MSI Prepares Another Version of AMD Radeon RX 580 Armor Graphics Card

[ZoneDymo]

Well, since they don't have any Navi products anywhere near this price range...you do the math. You really want to spend $300 on a 5700 just to do 1080p? And that is for the noisy blower style. Get a 5700 with a decent/quiet blowers and the price jumps by $50. Until the 5500/5600 series cards are widely available in retail, they still need Polaris to cover mainstream gaming.

My point is AMD needs to release the R5500 to the public and drop the price of the 5700(XT) so we are back to normal non inflated bs times.

Everything is in a good place right now to purchase APART from gpu's, they are massive bs.

And we dont need this card to go on any longer, it was last gen a year after the RX480 came out.... this just needs to go and we need to move on.

 

[Valantar]

This has absolutely no importance whether AMD is big. Lucrative? Maybe, maybe not. It's almost unthinkable that AMD could pay TSMC the kind of premium Apple or Nvidia do. Especially when you look at AMD's own profit margin.
Of course TSMC would love to be an exclusive manufacturer of high-profit CPUs, so maybe they're playing the long game - hoping that one day AMD will raise prices and be able to pay more.

Anyway, whatever supply of 7nm AMD has, it remains quite limited and contracted for a long period. On the other hand: AMD's has to supply a huge number of Navi chips next year, while Zen2 (especially for servers) is their current flagship product.
Navi GPU for PC is the least important 7nm product AMD makes at the moment. It would be quite weird if they decided to waste 7nm on it.

But hey: in 2 months we'll know what's inside next gen APU.
If it turns out to be a 14nm Vega, will you find the "7nm being crowded" idea more probable?

Not really. Sure, it would signal that 7nm availability is limited, but we already know that. And sure, there is a squeeze between Zen2 chiplets, Navi 10 and Navi 14, but APUs are a much, much smaller market than $150-200 GPUs, so it's obvious Navi 14 will have priority before any APU GPU chiplets (though frankly I doubt we'll see chiplet APUs until Zen3 - IF is a bit too power hungry for mobile use so far). Frankly, I'd be surprised if Navi 14 wasn't a higher priority than Navi 10 moving forward - the market in that price range is easily 2x the size, not to mention OEM sales for low-end GPUs far outstrip anything in the RX 5700 range.

As for others, the next Apple SoC is more than likely already being taped out, and is undoubtedly on 7+. SoCs for current iPhones have been in volume production since 4-6 months before launch, at least. Nvidia doesn't have and won't be making anything on TSMC 7nm - they're moving to Samsung for their 7nm parts. There are quite a few other large customers, but most of those produce massive quantities of tiny chips, which means a lot of flexibility due to massively high yields.

Around the $250 range not the $150-$200 that Polaris currently covers. Not sure what Navi can offer at 1080p that Polaris doesn't cover now.

You're joking, right? AMD is comparing the OEM part to two cards: The RX 480, which launched at $200 in mid-2016, and the Geforce GTX 1650, a card that's overpriced at its $150 MSRP. The performance delta over these is supposedly +~12% and +~30% respectively. And you think AMD will launch this card (or at least a consumer variant of it, which might perform slightly better) at $250? Sorry, but that's not going to happen. Yes, AMD has been following Nvidia's lead too closely in pricing in recent years, but they have nothing to win whatsoever by pricing the RX 5500 cards too close to the GTX 1660/1660 Super/1660 Ti - as these will be faster (at least the Ti and Super). The RX 5500 series is in no way a >$200 GPU series. There might be custom variants of an XT that exceed that price, but MSRP for the basic card? No way.

 

[notb]

Not really. Sure, it would signal that 7nm availability is limited, but we already know that. And sure, there is a squeeze between Zen2 chiplets, Navi 10 and Navi 14, but APUs are a much, much smaller market than $150-200 GPUs

Actually you're wrong here, so I won't comment on the rest. Maybe you'll change your mind.

If you look just on discrete GPUs, Nvidia has ~70% of market. But when you look at all GPUs combined, it's close to 50:50 between Nvidia and AMD (they have around 30-35% combined). In fact there was a huge news lately that AMD sold more GPUs than Nvidia for the first time since long long time ago. I'm surprised you've missed it.

