Not typically., there is usually some agreed price per unit and a stipend for R&D. Profits are slim to negative at the start, unless the supplier has got away with a very good deal form the outset. Long term it works out but Sony will make you work to get moderate profits. Profit margins are better with discrete GPUs
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THE REAL REASON VEGA FAILED & RAJA QUIT AMD!
- Thread starter Gregster
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Not typically., there is usually some agreed price per unit and a stipend for R&D. Profits are slim to negative at the start, unless the supplier has got away with a very good deal form the outset. Long term it works out but Sony will make you work to get moderate profits. Profit margins are better with discrete GPUs
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No component maker in their right mind would sell below cost in a high volume sector such as consoles, it would cost them millions.
I do not doubt for a second that Sony (and Microsoft) will have negotiated hard for the best price for the custom APUs from AMD, but it is them who will initially make a lost on the hardware (if they do at all these days) and make up the cost through game sales etc.
IIRC, AMDs financials don't show any losses from their custom chip business in relation to consoles which would suggest they aren't selling below cost.
I do not doubt for a second that Sony (and Microsoft) will have negotiated hard for the best price for the custom APUs from AMD, but it is them who will initially make a lost on the hardware (if they do at all these days) and make up the cost through game sales etc.
IIRC, AMDs financials don't show any losses from their custom chip business in relation to consoles which would suggest they aren't selling below cost.
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Sony said from the outset that they were making profit on the ps4. This was not the case with previous consoles but the ps4 was much weaker hardware in comparison to previous releases if we look at them compared to pc hardware. Amd's Semi custom division also made profit if I remember correctly and did so when other division were doing terribly. Quote below from q1 2014 after the ps4 and shone released.
Here is another from q3 2013 when the ps4/cone released. The launches made an immediate impact with profits going up.
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it does cost them millions unless they can reduce their manufacturing costs. This is when multiple bidding companies will try to offer the minimum viable price, and may have to factor in expected future improvements in production to lower costs. For the GPU exact yields become important, early on yields will be lower but the unit price is going to remain the same, and if the yields and profit margins are too tight there will be a small loss per unit, but with the hope when yields increase then profit margins will increase a lot.
Your own quote backs this up,
AMD;'s profit that quarter increased form 70 to 121 million due to console.s 40m profit a quarter given the millions of sales points to extremely low margins.
Luckily for MAD, profit margins icnreased later on.
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Yea but i think Rroff had said above AMD would be making a loss to start with then go on to a profit. This shows it was not the case. I should have quoted Rroff in as part of what i was getting across was AMD made a profit but so did Sony from the off. Profit is profit though no matter how many you have to make to get it. AMD at the time were sorely needing it due to the Cpu division performing so badly.
AMD would have priced the PS4/Xbone and their mid cycle refreshes at cost + margin. IMO no way would they go for a loss leader, either one of these consoles could have bombed (well Xbox nearly did). After time and process refinement margins go up.
It's a risk to take on a semicustom design. You are relying on the 3rd party to cut the mustard.
It's a risk to take on a semicustom design. You are relying on the 3rd party to cut the mustard.
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He lied, implied and got a job lined up elsewhere ready to jump ship once he was found out, How can you class that as doing good? nothing about Vega was handled well,
He destroyed the brands consumer trust. Whether he did well considering the budget he had is not the issue but is that even relevant?
This time last year half of this forum was saying how Vega isn't his anyway and how we'll have to wait for Navi to see Raja's work. As in making excuses in advance, but there's only so much you can excuse.
Good riddance to him, he's a sleazebag.
Made me chuckle when Vega finally landed and everybody was slamming it, Raja went on holiday for 3 months...then never returned to RTC.
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If it'd been handled better and we'd been given honest info rather than silence & false hope through vague innuendo it would have been taken a lot better than it was, At least he's gone now, hopefully common sense will prevail in future. It's Intel we should feel sorry for now.
Did not know about that. But to be honest we probably still don’t know the real story of what happened.
There is a video of him as I recall lying about something related to vega, but forgot now.
Vega was too little too late, 1080 performance at a time when 1080 was out for around a year and 1080ti had superseded it simply isn't good enough. The price was also too much.
This last while back amd have always been one upped at a time when they're about to release something new. With any luck the success of ryzen can see more cash pumped into gpu r&d.
This last while back amd have always been one upped at a time when they're about to release something new. With any luck the success of ryzen can see more cash pumped into gpu r&d.
