Pricing is difficult though. If they get too aggressive in going for low prices then with minimal margins then although they will claw back market share their budget for future R&D just gets smaller and smaller. I think they need a price that maximizes profit, not maximizes market share. That doesn't mean selling at high prices, just not rock bottom. AMD have mentioned this before that they need to loose their budget image.
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AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0
- Thread starter Boomstick777
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Pricing is difficult though. If they get too aggressive in going for low prices then with minimal margins then although they will claw back market share their budget for future R&D just gets smaller and smaller. I think they need a price that maximizes profit, not maximizes market share. That doesn't mean selling at high prices, just not rock bottom. AMD have mentioned this before that they need to loose their budget image.
+1, if you can't make any money on the products you sell, don't bother.
Its not just immediate outgoings, rents, taxes, wages ect.. these things cost tens if not hundreds of millions to develop and get into a state that you can sell them in.
If you cannot recoup those R&D costs you cannot develop the next product because you have no money, or you end up eating away at your rainy days reserves, once thats all gone and you still have nothing of what you need to show for it its over.
i would have said this was AMD's last chance, but with their China Chip venture, possible success with Zen and various other significant deals AMD managed to secure it looks like they will be plodding on for some time yet.
If you dont want a budget image, you need to *launch* with highly competitive hardware. Their past few launches haven't gone well and other cards have taken a fairly long time to 'get up to speed'.
Brand value goes down in this situation and the only way to pick up the slack is to cut prices. Look how drastic their price cuts were when the 970 was launched. That was all they could do to compete because the 970 was faster than the 290X at a better price point, so of course all they could do was undercut. Then they raised the price back up with the 300 series, but when they launched, they were still only getting on-par. Only in the past 6 months or so have they really edged out an advantage.
I also think there's merit in slightly undercutting the competition. I dont think it automatically equals 'budget' image, as it can easily be seen as 'better priced'. Making things more expensive for the sake of it is is not some inherently advantageous thing, but companies with marketshare leads can get away with it. So you win back marketshare through better pricing and competitive cards on Day 1, *then* you can afford to build better profit margins into the product pricing.
You can have good profit margins on a product but if you're losing marketshare, revenue forecasts will have to be pessimistic.
Soldato
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What if Polaris 10/11 is considered Low to Mid tier by AMD because the level of performance they can leverage out of the process is at the low to mid tier for them?
Maybe they decided to start the new 14nm stuff off with the low to mid tier gear first, and this comes in around the 390x tier of performance while dropping TDP etc?
What if that is the scenario and it infact is never meant to be aimed at the higher end market (as AMD have suggested) and this first batch of Polaris cards are the real low end of the process and towards the mid, then surely that would mean their mid to high end would be pretty damn good and leaving their high end stuff to be really something special no?
What i mean is, say their low tier stuff draws 40w of power but gives performance equal to a 280, then the next tier draws 80w of power and gives 390/fury level of performance? say then they have a tier around 150w and a final tier around 250w what kind of performance would you imagine them having?
Maybe they decided to start the new 14nm stuff off with the low to mid tier gear first, and this comes in around the 390x tier of performance while dropping TDP etc?
What if that is the scenario and it infact is never meant to be aimed at the higher end market (as AMD have suggested) and this first batch of Polaris cards are the real low end of the process and towards the mid, then surely that would mean their mid to high end would be pretty damn good and leaving their high end stuff to be really something special no?
What i mean is, say their low tier stuff draws 40w of power but gives performance equal to a 280, then the next tier draws 80w of power and gives 390/fury level of performance? say then they have a tier around 150w and a final tier around 250w what kind of performance would you imagine them having?
Maybe they'll simply give out the cards for free?
That wont be happening!
That is something close to what AMD are doing but you power figures are a little skewed. Polaris 10 should be somewhere in 390-Fury (non X) performance at 150w roughly, which is twice the performance per watt which AMD have told investors.
The real debate is if AMD wanted P10 to be closer to the Fury and more like 130w, but it is performing closer to 390-390X at 160w then AMD might be disappointed. I think this is what Kyle is hinting at.
And this all my be the fault of Globalfoundaries process just not stacking up as it should do, which would be incredibly frustrating for AMD.
SiD, you see what you did there? mentioned power and set him ^^^ off on one
So you think Polaris 10 draws 80w ?
