OK i get it now. Cross promotion. You're initial point was EVGA would be more supported then the rest, right. I doubt it, small bussiness the others would find out and get pissed, and this things always come out inside the bussiness, employes that move for example. But even if they have better deals that should not be meaningfull for the bottomline, case and point what happened to EVGA and the others are still standing.
... you seem to have a very ill informed idea of the relative power of the parties involved in such a negotiation. If, say, Gigabyte tells Nvidia "we heard you give more marketing support relative to sales to EVGA - we want you to give us a matching deal" - do you imagine Nvidia would just keel over and give them that? Of course not. Nvidia would say "Yes, and they are an exclusive partner, and they get more support in exchange for that exclusivity. You also work with AMD, so you'll not get the same level of support". There is literally nothing whatsoever an AIB could do about this outside of ending their deal with Nvidia outright. Which Nvidia knows, and reportedly uses to strong-arm AIB partners into very, very lopsided deals. AIB partners
are pissed at Nvidia. They have been for years. But they haven't got a choice, unless they're willing to significantly scale back their business - which most companies aren't.
As for marketing support not being meaningful for their bottom lines ... what planet are you living on? Do you think they'd survive without marketing? Do you think AIB partners have the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for a significant marketing presence in all the markets they are a part of? 'Cause they dont - outside of possibly Asus, being the juggernaut they are (but they also have way more products to market, which again eats into these funds).
When your highest revenue product segment has low single digit profit margins, even if you sell millions of that product and ASPs are high, you'll still be struggling to cover basic operating costs for your business, let alone have cash left over for marketing, R&D, etc.
I wish I could give the conclusion of this post a thousand upvotes.
APUs, by their very nature, will never be a replacement even for the midrange discrete GPUs like the RX6600. APUs made by merchant chip makers, i.e. everyone besides Apple, are limited by many economic factors from achieving their technological limits:
- Limited memory bandwidth
- Sharing of limited memory bandwidth with the CPU
- limited die size (small dies for CPUs, and only a fraction of that space is devoted to the GPU)
- limited power (35 to 65 W) compared to a discrete GPU (north of 100 W)
All of these are limits imposed by the necessity of these APUs being available in affordable laptops. When these limits don't apply, we can see great APUs like the various console chips that AMD has made. However, this will
never be the case for the APUs that we can buy for desktops or buy in the form of a whole laptop.
Yeah, APUs have promise in theory (and current ones are pretty good for their power level) but the board and platform requirements to realize that promise just don't really make sense for consumer applications. Special motherboards with GDDR on board would be exorbitantly expensive and difficult to sell; on-chip memory (like HBM) is expensive and very difficult to fit in a small package, etc. DDR5 has some promise towards alleviating this, but as you say you'd still struggle to come close to an RX 6600. I for one
really hope AMD pushes their APUs higher in terms of GPU power - 100-150W with a 20CU GPU would be amazing, even with just dual channel DDR5 - but I don't see them taking over PC gaming any time soon, that's for sure.
