AMD Focused on Delivering RDNA 4 to Desktop, Mobile a Secondary Concern

[T0@st]

AMD's small portfolio of current-gen (RDNA 3) mobile-oriented Radeon dedicated GPUs pales in comparison to a wide selection of related desktop offerings—a certain demographic of PC gamers have wondered whether the incoming RDNA 4 generation will produce more options for portable platforms. An extensive Notebookcheck article indicates that Team Red is not (immediately) interested in catering to mobile dGPU enthusiasts—the online publication conducted an interview with Ben Conrad, director of product management (client-side). The "Navi Mobile" Radeon RX 7000M range is an uncommon sight on gaming laptops—relative to NVIDIA's wide rollout of dedicated GeForce RTX 4000 Mobile GPUs—normally, higher-end models are present on ultra-expensive specification sheets (paired with "Dragon Range" Ryzen HX CPUs). Industry experts believe that lower-end options are more likely to turn up inside external enclosures.

One of Notebookcheck's questions focused in on this topic—they believe that: "the number of AMD dGPU-based laptop SKUs have been pretty anemic." Their interviewee was ambushed with a query regarding his company's outlook for mobile RDNA 4 options. In response, Conrad stated: "our current graphics strategy is focused on the desktop market with RDNA 4. So, I think you'll see those types of products first in the future. Certainly, RDNA 4 and future graphics technologies will make it into mobile, whether they be on APUs or future products." VideoCardz has read "between-the-lines" and posits that Team Red could skip a generation—UDNA is possibly a better fit for a new wave of laptop dGPUs. A sort-of stopgap has appeared on the horizon—in the shape of AMD's forthcoming "Strix Halo" RDNA 3.5-based integrated solution. The flagship chip's Radeon 8060S iGPU looks promising when compared to a current-gen dGPU, but it will likely struggle when pitted against Team Green's "Blackwell" dedicated mobile platform. Upcoming competition in the APU field will arrive in the form of Intel's "Panther Lake" processors—slated for launch later this year. Its next-gen iGPU is said to utilize the Xe3 "Celestial" architecture.



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[TheinsanegamerN]

This is probably a good thing, given how little traction AMD gets in mobile dGPUs, but at the same time withdrawing from yet another market while not giving us anything concrete and playing coy with actual numbers is not inspiring confidence either.

 

[Wasteland]

If this is what "focused" looks like, then good grief.

 

[Daven]

Basically AMD is covering the laptop midrange and budget just like on desktops with Strix Point and Strix Halo. Discrete laptop GPUs are not required.

 

[CosmicWanderer]

Mobile "dedicated" I assume. I'm guessing mobile integrated RDNA4 will make an appearance.

Makes sense if that's the case, given how powerful AMD's integrated graphics has become.

 

[Bomby569]

they are doing their best to become irrelevant

 

[HOkay]

If this is what "focused" looks like, then good grief.

This made me chuckle! You're so right though, the last word I'd use for the 9000 series launch so far is "focused".

 

[hsew]

Unless AMD wants to offer a 7800M laptop for $1000, they ought to just bow out of the laptop dGPU market and focus on desktop and Strix Halo. nVidia is easily at 98-99% laptop dGPU market share at this point.

 

[qlum]

Appart from how entrenched Nvidia has been, on mobile efficiency is king, and AMD's dedicated gpu's have not been winning any prices here, so it makes sense that they don't really try.

 

[trsttte]

I think that when we get benchmark numbers for Strix Halo everyone will rethink dGPU on laptops, it just won't make any sense.

 

[Visible Noise]

Unless AMD wants to offer a 7800M laptop for $1000, they ought to just bow out of the laptop dGPU market and focus on desktop and Strix Halo. nVidia is easily at 98-99% laptop dGPU market share at this point.

Then they just eliminated themselves from 90% of the corporate market.

I think that when we get benchmark numbers for Strix Halo everyone will rethink dGPU on laptops, it just won't make any sense.

It’s going to be very very expensive. It’s a niche product, not an everyone product.

 

[trsttte]

It’s going to be very very expensive. It’s a niche product, not an everyone product.

The Asus ROG Flow tablet (it doesn't get more niche than that) is going to cost 2200$, a laptop could start bellow 2000$ which is the starting price of any decent sized workstation. It won't compete with a 4070 equiped regular laptop but it will be very interesting for thinner machines.

 

[hsew]

Then they just eliminated themselves from 90% of the corporate market.



It’s going to be very very expensive. It’s a niche product, not an everyone product.

Corporate market? Care to explain? Because I worked for several corporate enterprise and state and federal government IT departments for nearly a decade and never saw a single AMD laptop dGPU in the thousands of laptops I encountered over the years… of the rare workstation-class laptops I encountered, they were always equipped with an nVidia GPU.

