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Are Nvidia and AMD price fixing again?

Caporegime
Joined
18 Mar 2008
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32,741
Now they've already been caught out for this before, but nothing really seems to stop companies doing it again (DRAM manufacturers). What with Nvidia's huge price hike on their cards for mostly pointless features that barely use the cores in question (yet), AMD releasing a similarly high priced card probably because the bar was set high enough for the VII to be sorta viable and the pointless confusion with the 2060 SKU's is maybe involved.

It just seems sketchy to me, but i'm not into the business side of this enough to make anything other than a poorly educated assumption on it.

I mean obviously Inflation is a thing and Nvidia pooped the bed with Crypto, so maybe it's nothing.
 
Soldato
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South UK
Best way to lower prices is to not buy when prices get too high.

NVidia push the boat out further and further each time, low end to them is now ~£350 for the 2060 - got to keep those investors happy..
 
Associate
Joined
20 Oct 2007
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776
Possibly. But I think the real reason is that when the mining craze hit, nvidia had a significant amount of data on what people were willing to pay and that set a precedent which they used for the 20 series. In a way it softened the blow because when they were announced we'd already had a years worth of heavily inflated prices.

I'm fondly remembering paying £300 for an 8800GTX and £350 for a Radeon 5870, the top tier cards of their time. Yes we should expect some inflation but those days are long gone :(
 
Associate
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Netherlands
Possibly. But I think the real reason is that when the mining craze hit, nvidia had a significant amount of data on what people were willing to pay and that set a precedent which they used for the 20 series. In a way it softened the blow because when they were announced we'd already had a years worth of heavily inflated prices.

I'm fondly remembering paying £300 for an 8800GTX and £350 for a Radeon 5870, the top tier cards of their time. Yes we should expect some inflation but those days are long gone :(

So much this :(
While numptys are willing to part with too much cash for the latest tech it'll carry on.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
32,615
Nvidia's prices have been pretty consistent until Turing came along. Turing is definitely more expensive to produce with GDDR6 and large dies, but that can only explain a small part of the price increase.

I think one factor no one really considers is the R&D costs increasing, and the manufacturing costs increasing a lot as well. 7nm is supposedly at least twice as expensive for the same sized die comapred to 14nm according to AMD. Worse still the development costs for a the new nodes are doubling each time. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/272096-3nm-process-node

With GPUs it is worse since the R&D costs for ever more complex GPUs is also increasing, more than doubling every generation. Nvidia is increasing R&D budget faster than most other similar tech companies. I believe nvidia spent $5bn developing Volta.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from...-big-spender-for-semiconductor-rd-thats-intel
Look how R&D just goes up and up and up:
https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/r_and_d_expense


Nvidia operating margin increased but at a much lower rate. Margins are about 35%, which about right for a very healthy company and is why their share price when sky high and recently got corrected.


Their margins on Turing are almst certainly higher than most previous generations but i doubt overall there is an astronomical margin to be made.
 
Caporegime
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18 Oct 2002
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Location
Ireland
I'm fondly remembering paying £300 for an 8800GTX and £350 for a Radeon 5870, the top tier cards of their time. Yes we should expect some inflation but those days are long gone :(


When did you buy the gtx? On launch they were around £400-£500+ depending on the brand.
 
Soldato
Joined
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Location
London
AMD had such an opportunity here. Obviously they have their reasons for sticking with HBM2 but lets say they had gone with GDDR6 this would allow them to manufacture at a cheaper price and they could have really under cut Nvidia and made a killing.

Feels like a missed opportunity.

They know how to do it to Intel but seemly pass up the opportunity to do it to Nvidia.

Mistake.
 
Caporegime
Joined
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39,267
Location
Ireland
AMD had such an opportunity here. Obviously they have their reasons for sticking with HBM2 but lets say they had gone with GDDR6 this would allow them to manufacture at a cheaper price and they could have really under cut Nvidia and made a killing.

Feels like a missed opportunity.

They know how to do it to Intel but seemly pass up the opportunity to do it to Nvidia.