Soldato
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All the numbers i gave out were completely made up by me, i have no idea what the real numbers are, pretty much like EVERYONE else here on this forum.
This is my point, we are all speculating, and hedging bets on previous AMD history and performance etc, none of us know what AMD has planned, we dont even know if they have just Polaris 10 and 11, they may well have 9 8 and 7 ready in the wings, nobody knows except AMD.
Maybe they are silent because what they have sucks, maybe they are silent because what they have is so mindblowingly great they want it to be a total suprise, maybe they are silent because what they have is pretty much what everyone is expecting? who knows, all we can do is wait.
That HardOCP dude sounds butthurt though, i know that much for sure.
Soldato
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Freesync though
I'll just have to wait for Vega and if thats too expensive just keep the 290X
Soldato
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No one knows what it will draw, we can all speculate, maybe it will draw 80w, maybe it will draw 100w, maybe 120w, nobody knows.
Maybe the cards will give between 2.2 and 2.5x perf per watt, maybe they wont, nobody knows.
Maybe the Polaris reveal is just going to be Laptop based gpu's only, maybe its going to be a mix of laptop and discreet, nobody but AMD knows.
No i don't, have a sense of humour.
We have the numbers that AMD provided, 2x the performance per watt of their previous mid-range. They have told investors this so it is likely fairly reliable. That provides a very good estimate. The 290X pulls 275w official, more like 300w in testing. So the same performance in Polaris would be 140w minimum, P10 is hopefully faster so the power draw goes to 150-160w or so. Even under the most optimistic values yp are looking at around 120w.
That is assuming AMD are not lieing.
if they dont go after market share with 20% when are they going to ? at 0% ?
i am not saying they should sell at cost, but at this point the priority is not for margins to me, they just locked deals for new console upgrades ps4neo and xbone2, they have 2deals in china that brings about 600mil$, zen is around the corner, and we all know cpu are better money makers than gpu, so the situation seem a lot more favorable to do it now, than for exemple a year ago.
yes it's difficult to have low margins, but in this specific instance, they need some agressive pricing, beside they already set the expectation of ppl with their "increasing the TAM for VR", so ppl are waiting for a good value perf/$ from polaris, if it isn't even if the product is ok it wont sit well with ppl.
maybe it was bad marketing saying that few months back, but now it's too late to go back, i really hope 480 at 199£ and 480X at 299£ (assuming it's 390/fury perf), they have a deal with glofo for a minimum of 1bil$ worth of wafers a year, price must be lower than what nvidia pays at TSMC, their chip is 30% smaller, yield must be better (unless there is a problem), so cost should be lower, technicaly they have the ability to undercut the 1070 by a fair margin even on the XT version of polaris 10.
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I think his point of contention is that you dont agree with every bit of positive speculation about Polaris. Seems to bother him for some reason.
So just any random made up numbers are equally reasonable to consider?
In which case - maybe AMD will be giving their cards out for free. It's all just speculation, right?
I think there are some pretty decent windows of 'likelihood' we can consider here. And an 80W card that performs like a 390X or Fury card is just not in that window.
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2.2x the performance per watt, according to AMD, not 2x.
The 290X has a 300 Watt TDP, no official rating, just that, the actual power consumption is around 250 to 275 Watts depending on where you look.
It also depends on what GPU we are talking about, the Fury-Nano, for example is a 175 Watt card and is much faster than the 290X
Even the Fury-X which one would argue is the one they are talking about given its the newest has the same power levels as the 290X, but is again much faster.
The 290X has a 300 Watt TDP, no official rating, just that, the actual power consumption is around 250 to 275 Watts depending on where you look.
It also depends on what GPU we are talking about, the Fury-Nano, for example is a 175 Watt card and is much faster than the 290X
Even the Fury-X which one would argue is the one they are talking about given its the newest has the same power levels as the 290X, but is again much faster.
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Wauw that HardOCP article sounds like a lot of negative attitude and very little journalism focused on the matter that they were not invited and now AMD **** monkey balls. Even if what HARDoCP is correct it just oozes through with the way it is written. Im sure it one of many reason why AMD dont like them anymore. I keep imagening a child on the playground stomping its feet in anger over not being invite to that other kids birthday party.
Soldato
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Ok but did AMD not say "more than 2x the performance" infact their slide states 2.5x performance per watt
https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/AMDGPU.jpg
So where does that put us?