AMD’s own website lists nine laptop offerings for their RX7000S/M(XT) lineup. Nine. Their dGPUs just aren’t competitive in the laptop sector and haven’t been for over a decade if we’re being honest. The performance and VRAM advantage AMD enjoys in the desktop dGPU market does not exist in the laptop space unfortunately. Hence why I said they’d have to offer a 12GB laptop dGPU to compete with the 8GB 4070M soon to be 8GB 5070M.



Strix Halo can’t be too expensive. I’ve heard some speculate it to start around $2200 for 32GB RAM, but if AMD were serious it’d have to start around $1600-1700. They can’t keep overvaluing their brand. No way is anyone going to spend $2200 on an entry-build 120W Strix Halo laptop with 32GB RAM to trade blows with a 5060 at best, when they can instead get a 5080 laptop for the same price, or even a nicely equipped 5070Ti laptop for slightly cheaper. No way José.

 

[Visible Noise]

Corporate market? Care to explain? Because I worked for several corporate enterprise and state and federal government IT departments for nearly a decade and never saw a single AMD laptop dGPU in the thousands of laptops I encountered over the years… of the rare workstation-class laptops I encountered, they were always equipped with an nVidia GPU.

It appears you are correct. My prior HP laptop had a AMD GPU in it, but it seems they have been discontinued.

 

[watzupken]

In my opinion, you can’t just focus on desktop GPUs and leave the mobile segment. It’s a dumb strategy simply because the desktop market have been shrinking and mobile segment growing. So by leaving their iGPU on RDNA 3, they are essentially ceding this segment to Intel and Nvidia. Even Intel is gaining on them with their Arc Battlemage. AMD is just fortunate Intel needs more time to further refine their drivers. For once, I think Intel’s ARC looks like a good alternative to very overpriced Ryzen AI 9 that comes with the best iGPU.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

In my opinion, you can’t just focus on desktop GPUs and leave the mobile segment. It’s a dumb strategy simply because the desktop market have been shrinking and mobile segment growing. So by leaving their iGPU on RDNA 3, they are essentially ceding this segment to Intel and Nvidia. Even Intel is gaining on them with their Arc Battlemage. AMD is just fortunate Intel needs more time to further refine their drivers. For once, I think Intel’s ARC looks like a good alternative to very overpriced Ryzen AI 9 that comes with the best iGPU.

Their leaving the mobile dGPU market, not the whole mobile market. FFS We used to teach reading comprehension at an elementary level.

Their iGPUs are NOT rDNA3 anyway. They are rDNA3.5. These iGPUs have 0 competition. Intel's Arc based iGPUs are extremely rare and in games struggle against the 680m, the 780m leaves it in the dust and the newer models have upgraded to 16CU from 12, only further widening the gap. We havent even gotten to strix halo yet. Nvidia currently has NOTHING in this space, that may change with the rumored ARM laptop chip, but nothing is official yet.

In APUs, AMD is competitive. In dGPUs, they are nowhere to be seen, and the 7000m series was so lackluster they may as well not have bothered. Most likely, they are skipping rDNA4 for iGPUs because they're all about RT, and the iGPU is too restrictive to make use of the tech. They will likely skip to uDNA once that is ready.

 

[hsew]

In my opinion, you can’t just focus on desktop GPUs and leave the mobile segment. It’s a dumb strategy simply because the desktop market have been shrinking and mobile segment growing. So by leaving their iGPU on RDNA 3, they are essentially ceding this segment to Intel and Nvidia. Even Intel is gaining on them with their Arc Battlemage. AMD is just fortunate Intel needs more time to further refine their drivers. For once, I think Intel’s ARC looks like a good alternative to very overpriced Ryzen AI 9 that comes with the best iGPU.

I’d agree that AMD messed up by introducing RDNA4 and FSR4, but then eschewing those advancements in Strix Halo when Intel is nipping at their heels with Battlemage. It’s crazy to think that Intel are presenting a serious threat to AMD in the GPU space; nobody would have seen this coming even 5 years ago.

But I’d disagree with your premise: by building bigger iGPUs, Intel and AMD are not actually ceding the high-performance laptop graphics market to nVidia. They are simply changing their approach. Remember, nVidia already owns basically 99% the high-performance notebook graphics sector, so Intel/AMD aren’t ceding any ground there because there really isn’t any ground left for them to cede.

Strix/Lunar Halo are the new/old approach of tech consolidation: cramming more performance and functionality into a single chip. From the Intel/AMD perspective, it allows them to advertise those SOCs in higher-end markets. From the OEM perspective, it presents the attractive proposition of reduced complexity vs having to design a notebook with a dGPU. So maybe they don’t quite achieve 4070M performance. But who cares? It turns out, x70 and higher dGPUs represent an increasingly small size of the market anyway! It’s the x60 segment and below where most customers are, and that’s exactly what needs to be targeted for any real market share to be recovered from nVidia.