Mistake.


They couldn't have went with gddr 6 without modifying the core\memory controller and making a ton of changes to the pcb. That would be more time and money spent to make the card a bit cheaper.
 
Associate
Joined
6 Nov 2005
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2,417
my theory on the radeon VII is, I don't think AMD are making much money on the VII, the 16gb of HBM2 is likely eating all the profit. It looks like they are reclaimed instinct chips which is why they only have 60 CUs, and they just looked at the 2080 and thought hey, these are as good as those and if we sell the same price we can make our money back.
 
Soldato
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Location
London
They couldn't have went with gddr 6 without modifying the core\memory controller and making a ton of changes to the pcb. That would be more time and money spent to make the card a bit cheaper.

But this was the story with Vega. How much time do they need. They've had time to get the product right already.

Time isn't the reason. It's actually a design choice.
 
Associate
Joined
20 Oct 2007
Posts
776
When did you buy the gtx? On launch they were around £400-£500+ depending on the brand.

Just found my email:

Code:
You have ordered the following items:
Item: BFG 8800GTX OC2 768MB GDDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out HDCP enabled PCI-E Graphics Card
Qty: 1Cost: 301.91

Sorry it was from a competitor :p Though looking at it again, it was September 2007 and without VAT, so ~£350 with VAT 10 months after launch but it was one of the more expensive models I seem to recall.

Though my memory was correct about the 5870, I pre-ordered it in November 2009:

Code:
Item Qty Price
XFX ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card 1 £295.64
  Sub Total: £295.64
DPD Next Day Parcel Shipping: £9.00
  Total Vat: £45.7
  Total inc Vat: £350.34
 
Caporegime
Joined
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Posts
39,267
Location
Ireland
But this was the story with Vega. How much time do they need. They've had time to get the product right already.

Time isn't the reason. It's actually a design choice.

As far as they're concerned the product is right for the price point they want to sell it at, if these are indeed instinct chips that didn't make the cut then it makes more sense to sell the gpu as it is instead of spending more resources on changing components out to fit different memory to the card.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
10,049
But this was the story with Vega. How much time do they need. They've had time to get the product right already.

Time isn't the reason. It's actually a design choice.

It is a design choice and they are designed for compute which is why they used HBM. These cards are just failed MI50's hence why they have HBM. Most people were not even expecting another Vega card but it looks like AMD have taken the chance to use failed MI50's and make some money on them. Like Vega 64 they should do a decent job in the gaming world. It makes sense though as why waste the chips when you can earn some money with them.
 
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Soldato
Joined
27 Mar 2010
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3,069
Yes, ever since Amd became weak around Fiji/Tonga and thus nvidia marketed laptop chips as high end, of which they share with the desktop.
Effectively this enabled them to create a higher tier (ultra high end/halo) which commands more money and peeps are happy to pay.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2006
Posts
6,722
I dunno... it is what it is and that is fine, i aint gonna moan about the price of RTX or Radeon 7. what winds me up however is the double standards... Not aimed at an individual and it is not really just aimed at this forum, but I am seeing a hell of a lot more defending AMD with their card pricing, which at the moment at least looks to be on a par with the RTX 2080 price wise and on a par with it performance wise as well, but without RTX or DLSS.

so, everything else aside IF Nvidia are taking the wet yellow stuff on the pricing of the RTX 2080, then what does that say about AMD, given that turing took a truck load of development costs, where as Radeon 7 is just a salvaged failed part which would have otherwise been destined for the bin.

IF NV are ********* with their pricing then surely AMD are just as bad, ?
 
Mobster
Soldato
Joined
4 Apr 2011
Posts
3,501
That's really the only, way, dont buy it, but not everyone would do it enough to make any difference. People have the power of the world in their hands but will never use it.

Petrol prices too high ? Dont fill up your car, can you imagine the price it would come down to if no-one filled ?
GPU's too expensive, dont buy.
Train travel too expensive - dont travel on trains.
And on and on and on.

It would only take a matter of days and you would see immediate changes.
 
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