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You're right we don't know everything that was going on and more than likely never will. All we have is what we saw and he did a lot of sidestepping, avoiding giving anything away which wouldn't of been so bad if he wasn't doing things like putting a poor Volta message in a promotional video knowing full well how it would be taken, When it finally came to Vega releasing we were suddenly told it wouldn't be streamed live, Then he manages to get Linus to go up on stage for him and do a Vega reveal where he pushes Vega to one side and tells a room of screaming children all about this great holocube he has. The saddest part of that is that Linus actually did it. A group of reviewers did a joint video after that saying how they'ed been mislead regarding Vega pricing.
Yes Vega was too late but it didn't have to be such a train wreck, Vega itself isn't bad, Yes it consumes too much power but that's the only negative. We all knew from the Doom demo 12 to 18 months before Vega released that we was looking at a 1080 level performer. It wasn't even far ahead of Doom in Vulcan but with over a year of further development to go we gave it the benefit of the doubt and presumed it'd have the bumps all ironed out in time for it's release.
When you consider how it performed back then and how close to that it still was on release you've gotta ask what were they doing for that 12-18 months? At the time the general consensus was the drivers needed sorting as it was on a tweaked Fiji driver but it didn't end up making much of a difference.
From what I saw Raja was too busy farting around promoting stuff like a streaming service for gamers where you don't need a good gpu for gaming as the graphics are all done via an online service that has rows of Vega cards to do all your heavy lifting.*** Bollywood VR was another, I don't know if you remember that? A lot of us sat through over an hour of an AMD & Bollywood event just to get a teaser about Vega, The teaser was a ten second sentence where he tells us Vega will be called Vega at the end of the event and then he leaves the stage. As for the meat of the event I seriously doubt anything's ever going to come from that either. From my perspective it looks like he mismanaged just about everything during his time in the top spot. He should be on the dole now. I just hope he does as well for Intel as he did for AMD. They need to be taken down a peg or two.
*** I wonder what happened to them? I haven't heard a thing since Raj got them up on stage with him. I bet he screwed them as bad as he did AMD.
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What about that one everyone sat through, only for him to reveal a T-shirt.
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What about that one everyone sat through, only for him to reveal a T-shirt.
The Vega t-shirts, I remember them, I'm not sure which was which though, The Bollywood event may of been the T-shirt event, I can't remember what the other was about but there was a few.
In performance terms I think they just topped out what it was more or less capable of, it was a chip that already had ridiculous power requirements so it was a trade-off between either trying to crank the clocks higher and having a card that needed water-cooling or settling for a middle ground.
Vega probably should have been another furyx and been fitted with an aio and anything not using that cooler could be Vega 56 cards. But they pushed ahead with the air and liquid options regardless. Probably didn't want to risk another batch of whiney aio units so production of them seemed limited.
It just had all the hallmarks of a chip (much like Polaris) that didn't meet expectations for performance so they ended up having to ratchet on the voltage to get performance up via clockspeeds. Amd made the best of what they could with Polaris and priced it accordingly but didn't want to go that route for Vega even though internally I bet they were disappointed with how it turned out.
Had it been priced under 1080 it could have been ok but they went with the premium price bs and those ridiculous "free" games that were anything but. Availability didn't help matters either though that was more down to the mining mob.
I vaguely remember the Bollywood thing, think I seen it the day after.
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They always **** up.
The 290s, yep, they were great cards, the custom ones, the refs were bloody gash, as they ****** the coolers up, they wern't good enough for em, they were hitting 95 degrees, and the coolers were screaming like banshees, remember the uber vid
The 480s, another fail, didn't beat the old 970 because of the poor drivers, so everyone just waited for the 1060, which came not longer after it, and smashed it, only for the 480 to take over it months later, when they'd sorted its drivers, which they should have done for release, as by then, it was too late, as everyone had a 1060.
The Vega **** up, with the Poor Volta crap, and the Frontier debacle, was getting absolutely slagged to death when it was reviewed, and AMD were silent, before they eventually came out and said, its not the gaming card, don't review it running games this that and the other, yet the Frontier website had, i only want to game on it, so can i, and they said yes, if all you want to do is game on it, then grab the gaming drivers from this link here.
