I dunno about that. NVIDIA is seen as the premium option. Their floor will never be that low, but rather they’ll make you pay for the cost of entry. When you’re in a position of dominance, you don’t even mess with low-margin segments until your position is threatened, and considering their profitability these days, I don’t think they feel much pressure to compete in the race to the bottom.
Also, I suspect NVIDIAs overhead is quite a bit higher than AMD, because they make big dies and there’s no doubt a premium to maneuver your way into whatever fab space you need.
You could be right. But AMD seems too scarred to flood the market with products, fearing that a response from Nvidia could left them with inventory that wouldn't be able to sell.
They would rather discontinue a product line than lower prices too much. This is why it’s so surprising how much money Intel is willing to lose on their dGPU aspirations. They have to be losing billions, and I don’t know that their ship will ever come in here. AMD can’t even chip away at NVIDIA, and they have way more experience and a long-standing presence in this space.
My theory, for years, is that without GPUs they will have a huge problem. Not immediately but surely in the future. Nvidia is rumored to start selling ARM SOCs for laptops and desktops next year. If they manage to get a good share of the market, thanks to their brand and GPU domination, they could slowly start abandoning Intel's and AMD's x86 platform for their own ARM platform. AMD could also start making GPUs that are performing much better with their own CPUs than CPUs from Intel. That could leave Intel with a platform that is terrible for gaming and applications that also use GPUs for compute tasks, only usable for basic office usage. I think they know that no matter how much money they will lose by trying to cover the distance with AMD and Nvidia in GPUs, they have to do it.
Now this could be a future that is 5-10-15-20 years away. But Intel is a company that would want to be still here after 30-50-100 years, so they have to look far ahead. If 20 years of upsence from the descrete GPU market makes them so desperate to have to lose billions every year to try to become competitive, imagine if they where deciding to abandon GPUs today and had to reconsider it after 10 years time. Nvidia and even AMD, or who knows, even Qualcomm and Apple would be so far ahead, that it will be pointless to even try. And that's why I never agree with those saying that Intel will abandon it's GPU business after ARC's failure. They just can't. It will be suicidal except if they manage to find huge money stream elsewhere. Well, buying Altera didn't worked for them, buying Mobileye didn't worked, Gaudi doesn't seems to work either, their x86 business is the only one that still works for them.