AMD Overtakes Nvidia in Graphics Shipments for First Time in 5 Years

AMD's overall share of the GPU market rose in Q2, outpacing Nvidia for the first time in five years.

www.extremetech.com

In other words: AMD sells more APUs than discrete GPUs.

 

[Valantar]

Actually you're wrong here, so I won't comment on the rest. Maybe you'll change your mind.

If you look just on discrete GPUs, Nvidia has ~70% of market. But when you look at all GPUs combined, it's close to 50:50 between Nvidia and AMD (they have around 30-35% combined). In fact there was a huge news lately that AMD sold more GPUs than Nvidia for the first time since long long time ago. I'm surprised you've missed it.

AMD Overtakes Nvidia in Graphics Shipments for First Time in 5 Years

AMD's overall share of the GPU market rose in Q2, outpacing Nvidia for the first time in five years.

www.extremetech.com

In other words: AMD sells more APUs than discrete GPUs.

Sure, but most of those are - even for people interested in their far-better-than-Intel GPUs, like me - mainly a CPU. Also, notebooks outsell desktops by quite a bit, so it's obvious that will count for quite a bit (just look at any GPU sales stat that includes Intel iGPUs - they suddenly have 90% market share). This still doesn't tell us whether AMD would prioritize node allocations for a tiny and relatively unimportant (in terms of mindshare and winning over consumers) die for APUs vs a die for the most-selling GPU segment , which also happens to have far higher margins than laptop APUs.

This is complicated, and comes down to what priorities AMD chooses to make, but I think they recognize that APUs are sufficiently hamstrung by the DDR4 interface that they won't waste die space on an upcoming Zen2 APU for the less space-efficient Navi arch (while an oversimplification, Vega 20 has ~20% more CUs per die area on the same node), and will instead (as persistent rumors claim) use a moderately grown Vega iGPU. That way they can beef up the GPU and bring in Navi when DDR5 arrives (and hopefully LPDDR5X for mobile) while saving die space while in this squeeze. They are going to need a 7nm APU die soon no matter what, and by going this way they ensure it is as small and cheap to make as possible, making balancing production easier. Of course the most efficient use of the node would be MCM APUs, but I don't think IF is power efficient enough for two constantly active links in 15W APUs, at least not yet.

Of course, Navi 14 is rolling out now, while 7nm APUs are likely to follow the previous generation's schedule, with a CES launch and roll-out in late winter/early spring. Even accounting for needing to build up stock of APUs beforehand, that should be plenty of time to also mass produce Navi 14 with no issues. And by that time the pressure from Apple on that node will be all but gone (unless they use the same equipment for 7+?).

AMD are doing well, but can't afford the PR disaster it would be to keep selling a 4-year-old architecture with half the perf/W of the competition, especially when they have shown that they can do a lot better.

 

[notb]

Sure, but most of those are - even for people interested in their far-better-than-Intel GPUs, like me - mainly a CPU.

I find that unlikely. On the Intel side - yes, most people assume IGP is always there. Most don't care about its performance, because they don't game.
And most gamers use a dGPU anyway.

It could be vastly different in case of AMD, because these CPUs are seldom chosen for office or casual work. I wouldn't be surprised if most were bought by gamers on a budget.

Anyway, a strong GPU part was always an important (if not only) advantage of AMD APUs. And AMD loves to mention this all the time.

Also, notebooks outsell desktops by quite a bit

So? These are still PCs. In fact - there are most of PCs.
And yes, AMD owes very good APU sales to the mobile segment.

This still doesn't tell us whether AMD would prioritize node allocations for a tiny and relatively unimportant (in terms of mindshare and winning over consumers) die for APUs vs a die for the most-selling GPU segment , which also happens to have far higher margins than laptop APUs.

That is just bizarre. Sorry.
Why do you think mobile parts are less important? I don't understand this.

Intel dominates this market exactly because they've focused on mobile parts. This is the future of PCs, not desktops. And that's where money is.

 

[kapone32]

If they sell this card for $200 Canadian it will sell like hotcakes.