of the underdog anymore -at least technology and product-portfolio wise when it comes to consumer CPUs. With better products, comes a desire for higher margins, and a change in direction for a company that was basically forced to almost cut itself out of the market in terms of profits with its previous, non-competitive CPU designs.
151 Comments on MSI CEO: AMD Plans to Stop Being the Value Alternative, X570 Motherboards to be Expensive
More connectivity: great!
Faster chipset interface: how much does it matter?
PCIE4: doesn't exactly matter right now.
Unless something massive changes, I don't see any reason that 400 series boards aren't still a really good option.
www.newegg.ca/p/pl?d=AMD+X470&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH
As you can see on this link that the cheap X470 boards are under $200 Canadian but anything half decent is at least $250 if not north of $300. Even the Crosshair has one listing for $650 CAD.
www.newegg.com/p/pl?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007625%20601311650%20601318817
I'm not saying it is 40%, but it may be a lot closer than you might think.
It's also quite possible that the lower silicon quality chiplets have been used in desktop, maybe they found that the lower bins were actually still very good so put them in the high-end desktop parts instead of keeping them for Epyc/TR. Maybe the TR parts will be even better or there are also even better ones being slowly binned to release another tier of parts.
How about R10 (RFX?) with 5+GHz boost at a later date?
We just don't know and whinging about a 10% deficit versus RUMOURS when we are seeing such amazing value versus what was available 2 years ago (and even current pricing from the competition) seems a little bit unfair.
We also don't know yet if (maybe only on X570) if XFR/the latest iteration of PBO will add something, maybe it kicks in over these boost figures? Given the difference in advertised clocks of 3800 vs 3800X I have to kind of think there must be something more to the X variant - it could well be something that will not be revealed/unlocked until the final AGESA which maybe board partners don't even have yet (speculation).
And all that's assuming the numbers you calculated were correct, which they even aren't -- yes, they too are purposefully exaggarted by you. IPC is 13% from the most accurate numbers we've seen. Clock speed certainly isn't 12%, as 4.7GHz is only 9% higher than 4.3 GHz (12% implies a 4.9 GHz turbo). OC isn't worth speculating about, as it can be 0 or as little as it was with 2700X (at which point we convert it to 0 anyway, to account for both chips' similiar OC potential) for all we know.
That gives us a total of 21% (or 23%, assuming IPC actually is a straight 15%) better singlethreaded performance, half of the numbers @Captain_Tom claimed.
And now he's off rambling about an additional 15% higher performance uplift + 2x reduction in power (7nm EUV wil supposedly magically cut power usage in half from current 7nm processes -- equal to, or arguably even more than, what we just saw from GloFo 12nm+ to TSMC 7nm with Zen 2) for Zen 3.20%, not 10%. And I agree, which is why I told him several times to stop making ridiculous speculation, as the conservative predictions and numbers, for which people like me were presenting, were already a prospect of great improvements. You know, the same kinds he's making about Zen 3 now.
Back to motherboards, component & R&D wise they look like they justify their cost.
A couple of % here and there. You are exaggerating too. ;)
www.newegg.ca/p/pl?d=As+rock+X399+PHantom+Gaming+6&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH
The cost of this board on Newegg.com is indeed $249.99 but we have to pay the distributor's tax here in Canada so the extra $83.17 US is applied.
Exchange rate is roughly $1.33 + bank fees = 1.37 exchange rate, so $249.99 US * 1.37 = $342.49 CAD + 15%(+) import/custom & brokerage fees = $393.86 CAD. I'd add 5% min. for internally handling all the paperwork and/or territory courtesy split commission = $413.55. Maybe a bit of gouging, $425 might be a more fair value. I may also be missing a fee or 2, or the 5% is too low, but that's the general idea.
My lord this website has turned into an Intel fanboy party....It is truly perplexing how bad some people's comprehension is. AMD has 5GHz 16-cores waiting, they just haven't released them because Intel is about to be busy struggling to keep up with AMD's R5 series...
I would like you to explain to us on what grounds you base that prediction on? According to Anandtech, early reports of 7nm EUV will offer "~8% lower power consumption at the same complexity and frequency (between 6% and 12% to be more precise)". Digitimes echoed something similiar when saying it would be 15%. Which makes sense, since the transistor density increases by only 20%. However, there's a huge discrepancy between 15% and your claim of 100% (2x), which is frankly technically impossible due to the density. So explain to us how you came to that deduction?Rebuking false statements does not make one a fanboy. Making them, like you constantly do, does.
If that's the compromise for the B550 ones (1 slot of each), then I'll be more than perfectly fine with it.