And, bigger picture, even with AI, it is highly likely that the mobile dGPU market as a whole will begin to experience a decline in the coming years if it hasn’t already. Besides the fact that technology has a well-established tendency to consolidate, which we have already seen for years with APU/iGPU, the majority of the most actively played games are either several years old or not graphically demanding to begin with. That leaves professional/creative work, which comes with the general preference of those markets for sleeker, more professional looking devices over edgy and RGB. They, for the most part, are happy accelerating their workloads with iGPU, especially when they’re away from their desks.


With all that to consider, investing in iGPU is exactly the correct move to make. It’s also why nVidia themselves are getting ready to jump into the SOC market. That, and, the very real threat that Intel and AMD could simply choose to lock nVidia out of their laptop ecosystems at any point in the future (Apple, is that you?).

 

[Random_User]

Let me put some input...

AMD mobile dGPUs are irrelevant. There were so few of them, and so weak performance. So this is completely fine, to drop these, since the laptop makers will stick with intel/nVidia, AMD/nVidia anyway. What they better to focus on, is power efficient laptops, with powerful iGPU instead, further improving them. And release iGPUs with RDNA5 iGPUs ASAP along with their newest CPU parts, instead of sticking with outdated solutions, like RDNA3, and RDNA3, like they did with Vega, with Zen 3.

After all, the Strix Halo, IMO, is the beginning of "fruition" of "fusion" idea, they were bearing all these years, and why they've bought ATi, back in the day. AMD simply has no other way, but focus on increasing the amount of these things, right now, and to make sure it has the sane price. Either to make off the money, they've put into it's R&D, and also to their overall "fusion" idea was correct. AMD has went a long way, to prove the APU idea that is capable of gaming is possible.
Now, here comes the most important part: they just have to get enough allocation, and price them properly, to outsell every low end mobile dGPUs, and even desktop dGPUs. Otherwise, they will lose, not only the high and mid end dGPU space, but the entire iGPU market as well. Because AMD's presence in both mobile and APU space is just barely existant.
This is where, IMHO, AMD should put a lot of efforts and money. Because dGPUs would inevitably sink into oblivion, as more compact solutions will come from all GPU and CPU vendors. APU is the future. Better to keep, and increase/improve this advantage, they have now. As the competition will be dire. Especially. the moment, intel get their issues sorted out with Battlemage, and nVidia will release their very own custom ARM-based CPU (IMHO, Mediatek joint is just temporary solution).

 

[trsttte]

I’ve heard some speculate it to start around $2200 for 32GB RAM

That's just the price of the Asus ROG Flow tablet/convertible. A regular laptop, especially one without the ROG branding, will be considerably cheaper.

Their dGPUs just aren’t competitive in the laptop sector and haven’t been for over a decade if we’re being honest

That doesn't tell the hole story, if we go back a decade neither were their CPU's and the company was almost wiped out (kind like Intel now come to think of it, except AMD didn't have other assets like fabs and existing market and mind share to lean on). There are also a ton of back door agreements and supply constraints preventing AMD solutions - be it CPU or GPU - for making a dent in the laptop market.

Intel is nipping at their heels with Battlemage. It’s crazy to think that Intel are presenting a serious threat to AMD in the GPU space

Except they aren't really, Battlemage was well received and offered a decent improvement over Alchemist but it's not even competing at mid higher range, they went straight for the lower end of the market to try to gain market share to justify the investment because anything higher was not worth it. Which is what AMD will do with RDNA4 as well except that they can target more demanding consumers in the 500-750$ space

Strix/Lunar Halo are the new/old approach of tech consolidation: cramming more performance and functionality into a single chip. From the Intel/AMD perspective, it allows them to advertise those SOCs in higher-end markets. From the OEM perspective, it presents the attractive proposition of reduced complexity vs having to design a notebook with a dGPU. So maybe they don’t quite achieve 4070M performance. But who cares? It turns out, x70 and higher dGPUs represent an increasingly small size of the market anyway! It’s the x60 segment and below where most customers are, and that’s exactly what needs to be targeted for any real market share to be recovered from nVidia.

Both Strix Halo and Lunar Lake are modular. I think they're simply finally designing a solution to deliver efficient laptops with decent GPU raw power which the market has been begging for since forever. Discrete GPUs on laptops are always very inneficient but previous APUs never offered particularly high GPU performance. This bridges that gap, between an ultrabook with ok battery but bad performance, and bigger laptop with more performance but loud hot and with low battery.

A 4070 laptop might be cheaper and might even win on some tests but it won't be as small, as quiet and it's battery won't last half as long. That's what this new crop of APU's is aiming to solve.