Then when the gaming Vega came out, yep, messed that up as well, reviews, **** me, its pulling 600w
, and its hot as hell, me case is literally melting, i started running heaven, and i had to stick the air con on, strip off, and open all the doors and windows, as the heat that was coming off the thing, was unbelievable, and the fan, **** me was it screaming, i had people from 3 streets away braying on me door saying 'wtf is that you got running, turn the thing down', and i wouldn't get one over a 1080, as the 1080s much better, its faster, cooler, quieter etc... etc..., and the so called 'features' people were saying wern't activated, that AMD eventually came out and said (months and months later), that they weren't now activating.
Then we got people rubbishing all that (and still do) saying, 'mine doesn't scream like a banshee, i can't hear it, fans hardly turning, its only doing about 5rpms, and power, mines only pulling about 3w at full load, and the heat, what heat, its cold as owt, mines not topping 10 degrees', and why ?, as they've all fiddled with the voltages, and sorted the fan speeds out etc..., come on, thats what AMD should have done, so they were like that out of the box ffs!.
Im surprised B&Q, Homebase etc... don't sell em, seen as you got to DIY, or they don't just stick all the componets in the box with an instruction manual, so you have to put em all together yer ******* self as well, and slap an Airfix label on em.
Then there was the high prices of em, they went up after a bit, and ended up being more expensive than the 1080 Tis (the 64s), which demolished them, and the 56s, ended more expensive than the faster 1080s.
The Ryzen **** up, released when BIOS etc... were not ready, so most of the reviews were saying, not recommended for gaming, can't beat 5yr old i5s etc... etc...
The list just goes on.
The 290s, yep, they were great cards, the custom ones, the refs were bloody gash, as they ****** the coolers up, they wern't good enough for em, they were hitting 95 degrees, and the coolers were screaming like banshees, remember the uber vid
The 480s, another fail, didn't beat the old 970 because of the poor drivers, so everyone just waited for the 1060, which came not longer after it, and smashed it, only for the 480 to take over it months later, when they'd sorted its drivers, which they should have done for release, as by then, it was too late, as everyone had a 1060.
The Vega **** up, with the Poor Volta crap, and the Frontier debacle, was getting absolutely slagged to death when it was reviewed, and AMD were silent, before they eventually came out and said, its not the gaming card, don't review it running games this that and the other, yet the Frontier website had, i only want to game on it, so can i, and they said yes, if all you want to do is game on it, then grab the gaming drivers from this link here.
Then when the gaming Vega came out, yep, messed that up as well, reviews, **** me, its pulling 600w
, and its hot as hell, me case is literally melting, i started running heaven, and i had to stick the air con on, strip off, and open all the doors and windows, as the heat that was coming off the thing, was unbelievable, and the fan, **** me was it screaming, i had people from 3 streets away braying on me door saying 'wtf is that you got running, turn the thing down', and i wouldn't get one over a 1080, as the 1080s much better, its faster, cooler, quieter etc... etc..., and the so called 'features' people were saying wern't activated, that AMD eventually came out and said (months and months later), that they weren't now activating.Then we got people rubbishing all that (and still do) saying, 'mine doesn't scream like a banshee, i can't hear it, fans hardly turning, its only doing about 5rpms, and power, mines only pulling about 3w at full load, and the heat, what heat, its cold as owt, mines not topping 10 degrees', and why ?, as they've all fiddled with the voltages, and sorted the fan speeds out etc..., come on, thats what AMD should have done, so they were like that out of the box ffs!.
Im surprised B&Q, Homebase etc... don't sell em, seen as you got to DIY, or they don't just stick all the componets in the box with an instruction manual, so you have to put em all together yer ******* self as well, and slap an Airfix label on em.
Then there was the high prices of em, they went up after a bit, and ended up being more expensive than the 1080 Tis (the 64s), which demolished them, and the 56s, ended more expensive than the faster 1080s.
The Ryzen **** up, released when BIOS etc... were not ready, so most of the reviews were saying, not recommended for gaming, can't beat 5yr old i5s etc... etc...
The list just goes on.
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Then AMD should have held off, until the maufacturers had them all sorted, its why they get bad reviews all the time they release anything, and why everyone just buys Intel/Nvidia, on the day that they release, as its on that release day, that people want to buy, they read the reviews on that day, and put their orders in, on that day, so its no good AMD sorting, months and months later, when they've already lost the sales.
Makes little difference now, people know how good ryzen is even with the flakey start. It was a good boot in intels plums to say the least
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Makes little difference now, people know how good ryzen is even with the flakey start. It was a good boot in intels plums to say the least
Yes now, but i bet they lost a load of sales on the Ryzen release day, with those reviews saying that they couldn't recommend them for gaming, and that 5yr old i5s were even beating em etc...