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

[HeggeBegge]

This is good news. A focus on PC implementation can only give confidence in the next generation (after the 9000 series) products. I'm waiting for the 1090 (Ti?).

10090 or 1090?

 

[hsew]

I appreciate the input. I guess you may be right on the limitations of AMD laptop GPUs, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem that cannot be remedied over the course of generations. AMD certainly has limitations on desktop GPUs as well, but in the CPU market their chiplet designs have given them an edge. I see no reason as to why they couldn't bridge the gap.



No, they haven't already. It is still a niche product, that fills a gap between professionals and gamers who prefer battery life and portability. I can understand that this is their angle of attack. No point in going for laptop dGPUs when you're planning to replace them with APUs. But the basic point remain. The Strix Halo chips (or AI MAX+) are just not up to it yet. When they reach the level of performance and power consumption of a M4 Max chip with a decent price, then we have a market disruptor. We still don't and there's no telling how long that will take.

I’m sure neither AMD nor Intel truly wanted to abandon the enthusiast/extreme discrete mobile graphics tier. But mobile is just a different beast from desktop entirely. Your product has to perform with 1/3rd the energy budget and 1/6th the cooling budget of the desktop part. And then, you have to approach laptop OEMs and negotiate with them to integrate your non-removable product into a device that they MUST SELL in order to recoup their own costs. And unlike a desktop you can’t just swap out a part you aren’t satisfied with, a laptop is a package deal. It’s a whole commitment to a static platform. A black box for all intents and purposes. Even if you manage to triumph in the engineering department, you now have to market your product. And we don’t need to rehash how far ahead nVidia is in terms of GPU marketing. The others may as well be invisible. And those immense challenges are precisely why the mobile dGPU market is currently 99% owned by nVidia.

As for iGPUs replacing mobile dGPUs, yes, they have. Look at it in terms of what the chip makers are actually delivering to the OEMs. Intel just cancelled their Battlemage and beyond mobile dGPUs, specifically to focus on bringing Battlemage to laptops through Lunar Lake and are about to unveil their ultimate mobile graphics through Lunar Lake Halo. AMD have done the same with Strix Point and will do the same with Strix Halo, albeit with an inferior RDNA3.5 architecture compared to their soon to launch RDNA4 (which, by the way, no mention of a dGPU RDNA4 for laptops). Point is, there simply won’t be any further efforts from Intel and most likely AMD as well to do things nVidia’s way with mobile dGPUs.



As for the Mac, there’s no denying the M series have always been an incredible feat of engineering. They’re just also, unfortunately, far more restricted in what they can actually run compared to your typical x86 processor. It’s like owning a race car that runs on solar power, but you can only drive it at the race track, playing by Apple’s rules. So, their disruption is ultimately limited to their platform. And if you want that same level of market disruption from any other chipmaker, you’ll have to be ready to accept compromises of a similar calibre.

Also, a max spec MacBook Pro with M4 Max (16/40/16, CPU/GPU/Neural with the 48GB RAM minimum for that chip) starts at $3700, before even getting any storage upgrades. That’s not exactly a disruptive price. But the expense definitely helps with my race car analogy.

 

[mama]

10090 or 1090?

Who knows. My bet is they'll rebrand completely for UDNA or whatever the acronym is. Maybe something simple and universal like their CPU lineup. So, you'll have the Radeon 3, 5, 7 and 9. Old school.